Online Games

You know, it seems like every month someone is exposed for crossing some sort of line in a poker game and getting into trouble. Recently pokerstars caught Chinese players who shared their cards at sit/n goes, and this large cheating operations took hundreds of thousands of dollars. But Pokerstars is vigilant. If you have not yet signed up, use a pokerstars marketing code to get your bonus.

People have had money confiscated from accounts, and been banned from sites. The most disturbing thing isn’t that this is going on though. It’s the fact that a lot of people, even those who aren’t being caught, don’t think it’s a big deal. That’s just the weird world of poker. It lives in it’s own little gray world, filled with gray people, doing gray things all the time.

Because of this, there is often no consensus on where a line should be drawn. For example, it’s been ruled that playing multiple seats in the same tournament is not ok. But, if you and your friends each individually enter a tournament, but play out of the same bankroll, that is ok. The distinction is subtle, and at a practical level is close to meaningless. Assuming all play is “honest” what is the difference between ten people each entering the same tournament ten times, and those people each entering ten different tournaments and sharing the results? This sort of stuff has been going on forever. Men ‘The Master’ has made a fortune out of doing this, yet he and his horses are still allowed to play at any tournament that they like.

So when it comes to the new breed of players getting caught red handed, I can certainly understand how they slipped down that slope. There are just so many examples of poker biggest and brightest — from authors to champions to internet pros — bending, twisting, and to suit their own personal needs and desires that it almost seems like it’s part of the game. That doesn’t make it all right though.

The problem is that without clear rules and guidelines, players looking for an edge will do everything they can in order to make it as large as possible. This takes all kinds of forms, from coffee housing to shorting chips, from active collusion to shared bankrolls. What is fair and what is not when it comes to poker? It’s a hard question to answer, and it’s one that a lot of smart people have come to very different conclusions about.

Erik Lindgren is a young poker player but he is feared by his opponents. Before turning thirty-five he won two World Poker Tour Championships, the $600,000 Full Tilt Poker Poker Pro Showdown at the Red Rock Casino, the World Poker Tour Party Poker Million III and was named the Player of the Year at the 2004 World Poker Tour. He netted $7.5 million by 2011 in live tournament winnings.

Erick is a California native of Swedish descent and lives in Las Vegas. He began as a blackjack dealer then moved to a card room prop player in California. At twenty-six he won his first major poker tournament in Las Vegas at the Bellagio.

He went on in ten months to win his first World Poker Tour title and then six months later the Poker Million. In 2005 he was runner up in the Atlantic City Circuit Event at the World Series of Poker and one month later he placed fifth in the LA Poker Classic at the World Poker Tour.

In 2007 he won $800,000 in the Aussie Millions at the $100,000 buy-in No Limit Hold’em tournament. While he has never won a bracelet at a World Series of Poker event he has thirteen in-the-money finishes. In World Poker Tours he has won two titles and sat at five final tables.

He has written “World Poker Tour: Making the Final Table” a poker tournament strategy book and a best seller! Online he used to play exclusively at Full Tilt Poker and he was a member and spokesman for Team Full Tilt. Unfortunately after Black Friday in 2011 Full Tilt was removed from the Internet and Erick lost his sponsor and a nice source of income. At this time he is not sponsored by another poker room, but Full Tilt is expected to be back on line and he may be back at his previous employer. There is currently a controversy to finalize the take over by group Tapie as some poker pros have debt with Full Tilt, including Erick himself.

Let’s hope this deal sees completion and that Full Tilt comes back with all the action we were used to see there.

Playing good poker is like shooting fish in a barrel

Lately my poker is really red hot! It is quite like shooting fish in a barrel. I am winning about 75% of my sit and go poker games right now. I am playing a combination of heads up and 9 players sit’n go tournaments, mostly at the $10 limits since my bankroll took such a large hit in the past few weeks.

I am building it back up quickly and will return to my $20 games soon I hope. This is my discliplined approach to bankroll management. When I lose and get below 20 buy-ins for the limit I am playing, I drop to a lower limit until I build my bankroll back up. Most players do now have the discipline to move down in limit like that, they only want to move up. But this is what you must do if you do not want to redeposit more money in the future.

I will be back in the $20 games soon and hope to continue improving my game on an ongoing basis. The players in the $20 games are not really that much better than the ones I encounter in the $10 games, maybe just a notch. But I will exercise good bankroll management so I do not bust out and have to buy in again. I need all my spare money for beer! Reloading is a bad idea if you want to play online poker profitably.

Here is my tip for the day. Do not get into the habit of depositing money into your poker account, playing until it is gone, and then rebuying. Use my simple tips for bankroll management to make sure you do not become one of the career losers in the poker rooms. It does not have to happen. If you keep on going down in limits instead of rebuying, ultimately you will reach the micro-limits, where it costs next to nothing to play. And these are easy to beat anyway, so you can move up from there.

Play using a solid poker strategy and you can enjoy the beer and fish too!

Well I suppose I will start another post as a place to vent about poker as well as record my progress on my moss work among other things. As it stands I probably will not be getting in a lot of poker time next year as I have at least two field excursions planned. One to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and the other one to several countries in South America.

I am also going to try to squeeze in a trip to several countries in Africa if the necessary funds are available. So if there is a lack of poker there should still be some interesting stories to record. Put in 1556 hands of 50 NL tonight and just ran horribly but still managed to win 9.00. That has to be one of the beauties of NL for me. If you play well post flop it is just very hard for these guys to get the best of you for very long before you turn the tables on them.

Going to try and get in 10K more hands at pokerstars this weekend. I figured playing just 50 NL I need to put in 19K hands before the 24th to clear the bonus before the deadline so I have a lot of work ahead of me but 10 tabling while nut peddling it goes by reasonably fast. Also managed my 4th day of not drinking any alcohol even after going to the TGIF free booze party this afternoon. Now that was a tough hurdle to pass but I made it.

So all in all things are going fairly well at the moment with the exception of my wife and little girl being stopped by immigration when leaving Venezuela last Tuesday. They would not let her travel because she did not have a letter of permission from me to travel alone with our little girl. I suppose that requirement is not such a bad thing but anyone wanting to circumvent it could easily do so so it really just turned things into a pain in the ass. The fuckers gave me a fax number to send a letter stating it was ok but their fax machine was not working properly so they never got it. So the bottom line is I had to fork out more money to change the date on the tickets and they will not arrive until the 29th which kind of sucks as I had planned on being in Arkansas with my mom as she has never seen her youngest granddaughter but I suppose we will still go after Christmas for a few days.

As you may know, the FBI closed the largest US online poker sites. But you can still play at Carbon Poker. So if you are not registered yet, use a Carbon Poker Bonus Code before you sign up so you get your 200% bonus. Anyway being an experienced poker player doesn’t mean that you cannot make some mistakes. Either you are to tired, or your opponents are too aggressive, mistakes are unavoidable.

If you are multi-tabling, today we are no longer surprised when we hear someone playing 8 + tables cash at once. So, at how many tables a player can play? The answer is not very precise and depends on many factors. Each player has his limits and a too high number of tables may result in (1) getting to give fold in limited circumstances because you do not have time to take the optimal decision, or (2) folding at the other tables because of the lack of time in which you have to focus to another table.

The result is again a predictable game and lost money in the pots without showdown. Thus, it is good that each player finds the number of tables at which he feels comfortable and increases or decreases it while making the best decisions, to add one table, not to fall the other extreme, to play too many hands.

Do not play average hands because, even If you make a flush or a straight, chances are someone else makes a straight or a higher flush, and so you will lose much, being tempted to go ahead with the hand.

Do not be disappointed by the weak hands with what you will have to fold, and if you enter, you make a strong hand and you win! For example if you gave up 8,2 and the flop is K 2 2 or 5 8 8, do not be disappointed and next time proceed as fold!

Playing too predictably is a common mistake for intermediate poker players, specifically for no–limit players. If you tend to always play the same way, it is very easy for your opponents to read your moves. It is good to change your style from time to time or you can also change table, starting a new game with new players.

In poker besides how strong your hand it is, what does matter much more is the strength of your opponents’ hand. Not thinking about your opponent hand is a mistake and there are small chances to become a winner if you play this way. Always try to read your opponents playing style and what hand they might hold.

Poker is a game of little secrets. The best players are not the best because they have a different understanding of the fundamental nature of the game. They are the best because they have a deep understanding of all the tiny little edges that you can get here and there.

One fairly obvious edge is that when you are faced with a narrow distribution of hands, the least likely rank to help the player is the King. Bruce Lipstein has a good illustration of this concept in his journal.

How do you use this information? Well, you should probably play king-high flops a little more aggressively than you would most other flops, all else equal. The goal of course is to get random under pairs to the flop to fold. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always work out for the best.

One example came from a $40/$80 game that I played, where I had 55 versus KK and the board was Js 3h Kd Tc. Sometimes when a king hits the flop the player actually does have trip kings, so of course this is the exception that confirms the rule of being aggressive on K high flops. But given that the flop has one king, the probability that your opponent holds KK is very low as only three kings are left.

So the hand above is a very rare case. Most of the time you can be aggressive on a king high board and you should. The hand above is really not a typical hand in poker so do not base your play on that.