How to beat poker - the basics

I am not talking about basics like pot odds and winning percentages. There are some principles which are even more basic and fundamental to all forms of poker.

Table/Seatselection
Choose your opponents wisely. If you wanna win money make sure you are the best or at least one of the better players at the table. Playing against better opponents might improve your own game if you are willing to learn from them. But you should be aware that you don't get these lessons for free. Others like to match themself with the best players around. That is just stupid..Leave your ego away from the table. It will just cost you a lot of money. You should also try to be on the left of bad players. This gives you the chance to isolate these players preflop and play one on one against them.

Bankroll Management
Even if you are a winning player poker is still a game of chance. You can and will lose versus weaker players sometimes. And sometimes this might stretch over a long period of hands. Even solid winners of swings of 100 big bets every now and than. So make sure that you can handle these times. You should have at least 500 BB for the stakes you are playing. If you play professionally it should be even more. So you don't have to move down in the stakes you are playing. If you have less than 300 BB for your current limit you should move down to avoid going broke.

Don't tilt/Play your A game
This seems simple, right ? But i guess it is what turns themost players into losers. They know how to play. When to fold or raise but they don't do it at times. I am not only talking about the obvious signs of tilting like going full phil hellmuth and scream at everyone and everything. The more dangerous form of tilt is not when you are in full berserker mode. After a couple of suckouts or setups/coolers you start making bad calldowns or become a maniac. DON'T !
Don't let your feelings influence your game. If you notice that your style of play changes stop playing.

Good luck at the tables everyone!

Duplicate Poker - Poker as a game of skill

There is a new pokersite called DuplicatePoker. But what is the difference between this site and all others already on the net ?
Poker on Duplicate is different to what you know. You don't compete against the other players on your table. There is always one other with the exact same deck of cards and one other player who gets the same cards as you. After a couple of hands your results are compared to this player. This way the element of chance is reduced because the way you play your hands is more important than the cards you get. Because the element of skill is increased DuplicatePoker claims to be not a gambling site therefor they are open to US players and everyone who is allowed to play games of skill for money.
If you sign up now they will give you a free $3 to start playing with. You can cash out this amount after a couple of hands (a couple of players from the 2+2 forums have already cashed out successfully). They are also offering a 200% up to $100 bonus if you cash in.
The only downside right now is that the games play really slow because each table has to wait for a other table to finish first. Now go give it a try at:

PokerParadime - the long term in no time

PokerParadime is a new site to play texas hold'em. But it is not build to play for cash. It is totally web based so you do not have to download any software and install anything. You play against other players online or against bots. And here is the clue, bots are not only allowed to play it is what the site is build for. As soon as you have played a couple of hands you can turn yourself into a virtual player who will continue to play just like you did. So you can train your virtual self and then check how you would do with this style after thousands of hands. Because the bot also plays while you are not online.
There is no fee or anything else involved but you can not win any real money. But it is a really funny website and a good way to check your moves. My virtual me is currently in the top 20 of 354 registered players. How good is your bot ?

Poker: September Graph

After my bad downswing September turned out fine in the end. I was able to maintain my aces status at PartyPoker and i am also happy with my winning rate. I won about 200 big bets within 9200 hands. That is 2.60 BB/100 which is actually more then good. I guess i was running good at the end of the month. So here is the graph:

I guess it is pretty easy to tell where the downswing hit me. It is part of the game and this graph shows that playing "good" will be rewarded in the end.

World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) 2007

Today starts the World Championship of Online Poker 2007. The best online players will come together in 23 different events to determine a champion in the different variants like Hold em, Omaha, 7 card Stud or good old 5 card draw. PokerStars will guarantee a total price pool of 15 million dollars for all events and each champion will receive a bracelet. Check out the schedule and buy ins at the PokerStars homepage

poker is fun - no it is not

well i have to make another post about poker. just to show you want a perfect week party poker gave me.

the graph is made by PokerEV (a software that displays your luck - well it shows how much money you won and how much you should have won statistically aka in the long run). the red line shows how much money i should have made...it shows a small but decent plus. the blue line is the winnings whenever i got to a showdown and the green line shows my actual winnings or to be correct my losings in the last few days :(
and is you can see by the large gap between the lines i am running bad as hell.
sorry for writing a "poker blog" post but i just needed to tell everyone how unlucky i am.

queens in trouble - an interesting poker hand

I found the following hand on the internet and i think it is a really interesting. There is no additional information on the other players involved. Well they all limped in so i guess there are not really playing a TAG (tight aggressive) style.

Preflop: Hero is Button with Q, Q.

UTG calls, 2 folds, MP2 calls, MP3 calls, CO checks, Hero raises, 2 folds, UTG calls, MP2 calls, MP3 calls, CO calls.


Flop: (11.40 SB) T , J , Q (5 players)

Now that is a good flop – dangerous but good. Right now we got top set – a very strong hand – only 3 hands are beating us right now (AK, K9, 98). AK would have raised before the flop. So K9 and 98 are the only hands we have to fear. And even against these straights we have a couple of outs (cards that would give us the better hand) because we can still make a full house. Pokerstove - a program to calculate your chance to win a hand – says QQ is a 53% favorite to take the pot (assuming all opponents are limping with the top 30% of their hands and raising 10%). I think that range is pretty good for these enemies. Actually i think they will limp even more – given us a better chance to win.


UTG bets, MP2 calls, MP3 folds, CO calls, Hero raises, UTG calls, MP2 calls, CO calls.

The first player bets and everyone else calls. We have to raise here. Most likely the set is the best hand and we have to charge all players drawing for a flush or a straight. Maybe UTG has us beaten right now but we have outs and let the others pay if they are still drawing. Once again the queens have a 53% chance to win this hand. As soon as our chance is bigger than 20% (because there are 5 players) it wins money in the long run to put more chips into the middle.


Turn: (9.70 BB) 8 (4 players)

The 8 is a bad card for our queens. Now every 9 makes a straight already. Pokerstove still shows 32% to take the pot. We are still a favorite against the range of our opponents.


UTG checks, MP2 checks, CO bets, Hero....

Now we have to make a tough decision. The player in the cut-off wakes up and bets into us. We have to assume that the 8 helped him – he made the straight. If we believe he has the 9 and the range for all other players stays the same our chance to win drops to 20%. So that is really on the edge. I would love to raise and kick out the flush draws. But raising would give the following players still the needed odds to draw because they have to pay 2 BB for a pot of 12.7 BB and there are 9 cards of the remaining 46 cards giving them the flush. So raising will build a bigger pot for the guy with the straight and knocking out other draws or made hands would reduce the equity of our hand. Reducing the amount of players while building the pot with just a 20% chance to win will lose money in the long run. So calling is right. Remember we still have a draw ourselves to win the hand. And flat calling will invite others to call. So maybe some two pairs will stay in and give us additional money if we hit our full house - besides the flush draws.

Hero calls, UTG calls, MP2 calls.

River: (13.70 BB) A (4 players)

UTG bets, MP2 calls, CO calls, Hero folds.

The ace of hearts is maybe the worst river card we could expect. We did not improve our set to a full house. And in addition now every king makes a straight and the flush draw hit. Now the player first to act bets into the whole field. He really has to have a hand. I would say he was drawing for a flush and finally made it. He bet out on the flop with his flush draw to build a big pot. He called the turn so most likely he did not have a straight then. Well even if he did not complete a flush he is telling the table that he has a strong hand and there are two callers in front of us. There are to many ways we are beaten so we just fold our lovely three ladies.

If you think that the analysis is wrong and you would play the hand different feel free to leave a comment.