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Showing posts with label poker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poker. Show all posts
Bad Beats
Some of you may be new to poker and are wondering what a Bad Beat is. Well, if you lose a hand holding four eights (8888) or better, that’s a bad beat.
Here's one players story: I was playing in one of my first tournaments, the first prize was a fully paid trip to hawaii and i had made the final table!
It was down to the last 4 players and I looked at my hole cards and found K K.
I made a 2x pot raise and had 1 caller. The flop was an incredible K K A. Trying to not give away my hand I made a medium size bet. The other player came over the top with 2x my bet as a raise.
I thought for a few seconds and made the all in move. The other player instantly called and said " unless you have K K, your drawing dead. With a huge smile I turned over my KK and he showed his AA hole cards. Turn card nothing, but the river card..........was the freakin case A!
I was still excited..I had hit the bad beat (which was 85K at the time!), but they quickly told me bad beat jackpot does not play during a tournament. So i did lose all my chips!
I have never had a bad beat hand since!
Poor poker face? Try this ...
Tensions were high. Everyone had a straight face except for one. You. Have you ever played poker and not been able to contain your excitement or your sadness? It happens to the best of us, so here's how you beat it!
Relax. No matter how much money you are playing for, remember that it is a game. Clear your mind. Not only will you play better, but you will be one step closer to a good poker face. Just relax-let everything fall into place.
Talk as normally as possible. When you are betting and talking, it is easy to tell how someone is feeling by the way that they talk. So again, relax. When it comes down to you and someone else, try to psych them out. Have a mischievous gleam in your eye and a "you are so on" look in your eyes as well. Don't let it show on your face, let your eyes to the talking.
Maintain an emotionless, apathetic demeanor. You want a tough, "I-play-poker-all-the-time-rookie" expression that says that you are the boss. Imagine that you are the big, scary company boss, and the other players are the interns. Keep focused & be mysterious. However, if you are just playing a family game for bragging rights and cookies, feel free to loosen up a little. Keep a straight face no matter what. It goes back to relaxation.
Win gracefully. It is down to you and another person. (S)he lays down his/her cards. You see that you have won. It's acceptable to smile a little and have a "It-is-all-over" look. Remember, it is just a game—don't go overboard.
Lose with pride. Whether it is as the beginning of a game, or when it is just you and another person, lose with pride. You can even smile as if it were all according to plan. But again, if it is with your family, relax - you lost, oh well.
How to Bluff in Poker
-Know your game. Can you predict when one player is going to take the pot without showing his hand? Bluffing involves recognizing that situation and exploiting it.
-Don't bluff too much. It is essential that the other players think you only play good hands.
-The basic bluff goes like this: You have nothing. Your opponents have nothing. You bet. They fold. Sometimes it's difficult even to make people throw away an inside straight. Know your opponents. Watch for signs of disgust with their hand.
-Bluffing is best with a very small pot because no one really wants to vie for it with you. They think to themselves, "alright, if he has something good, he'll win.
-If he doesn't, I might win but it's not worth the risk." Although it doesn't seem like much money, it can be your edge if you do it well.
-It is a mistake to think that there are no mathematics involved in bluffing. It is mathematically a good idea to bluff if you are in late position against one or two opponents going into the flop. The small pool guarantees that no one has a very good idea of what the other person has. In other words it's a high risk bet for everyone.
-Betting into a high risk pot is bad poker strategy, so if a young/inexperienced player bets, he is probably bluffing (raise him) and if the player is older and better, you can trust his bet is backed up with at least something (fold). Keep in mind that the early position player might try to draw a bluff by checking if he has a good hand. That's part of the game.
-Conversely, it's generally not a good idea to bluff if a lot of people saw the flop. There is a very good chance that someone made at least a two pair or trips (the average winning hand in 10-handed holdem). It will take a very strong bet and strong reputation to scare away someone with a real hand.
-Some flops (three of a kind for example) lend themselves towards bluffing (betting with nothing) or semi-bluffing (overbetting your hand). For a flop to be "bluffable" it must be rare and there must be a small number of ways to win. Three queens on the flop is a perfect example. There is anxiety about who has the pocket pair. Fear and risk are a bluffer's best friends because good poker players look for easy money. In this case it is best to bluff in early position because if someone in early position has the nuts, they are likely to check and call the bluff.
-One fundamental requirement for successful bluffing is a table with other players who are thinking about what cards YOU have. In many low stakes (so called "No Fold'em) Hold'em games, players think only about their own hands; in these games, a bluff will rarely work.
-And most importantly: You don't have to show your cards if everyone else folds. You can take the pot and leave everyone to wonder what you had. This is almost always advisable.
Expensive Errors in Holdem
There are several expensive errors that are frequently made in poker, especially Hold'em. This article will discuss the two most expensive errors that players make.
What makes these errors so expensive? For one thing, we get an opportunity to make them frequently, and even errors that only cost a portion of a bet can add up to big dollar amounts if they are made often. As well, sometimes when we make these mistakes we are rewarded by winning a big pot, leading us to believe that they are not errors at all. All of us tend to remember the big pots we win with a miracle flop, and forget the thousand times we called a few bets and then lost. This encourages players to make those mistakes even more frequently.
The first error that most players make is to play too many hands. Poker is a game of patience, and it can be boring to throw somewhere between 75% and 85% of your hands away before you even see the flop. The truth however is that you must do just that.
The first 2 cards in Hold'em have some value, the percentage of times that they are expected to win. Another way of looking at this is that over thousands of hands, some starting cards will make a profit, some will approximately break even, and some will lose money.
Of the 169 possible starting hands in Hold'em, only 40 show a profit in the long term. That is less than 25% of the starting hands. After the first 40, there are a few more hands that are break even, or close to it, that can be played for a profit in certain situations, but only in a very few specific situations. I have a table on my web site that shows all 169 hands, their expected value, and the amount you will win or lose over the long term. This data is derived from more than 120 million actual hands played, so it should be fairly accurate. For instance, the data shows that playing a pair of aces over this long term, in a game with a $1 big bet, you can expect to come out ahead by $1.25 million. Now, of course none of us is going to live long enough to play that many hands, but it gives us an idea of the difference between good and bad cards to play. If you compare the pair of aces to say an ace and eight of different suits, which will lose $77,031 over that same number of hands, or an ace and a two of different suits, which will lose $165,968, you begin to see the problem. And hands like these are routinely played by many people at the tables.
Now some of you may be thinking that since you win so much on the pair of aces, and also do pretty well on some of the other top hands, and only lose numbers like $77,000, and $165,000, on the bad hands, that you are still in pretty good shape. If so, consider that if you played all of the 169 starting hands over this long term sample, you would win $7,248,687 on the 40 premium hands, a pretty nice figure. But, you would lose $10,787,747 on the bad hands. After playing for a very long time, you would be $3,539,060 in the hole. Not many of us can afford to play poker that way. The second big mistake that many players make is to cold call too many raises. Cold calling a raise is putting multiple bets into the pot when it is your turn to bet. For example, if someone in early position raises, when the action gets to you in middle position you must call 2 bets in order to play. There are three reasons why this is a big mistake. First, a player in early position liked his hand enough that he was willing to raise with most of the table still to play. Second, if anybody called before it got to you, they liked their hand enough that they were willing to call the 2 bets. Third, there are still players to act after you who could very well re-raise, which would not only cost you more money, but indicates yet another good hand out against you. Also, the original raiser may re-raise again, meaning that it will be 2 more bets when the action gets back to you.
In a situation such as this, with at least 1 big hand against you, and possibly more, you must play only the best hands, AA, KK, QQ, JJ, AK suited and AK un-suited. Furthermore, with the AA, KK, QQ and AK suited you should re-raise. If you think that the raiser would raise with hands like AQ, AJ, or less, you should also re-raise with the JJ and AK un-suited. Throw everything else away, it just isn't worth playing.
There are 2 reasons for raising with your premium hands. First, you get more money in the pot with hands that you have a good chance of winning. Second, you will hopefully eliminate a few players from the pot. Big hands like these are best played against fewer players, and you don't want someone with a 5 and 6 to hit 2 pair, or a straight and take the pot away from you.
Remember, play fewer hands. Throw away those ace nine off-suit hands from early and middle position. Don't play a 5 and 9 just because they are suited. And if there is a raise in front of you, fold unless your hand is good enough to re-raise.
Copyright © 2005 A1-PokerInfo.com. All rights reserved. Contact the author at http://A1-PokerInfo.com
Phil Gordon's Little Green Book
World poker champion and host of CELEBRITY POKER SHOWDOWN Phil Gordon shares his secrets to winning Texas Hold 'Em with host Janie Haddad. PHIL GORDON'S LITTLE GREEN BOOK shows you how to play professionally and win big.
Pokerbots taking over
The University of Alberta's Polaris poker-playing software won out in a six-round match held July 3-6 at the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.
Each game included 500 hands of limit hold 'em, matching Polaris against living, breathing poker professionals. But Polaris still has a bit to learn; it won three of the games, the humans took two, and one was a draw.
"It's hard to describe how good that felt," research team leader Michael Bowling said. "As a group, we may not all be great poker players, but all of us really, really want to win.
"This was really the simplest form of poker," he continued. "There's a lot more we can look at, such as playing without betting limits, or playing with more than two opponents. One of the reasons I got excited about this line of research is that it's not just a one-off. It's a really challenging path of research."
So next time a computer beats you at chess or checkers, pull out the cards and show the bastard who's boss.
Bluff vs Bluff Million Dollar Pot
This is some pretty impressive poker play. 2 men. Both bluffing. A million dollar pot. What would you do?
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