Journey To Being an Online Poker Pro

The past couple of days have gone really well for me at the ring games.  Tournaments…not so much.  Other than the one I recently posted about it’s been rough going.  Recently I played an $11 buy in tournament and was doing really well when the following hand came up.  I was on a pretty good heater up until this point and was in the middle of the pack when I got dealt pocket kings for the second time in about 7 hands.  I was in the BB and action folded around to the button.  He was the only one at the table who could bust me and not by much.  Blinds were 75/150 with a 20 chip ante and we both had about 30K.  Read more…

I played in a small buy in online tournament last night and did pretty well.  I looked at the structure before registering and saw that it was a $3 buy in, with 1 Rebuy and 1 Add on (adding chips for $3 during the first break).  I’m not a big fan of rebuy tournaments because the first hour is just ridiculous.  People are  shoving with 9 high, hoping to double or even triple up and if they miss, so what?  Rebuy and do it again.  Yes it drives the prize pools up but it just isn’t poker and to do it for an hour is painful.  This tournament started you off with 3K in chips and the rebuy was for 3K as well.  If you wanted, you could just take your rebuy right away so you’d be starting with 6K in chips and the blinds were 10/20.  This meant very deep stacked poker which, for me, is a very good thing.  I’m a very patient player when it comes to playing deep stacked like that and would look to pick my spots throughout.  After the extended registration was over there were 1100 entrants in total. Read more…

There are a lot of misconceptions or myths when it comes to the game of poker.  I’m going to list some of the popular ones and why they just aren’t true

Online Poker is Rigged

This one actually makes me laugh the most.  It’s really amazing how many people actually believe that online poker is rigged.  They take a really bad beat and automatically it’s because the online site is out to get them.  “This never happens live”, and “This site is so ridiculous” are amongst the many things you’ll see in the chat box when the bad beat happens.  For the record it does happen live and it has nothing to do with the site.  The truth is, it only SEEMS like there are more bad beats online.  This is because there are more hands being played per hour.  There’s no shuffling, no waiting for chips to be pushed to someone, cards being brought together to be shuffled, cards are dealt much faster, etc.  Typically there are double the amount of hands being played per hour online than in a live game.  We also have very selective memories.  Think about it.  Which hands are we likely to remember?  The time we had AA and our hands held up like it’s “supposed to” or the time  someone called our raise with K 7 suited, rivered the flush and cracked our aces?  We are also less likely to remember the times we did it to others.  Instead of blaming the site for being rigged, maybe we should examine our own play.  Ask yourself, “Did I give the other player the correct odds to call for his flush?  Should I have bet the flop instead of checking it?”  Go over your own play before thinking that the site is rigged. Read more…

For myself, it’s been a “steady as she goes” week.  Some decent pots won, some decent pots lost…nothing really new to report.  I’ve played in a few more tournaments this week too but the results have been less than stellar.  I played in 6 tournaments of $11 buy ins or less and haven’t cashed in any of them.  All 6 times I busted I got my chips in with way the best of it and the last two times it was my AK vs. an opponent’s AQ.  Both times they hit their queen so it’s been very frustrating as you can imagine.  If I fade those queens, both times it would have put me amongst the chip leaders as we closed in on the money.  Read more…

I wrote an earlier post about online poker tells and had forgotten I was going to write one about live tells as well.  There are a number of common tells and I’m going to go over a few of them.  Note though, that if you witness some of these tells, it doesn’t ALWAYS mean the same thing.  These are just some of what you’ll see at the table but keep in mind that a tell can also be anything a player does to give away the strength or weakness of their hand.  If you notice something a player did in a situation where he got caught bluffing, and you see him doing it again, that’s a tell.  That, and the ones I’m about to list below are more reasons as to why you should ALWAYS pay attention at the poker table. Read more…

In today’s poker world there are many tools out there to help one become a better player. There are blogs like this one, video tutorials, poker camps, and many many books.  I want to talk about and give my review of some of the books that got me started on No Limit Texas Hold Em.  My actual  introduction to the game came late one night on ESPN Classics.  They were showing the World Series of Poker Main Event final table in which Russ Hamilton won.  This was before hole cams were invented so it left you trying to guess what they had.  It was sort of boring at first until Hamilton made a straight flush.  I watched intently how the game was dealt, about the blinds, and all that and tried to introduce it to my friends in our weekly poker game.  They weren’t interested after a few rounds of playing.  They wanted to go back to the standard dealer chooses.  So that meant more of High Chicago, Follow the Queen, and Guts. We called it Balls though. Just sounded better to us. Read more…

With all of the happenings of the WSOP final table, I forgot about the High Stakes Poker lineup being announced by the Game Show Network.  Coming back to the show will be Daniel Negreanu, Eli Elezra, Doyle Brunson, Tom ‘durrrr’ Dwan, Patrik Antonius, Antonio Esfandiari, Barry Greenstein, Phil Hellmuth, Phil Ivey, Mike Matusow, and David Benyamine.  Quite the lineup to be sure.  A lot of these guys were also recently on Season 3 of the Million Dollar Cash game in London and the action was pretty unbelievable.  Phil Ivey had over $1M in front of him at one point (he had bought in a few times throughout the show for $800K total) and David Benyamine was getting away with bluff after bluff.  Tom Dwan had his usual roller coaster ride and Phil Hellmuth couldn’t get dealt anything and naturally complained about it the whole time.  His interaction with Mike Matusow was funny though. Read more…

With the World Series of Poker done for another year I just wanted to make a few observations:

Joe Cada:

 This is the first year I listened to a broadcast of a final table and then watched it on ESPN afterwards and I must say, I was somewhat surprised.  The TV coverage was not friendly to Joe Cada at all.  He really came across as not much more than a suckout artist and that’s somewhat inaccurate.  Yes, he WAY overplayed his low pairs but at least he was the aggressor with them.  The one mistake he did make was against Jeff Shulman, as I’ve said before, reraising all in with the pocket 3’s vs. Shulman’s jacks.  But what the TV didn’t show was how he was earning pots throughout the final table with the same sort of aggression.  He was pretty active with preflop raises and reraises but because people were laying down a lot, it doesn’t make for good TV and therefore doesn’t get shown.  The times he did get involved in a big hand, he was behind and obviously got very very lucky.  You have to be lucky to win these things of course, but he wasn’t the only one hitting ridiculous cards to survive either. Read more…

After 8 exhausting days, a gruelling, crazy, and exciting final table that was the longest in history, we have a new World Series of Poker Champion and his name is Joe Cada.  Like most, I expected the heads up battle with Darvin Moon to not last long.  Cada was by far the more experienced player and Moon just didn’t seem like he wanted to be there during Saturday’s play.  But, as with most things at this year’s tournament, it was safer to expect the unexpected.

Before action could get underway there was a ceremony to congratulate the other 7 November Niners and then Vince Neal of Motley Crue got things started with the now traditional “Shuffle up and deal!”.  Read more…

I listened to most of the World Series of Poker final table broadcast on bluffmagazine.com last night, with a 5 hour break in between as I had to work a short shift.  I didn’t miss too much as there was a 2 hour dinner break thrown in there.  I missed the elimination of James Akenhead and Kevin Schaffel but heard the rest, in what will surely go down as the craziest final table with the biggest suckouts in history.  It just seemed like anytime someone got their hand in with a dominating hand, they would lose.

The first example came about a few hours into the action.  Well, action is a bit misleading as the players were playing very cautiously and I think that was to be expected.  Nobody wanted to get too involved early and can you blame them?  Read more…