Poker Forums

Poker forums offer tremendous information about effective poker strategies and tips. Expert and new poker players usually visit these forums to share their unique experiences about playing online poker. By signing up as a member of poker forums, you can increase your knowledge about various poker tips and strategies without spending a single dime.

Poker forums are also the best places for free buy-ins, leagues, and private rolls. Most of them also organize poker competitions and challenges with cash prizes at stake. By participating in poker forums, you can improve your playing skills, increase your odds of winning poker matches, and earn cash from all your winnings.

Benefits from poker discussion boards

Poker forums do not only serve as good sources of poker tips and strategies, they also offer players with a sense of unity, a brotherhood and a bond that they can cherish forever. Once you have become active in poker forums, you can build teams of poker players and challenge your fellow players to exciting tourneys and private games. Inside a poker forum, the possibilities of taking poker matches or tourneys to the next level are endless – the excitement too is continuous.

Online poker forums will also keep you updated with all the latest events and developments in the poker world. They offer the latest news about poker, offer meaningful reviews about various poker rooms, and share poker bonuses that you can use for your next match.

Poker forums also serve as the best venue for asking all your questions about the world of poker. By being an active contributing member, you can get the answers to all your poker-related questions while entertaining the questions of your fellow players too. With regular use of poker forums, you can also work with other players when devising groundbreaking poker strategies and tactics.

Features of poker forums

Poker forums share all the things that a player needs in order to become a competent poker player. They have numerous web pages dedicated for poker news, rules, articles, and information centres. Most of them also have halls of fame where the names and pictures of top poker players are posted. Poker forums serve as one-stop resources for all the information you need in order to excel in several poker tournaments and challenges.

Information centres of poker forums explain the general structure of poker tournaments as well as the different rules they implement. After all, you will need to be aware of all these rules before you can become a part of your dream online poker tournament. You can also use the well-written articles posted in various poker forums. These articles offer useful information about the ins and outs of playing online poker. After browsing through these write-ups, you actually wouldn’t have to be paying for expensive books that contain the same poker strategies discussed in poker articles. And remember, these are live experiences shared and exchanged by tens of thousands of regular buffs of the game like you and me.

One thing I personally like about some poker forums is that they also have live chat features. Live chat can make all your poker matches seem more exciting than before. You can use it to start interactive poker games with your peers. Who needs all the hustle and bustle in casinos if you can already chat with other poker players without leaving the comforts of your home? I, for one, love it!

Poker forums have always been and will always be an indispensable part in the journey of the world’s top poker players. If you want to play poker like professional players do, your participation in online poker forums will do the trick.

Poker Bankroll Management

~ Part 2
It is a poker players job, whenever he plays poker live or online, to minimize the risk of losing money and analyze the best opportunity to win a maximum amount of profit at the same time. This process is where the methodology of poker bankroll management comes in. You should take into consideration that not all poker players are the same. Some poker bankroll management techniques may suit you, while some may not. Underneath are a few tips you could employ based on the different poker games available to you:

Sit and Go Bankroll Requirements

A poker player once played from $0 to a staggering $10,000 by employing a proper bankroll technique. His rule was never to spend more than 5% of his poker bankroll on a Sit and Go. This roughly translates into 20 buy-ins. A recommendation of 20 for a gambler and 65 for a poker pro is best.

Pot Limit and No Limit Holdem

The safe recommended size of a poker bankroll is always 20 times the full buy in. This roughly means that should you want the best chance of making money at a $1 or $2 game where the maximum buy in is equivalent to $200, then you should have a poker bankroll of at least $4000.

Players who play poker for fun might use a least 15 buy-ins as their base number, while the more dedicated players would want their buy-ins to be around 20-30 in their poker bankroll before they sit on a table.

Multi-table Tournaments

The typical player needs about 100 buy-ins to protect them from the variance associated with larger tournaments. One should pay attention to the pay-out structure in the events they encounter. Some poker players pay more than others, and those events have the ability to reduce the variance in their poker bankroll since the player will be making the money a lot more often.

Limit Holdem

For players who are fans of limit Holdem, the general recommendation is that they should have at least 300 big bets as a minimum for the limit which they wish to play at. So if one wants to play a $1 or $2 limit Holdem, then he/she should have a poker bankroll of at least $600 dollars.

Poker Bankroll Management for Pro Players

For those players who want poker to be their main source of income, the poker bankroll required will be larger than 20 full buy-ins for cash and about 40 buy-ins for poker tournaments. This value is particularly important because of the reason that your living expenses are taken from your poker bankroll, ergo, having the ability to withstand the variance along with the cost of your everyday life.

Poker has been kicked up a notch by players who want the game to be their main source of income. In order to earn a substantial amount by playing poker, one needs to employ these poker bankroll management techniques so that one can shoulder the detrimental effects that variance often causes. The tips offered above are not going to help you win a game, but on the other hand, they are going to help you save so that you get to play poker more with a good poker bankroll. Always remember: no matter how skilled or how good you are at poker, if you are not adept in managing your poker bankroll, you will encounter the word every poker player despairs to encounter: bankruptcy.

Poker Bankroll Management

(Part 1)

Some poker players play poker just for the fun of it - they list poker in the entertainment section of their social networking accounts and they play entirely for the sole purpose of recreation, thus having one hell of a good time. Other more intense poker players take poker a bit more seriously. When they play, they make it a point that none of their winnings go to waste. They save up using a technique that renders them immune to the perils of the word every poker player despairs to encounter: bankruptcy. By utilizing this particular management method, these poker players get to play poker pretty much endlessly. Without utilizing proper management methods, professional poker players would surely end up being broke, considering the generic upheavals in the game. This special money saving technique is what poker players like to call poker bankroll management, abbreviated BRM by some poker players.

A poker bankroll is the amount of money one sets aside for the purpose of, you've guessed it, playing more poker. You begin by making a deposit to an online poker room. There are a variety of methods that you can use to practice efficient poker bankroll techniques. If you follow certain poker bankroll techniques, it is guaranteed that you can make your poker money last ad infinitum.

When you play poker, you should apply certain limits to your game to avoid losing all of your poker bankroll due to a hideous run of cards, which poker players must often expect from playing. This method of playing is named “playing within your poker bankroll”. On the other hand, if you play like a raging bull with extremely higher limits when there is a great chance of losing all of your poker money, you are then “playing out of your poker bankroll”. The reason why certain poker bankroll methods must be employed is because of what is referred to as “variance”. Variance measures the variability (volatility) from an average. Volatility is a measure of risk, so this statistic can help determine the risk a player might take on when playing a specific hand, thus defining the ups and downs of poker where you run the gamut from good cards to bad ones. Variance measures and defines the varying profits and losses you encounter with a series of good and bad card runs.

Playing poker for lengthy periods exposes players to the possibility of experiencing unfortunate sessions where one consistently loses money, not for the reason of lack in skill or unsatisfactory choices, but entirely for the reason of receiving a bad set of cards which are entirely out of one's control. To absorb the shock of this losing streak, you need to carefully play your poker bankroll so you wouldn't lose all of your money. Every poker player, regardless of their skill or experience in poker, will experience variance in their game. Proper usage of their bankroll should be employed by these players to allow them to continue playing and not end up being broke.   

Next: Poker Bankroll Management Techniques…

Poker Strategy For Dummies

When you are playing any variance of poker, be it Texas Holdem, Stud, or Omaha, you want to adopt a winning poker strategy, the first thing that you have to remember is that this is a game of psychology. You winning or losing does not depend on luck in playing poker, it depends on how you are able to read your opponents and manipulate their actions through your own deception. This is the foundation of any winning poker strategy.

When conceptualizing your poker strategy, it is not only your actual plays that you should consider or put into mind, you should also think about how you can get an edge on your opponent by getting inside their minds. You should adopt the right mindset so that you become unpredictable to your opponent and at the same time, his or her poker strategy becomes predictable to you. This however, cannot be taught. It is not a learnable skill. Instead, it is something that you acquire through time and experience.

With that, another key component for your poker strategy to work is to practice. It is not enough that you simply learn the basics to enter a tournament, you will get slaughtered. Instead, grab a couple of your friends for a couple of friendly games to practice your poker strategy. The basic skills that you need to master for your strategy are bluffing, slow playing, the pot odds and as an option, the different rules and variations of the game. You can learn more from practicing rather than going through countless books.

When practicing your poker strategy, I believe that you should also avoid free games. This will not help you in any way since these players have a pre-determined poker strategy themselves which you can easily read and beat. What you need are real human players to hone your skills and your style of play.

You should also put into your mind that you will not win all the games that you play in. As a matter of fact, simply based on the odds, you will lose more times than you will win. Adopt this mindset so that you are prepared for the challenges ahead. This will help you fully devote to your poker strategy. Win or lose, the important thing is that you are learning through experience. Take note of every hand, take note of what each player is doing, take note of how you won or lost. At the end of the day, all of these information will be helpful for you in adjusting and creating your own strategy which is the point of practicing.

If you are confident enough already in your poker strategy, then it would be time to play for real money. You should start out slow to get a feel of the actual game. Most people change their strategies when it comes to tournaments. For a beginner to win consistently, you should stick to what you know and minimize the risks that you would be taking. Do that, and your strategy will be fine even up against the big time pros.

~ Kattrine John

Poker Tournaments for Dummies

Poker tournaments are really fun ways to earn a lot of money. But as with any online casino and gaming game, poker tournaments are not for the fainthearted. Playing and winning a poker tournament require excellent techniques and good money management. In order to win poker tournaments, you need good bluffing and calling skills, and maybe just a little bit of luck on the side.

Poker tournaments consist of two players playing against each other on a single table. We call this duel to death as a heads up tournament. Poker tournaments can also consist of thousands of players playing on thousands of tables. The winner of a poker tournament is the player who wins every chip in the game, while the others are granted places or ranks in the tournament. To enter poker tournaments, you need to pay a fixed buy-in and at the start of the game is given a certain amount of chips with the amount of the buy-in paid. If poker tournaments are held in a commercial venue, part of the buy-in could go to the host to pay for the tournament costs. When a player in a poker tournament finishes all his chips, then he or she is automatically eliminated from the poker tournament.

When one wins poker tournaments the prize is usually derived from the buy-ins, although sometimes, funds from the outside may be entered as well. An example of this would be invitational tournaments where players do not have buy-ins but fund their prizes with gate receipts from spectators or a sponsorship revenue (poker tournaments like these are often called freerolls). Poker tournaments usually end when only one player is left with the chips although sometimes, the game can also be ended when the players call a consensus.

Ranking of poker tournaments are in reverse order with the last man standing garnering first place, and so on and so forth. The prizes are awarded in two ways. The first one is a fixed prize, while the other one is a proportional prize. A fixed price in poker tournaments states that a rank amounts to a certain prize. This means that the first place may get 60 dollars, while the second gets 30 and the third gets 10, while the other lower ranks do not get anything. Proportional awarding in poker tournaments, in the other hand, is more complicated. In proportional awarding, payouts are determined according to a percentage based scale. The percentage for the award will be determined entirely but the number of playing participants, and the percentage increases as more participants join the game. As a strict rule, one player will make a high enough place to earn money. This then creates a top heavy structure where the top three will earn more money than the rest of the other players combined.

Knockout is the most common playing format for poker tournaments. Whenever a player loses the game and finishes his chips, he gets eliminated and his table shrinks. To avoid the shrinking of tables, and to avoid having tables with varying numbers of people, the players are moved between tables. The tables where no one is left are taken away until all players are playing in a single table. The single poker table will be called the final table. A lot of sit and go tournaments are knockout poker tournaments.

There are numerous variants of poker tournaments and all of them are equally exciting. There are also mixes of tournaments called the H.O.R.S.E which combines a variety of different poker games such as Holdem, Omaha, Razz, Stud and Stud Eight. Dealer’s choice events are events where a player can choose from a similar menu of games.

But not all poker tournaments are professionally held tourneys. Informal poker tournaments could be just as exciting as real poker tournaments, so go ahead and organize one with a group of friends!

About 5 Card Stud Poker

They even came up with a movie in 1968 called 5 Card Stud. Though it was a dud at the box office, it would be great to serve memory that at one time 5-card stud poker was the most popular poker game being dealt. It is said to have started in New Orleans and moved up the Mississippi on the steamboats and then moved out west with the gold rush and the end of the Civil War. 

5 Card Stud Poker is quite simple to play and does involve some bluffing, as the hand possibilities are easy to read. It is played with one card dealt face down and four cards dealt face up. The betting starts after the first two cards are dealt and continues after each of the other three cards are dealt. Steve McQueen in The Cincinnati Kid played this game, and some of the showdowns in the movie are immortal indeed. It is getting less and less played in online poker variations at the moment, and so is it in live casinos, most new players to poker have never played 5 Card Stud Poker. The best starting hand is a pair of Aces or any other high pair. Pairs of higher value do have a tendency to hold up in this game. Three of a kind is a monster hand and any hand bigger than that would be a super monster. Five-card draw poker replaced this game in popularity eventually, as it allows more betting and more gambling as each player got to see more cards to make a hand. Lack of betting possibilities in a way is what helped to kill off 5-card stud poker. Seven-card stud poker finally replaced both in most card rooms and went on to become the firm favourite.

There is a passionate romance about 5-card stud and it was favoured in the movies for a long time as it is relatively easy to understand and follow the action as a hand is played out. The first movie that I saw and loved with this game in it was Mel Gibson’s Maverick. More than the 5 card stud poker played in the movie, though, it was the antics and the humour that actually I ended up liking more. It’s a fun, fun, movie. So though 5 card stud poker is becoming increasing redundant in one way, it is surely picking up steam and is still a popular game in some parts of the world, especially in Finland where a specific variant of five-card stud called Sökö (also known as Canadian stud or Scandinavian stud) is played.

Sökö is almost identical to the traditional format of 5 card stud poker - the only difference being the introduction of two new hands into the hand ranking. Due to the sparse nature of flushes and straights in Five-card stud poker, this variant counts four-card straights and four-card flushes as poker hands. A four-card straight is ranked higher than a pair, a four-card flush is ranked higher than a four-card straight and a two-pair is ranked higher than a four-card flush. Sökö is a game my company is currently developing.

Then, we have Telesina, often described as a variant of Five-card stud - although it is more of an amalgamation of Stud poker and Community card poker. The initial four rounds are identical to Five-card stud poker, the players receiving two cards (one face down) and then 3 more face-up cards interspersed with betting rounds. However, a final round is added where all the players are dealt a single community card. The other main difference is the use of a stripped deck - with all cards of rank 2 to 6 inclusive taken out of the deck. As a result, this variant is often played shorthanded - usually with 6 players per table. It is also important to note that in Telesina flushes are ranked above full-houses. I find that intriguing.

Some of you love the Hi-Lo variations that have sprung up in numerous poker card rooms around the globe. 5 card stud poker was one of the main variations in the WSOP from 1971 through 1974 too. Five-card stud poker is a fine game for learning to play poker and hand values. The lack of complication makes it an easy game to learn and play and that too quickly. The other feature of this stud poker game is the art of the bluff. Bluffing is part of poker and stud poker is a game that a good bluffer will do well at against other players at the table. If you do not have a pair at the end of the five cards it is very hard to call a large bet with just an ace high. Four cards to a flush showing is tough to call without a pair, if you know what I mean.

All in all, with its rocking history and made popular in Hollywood in scores of Westerns and other movies, I personally think stud poker is a game that hasn’t lost its charm and I love to play it time and again.

“Strategic Plan” to Win at Poker!

I had a funny thought once: How would it go if the owners of the top 10 poker sites in the world sat down and played at the same table? In my experience I have run across many gaming and otherwise business owners that are terrible poker players. You could say in one breath that there are a group of them just out for a night of fun; though in the same token, there are many of these business owners that do play poker on a regular basis and still don’t get the hang of the game, thus making many mistakes.

Being a business owner and a professional poker player on my time, I often think of adding as much of my learning and background to my poker as I possibly can. This, I believe, is a key to my winning more often than not. As a business owner you’re of course obligated to make a strategic plan for the company – a business plan, a marketing plan, a sales plan, a financial plan and….oh so many of them! A lot of business owners who are also poker players are often so preoccupied with immediate issues that they often lose sight of their ultimate objective. That is why a preparation of a strategic plan to win at poker is a virtual necessity. This may not be a recipe for success, but without a plan success is pretty much not going to come your way.

As an example, compare the process of planning a vacation (where, when, duration, budget, who goes, how to travel are all strategic issues) with the final preparations (tasks, deadlines, funding, weather, packing, transport and so on). A satisfactory strategic plan must be realistic and attainable, because having a plan makes you able to stick to it when you are on one of those big losing streaks or you’re not on the top of your game. As developing a strategic plan, it is desirable to clearly identify your current status, objectives and strategies. Identify possible strategies by building on strengths, resolving weaknesses, exploiting opportunities and avoiding threats.

You may design your plan however you please, and put any rules you so wish into it. You may modify it as time goes by, but don't change your rules so lightly. Remember that the reason you want a plan to begin with is so you don't do something that you're not "required" to do, like sitting down at a table that's way over your head and the amount of money being risked is not sufficient to your bankroll. This is a clear rule that should be implemented without thought, because chasing money to cover up those losses is inexcusable. And stupid.

Remember, a key factor when making such a strategic plan for playing to win at poker, you’re gambling with your hard earned cash and you do not want to give it back so easy.

My Poker Blog

A poker blog is not fun to write if you aren’t involved with poker or gaming on a day-to-day basis. I have seen several people write in their experiences and they are worth reading because they are at the centre of action in some way or the other. Writing your experiences about anything in a lucid, simple style is what I liken to art, because it is expressing in words what you have been going through. Folks who blog with flair are artists in itself – they are putting into words what would best describe their feelings, sentiments, wishes, desires.

Take a snapshot into the past, before blogging became popular, digital communities took many forms, including Usenet, commercial online services such as GEnie, BiX and the early CompuServe, e-mail lists and Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). In the 1990s, Internet forum software, created running conversations with "threads." The modern blog evolved from the online diary, where people would keep a running account of their personal lives. So then blogs were first introduced as weblogs that referred to a “server’s log file” that was created when web logging hit the internet. With web logging you needed a website and domain names, with blogging, you do not need anything but an account with blog providers like blogger which I use. In most cases, like blogger is, these blogs are free of charge.
  
I was never a writer in school, I was a painter. When I took up modeling, life was thrust into another art form by default –I had to learn ballet, and of course the ramp walk; here, physical body language took on a whole new meaning, and it took a lot of training and patience to develop the nuances and the discipline required for it. Compared to that, blog writing is fun. For people who wish to harness their craft, as far as writing is concerned, blogs are the best way to do it. Blogging IS the contemporary term of creative and commercial writing.

A poker blog could be a personal blog or a business blog. Personal would be when I would put into it my daily adventures in the world of gaming, my wishes, my desires or any ideas that I would want to express online. A business poker blog would be where I would create a blog to advertise my product or services in order to increase sales. Through articles that can be very useful in the gaming reader’s life, I would then be able to establish a name in the virtual market for my product or/and services. I am often asked by my peers what kind of a blog do I run? Well, the answer is that I did begin blogging as a part of company policy which stated that everyone who was a VP level up should be writing a blog post once a week; but then, I began loving it. 

It is wonderful to put on paper the learning and the fun that is a part of your daily existence. I think, my poker blog can more be classified in terms of “genre” than whether it would be personal or a business blog. Whatever the classification, the whole point is to enjoy it and get and give the best that is possible to me to my various readers in terms of factual experiences of my own and my buddies and associates. I hope my poker blog has its own place in the sun for a long time to come.

Card Counting In Blackjack

Being an avid gaming person, I have had the good fortune of visiting casinos and card rooms in the most exotic locations. In course of my casino flitting, I also made several friends who actually taught me the fine art of playing different games. The tips were valuable enough, and I learned to apply quite a few of them, thus making my casino visits more interesting and rounding me off as a player and as a person. It soon came to pass that I saw the movie 21 and I had to know and learn what counting cards in blackjack was all about.

Charlie Tan (name changed to preserve request for anonymity), the manager of the top casino in Vietnam is a friend, and over a few drinks and dinner he had me a few friends enthralled in a presentation and practical demo about it all! As per Charlie, Blackjack is one of the few games where players have always tried to figure out a way to beat the dealer and the system in a variety of ways and counting cards is one of the major strategies in play.

Counting cards in Blackjack is a strategy where the people who count cards attempt to memorize the cards that have been dealt to lower the casino advantage by having a good clue which card will come out next, anticipating to eventually memorize the order of each card in the deck. For instance, knowing if all of the high cards already been dealt out would logically lead you to believe the remaining cards are of lower values. Imagine how easy card counting in blackjack would be in an online game where no one is watching you as long as you are quick to memorize the card or write it down - games give a limited amount of time to respond with hit or hold. Many have used this to their advantage and learned online before taking their skills into real casinos. It is a risky way to play – even though it is not illegal, the casino management may ask you to leave.

So how has the latest online gambling craze, viz. live webcam games responded to prevent players counting cards? Common methods include using multiple packs of cards, splitting the deck into two and shuffling them far sooner than it would happen during a game in a real casino. Casinos can often deliberately hide the remaining decks to put off card counters.
It must be noted that card counting in blackjack takes effort but is it rarely worth it; firstly you have to have a fantastic memory, and statistically it gives a 1% advantage to an experienced player under the best circumstances. Yet this is still not enough or only just enough to cancel out the house advantage in most cases.

So next time you see 21 and those wonderful whiz kids belt out perfect card counting under the expert aegis of Kevin Spacey, just sit back and enjoy the movie, do not take to card counting in blackjack as a career move.