Professional Poker - Poker Radio - Poker Strategy Learn the “ADZ of Poker” Poker Talk, Reviews, Poker Bonus Codes, & Online Poker Magazine…

Check Raising the Devil

Whether you like Mike Matusow or not readers will find this book interesting.  If you like poker or not this book goes beyond your normal poker book. Not only is there discussion of poker in this book, but it also explores what it is like to live life in the fast-lane, play poker, suffer from depression and Attention Deficit Disorder. The book contains confessions from Mike the Mouth, and is co-authored by Amy Calistri and Dr. Tim Lavalli. Mike Matusow took at least two years to write this book to set the record straight, “he is a nice guy” and “he had to get things off his chest” For what it is worth the book is interesting at the very least. Congratulations to Mike Matusow and good luck.

Buy the Book from Amazon

Posted under Poker Book Review

1) Texas holdem

Texas holdem is one of the most popular variations of the game of poker. The number of people playing can vary from two to ten. The game has gained tremendous popularity because it is fast and the rules are pretty simple to learn. The game has four betting rounds. Each player receives two private cards face down and five community cards face up placed in the center of the table, to be shared by all the players. Player with the highest hand at the showdown wins the pot.

2) Omaha hi and low

Omaha hi is also another very popular poker game and is played between two and ten players. The game consists of four betting rounds. Each player receives four cards face down and five community cards face-up placed in the center of the table, to be shared by all the players. Each player creates the highest valued hand, using any two of their four private cards and any three of the five community cards. Omaha-low also has the same rules with one variation, only each player creates the highest valued and/or lowest valued qualifying hand, using any two of their four private cards and any three of the five community cards.

3) Seven card stud / hi and low

Seven-card stud is played between two and eight players. Betting in Seven Card Stud consists of an initial ante, preceded by five betting rounds. Each player receives three face down cards and four face-up cards. Each player creates the highest valued hand using any combination of five, of their seven total cards. In another variation - Seven Card hi and low each player creates the highest valued and/or lowest valued qualifying hand, using any combination of five of their seven total cards.

4 ) Five card draw

Five card draw poker is the oldest poker game. The game is played between two and five players. Betting in five card draw poker consists of an initial Ante, preceded by two betting rounds. Each player receives five cards face-down and may discard or draw up to five cards after the first betting round. The player with the highest hand at showdown wins the pot.

5) Caribbean stud poker

Here everyone plays against the casino or poker room, which acts as a bank (dealer), paying out all winning bets. To win you have to beat the dealer’s hand only. The other players are of no consequence. You can also try a fun game named Tri Card Poker

Posted under Omaha, Texas Hold'em

A multi-table poker tournament can be a marathon, like for example the WSOP Main Event, with thousands of entrants. Making it from the cry of “Shuffle up and deal!” to the final table can take many hours, if not days. Each stage of a poker tournament requires some adjustments in strategy. Just like in a chess game where the opening, middle game and endgame are three distinct phases; the early rounds of a poker tournament have some important tactical features that distinguish it from later rounds.

In the early rounds of a poker tournament, your chips are at a premium. Blinds are low and everyone has an average stack, meaning you don’t necessarily want to risk a lot of chips, since losing a big hand will put you at a big disadvantage, but winning a big pot won’t get you that much closer to winning the tournament, relatively speaking. The early rounds are a time to play tight, assess your opponents and try to pick up chips wherever you can.

Some pros will argue that the early rounds are time to get super aggressive, to try to double up early so you can have a big stack with which to club your opponents or get knocked out and not waste time playing for hours when you may still end up out of the money. This is a questionable strategy at best. While you do have more options when you have more money, you are still taking more risks than necessary for the benefits you may gain. Many times the person who is chip leader after the early rounds have been completed does not even make the money. This is usually because the same reckless, gambling style that enabled them to amass many chips enables them to lose them extremely quickly when their luck runs out. This super aggressive early strategy is usually espoused by pro players with a large bankroll, who can afford to jump right into a new $10,000 tournament as soon as they get busted out of the last one, and who can use the hours they might have wasted playing and not cashing to rack up money in cash games.

Most players will want to follow the “tight is right” strategy in the early round of tournaments. This is the strategy favored by Phil Hellmuth, the most successful Texas No-Limit Hold’em tournament player in World Series history, so there must be something to it. The time to loosen up is when your stack has gotten so low that if you don’t double up soon you won’t be able to make any moves at all, usually between 5 and 10 times the blinds, when the tournament has progressed to the middle stages, usually defined as the time when antes come into play or when your stack has gotten so big that you can afford to make a few mistakes and still have a strong chip position, enabling you to play more of a cash game style.

Your goal in the early stages should not be to double up, although that would be nice. You should simply try to have more chips in your stack than you did at the start of the previous round. If you can achieve this goal throughout the early stages of the tournament, you will be well positioned for the middle rounds of play.

Posted under Poker Strategy

This Post is Sponsored by Doyle Brunson - DoylesRoom

Imagine that you are on the poker table and you have four cards to the nut flush on the Turn. You have two suited cards in your hand and there are two cards of the same suit on the board. Your hand: A?K? Board: Q?7?3?2? If you make your flush, it would be the nut hand provided someone does not have a full house (there are no straight flush possibilities since the gap between the Q? and the 7? is too wide). In this case, the 9 remaining spades would give you the nut flush, but not necessarily the nut hand. Out of the 9 flush cards, 7 of them will not pair the board (thus giving you the nut hand). Two of the flush cards will pair the board (3? and 2?). For the 7 flush cards that do not pair the board, you know those cards are definitely outs as it makes your hand the nut flush because there are no possibilities of a full house or four-of-a-kind. If the flush card that comes on the River does pair the board, you may be in a dangerous position if any player held three-of-a-kind or two pair going in, because that player could then make a full house or four-of-a-kind when you make your flush. In this example, you know 6 cards before the River card is dealt, 2 cards in your hand and 4 on the board. Since there are 52 cards in a deck, this means you do not know the other 46 cards. If you did have 9 outs that means the other 37 (46-9 = 37) cards in the deck would be non-outs.

The concept of the number of unknown cards may be confusing since there are actually less than 46 cards left in the dealer’s hand after the Turn. If he has dealt in 10 players, it means he has dealt 20 cards to the players. With 4 cards on the board after the Turn, this would mean the dealer would only have 28 cards left in the deck in his hand (actually 26 since he has burned two cards, one before the Flop and one before the Turn). However since we do not know what the other players’ holdings are, it is usually correct to assume 46 unknown cards after the Turn. For any particular card, there is a chance it was dealt to another poker player or still left in the deck. Since we do not know which cards were dealt to the players or are still in the deck, we cannot make any assumptions about what is left in the deck. Sometimes we can be quite sure of an opponent’s two hole cards based on the play of the hand thus far, in these cases, we can be sure there are only 44 unknown cards. But these are rare cases, it is usually correct to assume 47 unknown cards after the Flop and 46 unknown cards after the Turn. Counting Outs The process of counting outs is a combination of art and science. If we knew exactly what our opponent’s cards are, then it would be a science, as we would be able to calculate our outs and non-outs. But poker is a game of imperfect information. It is an unusual circumstance when we know the exact two cards our opponent holds but we can often have a good idea of what the other players may hold based on their play so far, this is the most significant key poker skill one must have. A player who has the ability to read the hands of his opponents with precision will be able to pinpoint his opponents’ cards with a greater degree of accuracy than those players who cannot read hands well. Tri Card Poker is a completely different animal.

Posted under Poker Strategy

Enjoying the fruits of a well-executed bluff is probably one of the biggest thrills you’ll ever come across in online and live poker. There’s something extremely appealing in scoring a hit while having absolutely no ammo in the pocket.

The bluff is probably the most renowned move in poker too. Even people who never played a hand of Texas Holdem know that bluffing is a central piece in winning poker. The perception that poker revolves around successful bluffs is wrong of course, and because they give it too much of an importance, people tend to abuse bluffing and thus lose a lot of money on it.

Don’t build your strategy around the bluff, try to find smaller edges (like table selection, rakeback, good starting hand selection etc) and put them to work over and over: if you manage to play EV+ situations the majority of the time, you’ll walk away a winner. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make use of the bluff though. Before you do however, there are a few things you ought to learn about it.

There are two basic types of bluffs: semi bluffs and pure bluffs.

A semi bluff is one where you actually hold a strong drawing hand in your pocket (like a 4-card flush), which stands a pretty good chance to be hit by one of the upcoming streets to become the best hand at the table. By semi-bluffing, you’re aiming to take the hand down right away, without running the risk of your drawing hand failing to fill.
A classic semi bluff example would be the 4-card flush on the flop situation, when you know you may well happen upon a monster on the turn, but you’d rather take the pot down without seeing a turn at all.

Pure bluffs can be broken down into floating bluffs and probe bets. The c-bet (continuation bet) fits within none of those two categories, yet it too is a pure bluff. The c-bet capitalizes on the advantage the preflop raiser has created for he or she by being aggressive preflop. Under given circumstances (a relatively large percentage of the time) it is healthy to place a continuation bet on the flop, even if it has missed the preflop raiser completely, because that way he’ll take the pot down and make money on a busted hand.

Floating is an efficient way to counter c-betting. It is only suited that you bust a bluff through another bluff. Floating is about flat calling an opponent’s c-bet to see what the turn brings about and how the targeted opponent reacts. The idea is that the calling of his c-bet will let your opponent know that you do in fact have a hand, and get him thinking. If he commits the mistake of backing off and checking on the turn, you’ll be able to bet into him and push him out of the pot.

Floating is best done from late position, although it can be pulled off from early position as well. That way however, you’ll have to trap your opponent on a check-raise, a move which may not work against less skilled opposition.

Probe bets are another breed of pure bluff. Probe betting is always done out of position, on boards on which you suspect your opponents may be drawing dead. The probe bet is a well-sized bet (around half the size of the pot), which is meant to force those coming up behind you to fold their hands around to you.

Probe betting is a much more efficient way to fire out a pure bluff than most people would think. It is therefore one of the most underrated moves in poker. As you can see, none of the above described bluffs call for blind action: they’re all based on circumstances that logically enhance their odds for success.

If you intend to secure yourself a sizeable long-term edge, sign up for a poker prop deal. By becoming a poker prop, you’ll often earn over 100% rakeback, which means that you’ll be basically paid to play.

Posted under Poker Strategy