Turbo MTT strategy

Playing in a Turbo MTT often carries extra pressure for the participants, pressure which forces them to make mistakes very early on.

A Turbo MTT has much shorter blinds intervals, and smaller starting stacks. This means inexperienced players will see several reasons to push their stack all-in on hands like A,Jo or 5,5 very early on. Turbo MTTs reward aggressive and daring players after all, don’t they? The fact is though, that Turbo tournaments should not be treated any differently from their traditional variants for the first quarter of an hour to 20 minutes. What you need to do in the beginning of a Turbo MTT is the same thing you do in the hour and a half of a regular MTT: wait for good hands and act aggressively on them, especially if you’re in position. Avoid committing all your chips against an overly aggressive foe that early in the game, although if you consider that many other players do indeed fall into the trap of becoming way to aggressive on rags, that may not be such a bad move after all especially if you’re doing it on a good hand.

You shouldn’t exactly risk too much in order to get your hands on some blinds either. At this stage of the tournament, the blinds are just not worth it. According to a fundamental poker theory, when the blinds are small, you should play tight and when the blinds are large (due to the much better pot odds you get) you should act more aggressively. Well, in this case the blinds are small so save your gunpowder for later.
Blinds stealing will be a move destined for failure on account of another fact too. In the beginning of a Turbo MTT, you’re much more likely to get a call from one of your opponents because they tend to act much looser than usual as well. On top of that, the guy in the BB can usually hardly wait to mount a defense and he will not be deterred to shove all his chips in if that’s what things come down to.

One healthy approach towards the early-stage Turbo MTT strategy is to aim for the exploitation of the implied odds. Play as many small hands that can turn into big hands as possible. Take small pocket pairs for instance. Those will fail to make a set on the flop most of the time, but when they do make one, you’re bound to take down a huge pot in the loose environment that the Turbo nature of the game gives birth to.

It even makes sense to call a preflop raise on such a small pocket pair from a player who you know is endowed with a big pair in the pocket. Roughly one in 8 times you will catch your set, and then you’ll most probably double up on the guy who will probably refuse to muck his big pair.
What you need to pay attention to is that your opponent should have a large enough stack to justify going after him, that is, he will be able to give you the right pot odds.

In a Turbo MTT, letting your opponents commit mistakes is the way to go. This is a sound strategy in a regular MTT as well, where some people will still overplay their weak hands despite the lack of pressure, in a Turbo MTT however the approach is much more efficient because of the added pressure.

Get a true measure of your poker skill through Full Tilt’s Matrix SNGs

If you feel that your SNG efforts get compromised time and time again by lucky calls belonging to poor players, Full Tilt’s Matrix tournaments may just be the answer you’re looking for. You will play the same 8 players on 4 tables in the same time. Do you take a bad beat on one of the tables? Exact your revenge on the other table.

All 4 of the SNGs will pay out just like regular ones, with the top 3 finishers taking down the cash prizes. The Matrix SNG’s however will have a prize-pool for overall performance as well.

You’ll earn survival points for every player you manage to outlast, and knockout points for every player you oust from one of the SNGs yourself. These points are used to determine your overall position after all 4 SNGs come to a conclusion. If you manage to win all 4 SNGs, you will become the Dominatrix. The Dominatrix takes down the whole Matrix (overall performance) prize pool, leaving all the other players in the dust.

Sign up to Full Tilt Poker now, download and install their software, go to their tournament lobby, hit the SNG button and click the tournaments marked with an M. Hit “register”.

Build your beginner’s bankroll at Everest Poker

Everest Poker offers its new players an excellent opportunity for getting their online poker skills on the right track for free, with the possibility of building up a nice starting bankroll too.

Every week there’s a $2,500 freeroll final at Everest to which the entry can be obtained for free through one of the two daily freeroll satellites.

The first of these satellites is reserved for players who have only been playing at Everest for three months and thus they qualify as “beginners”. These satellites send the top 50 players to the weekly freeroll final. Players who are not beginners also get a chance to qualify for the weekly final: for 50 Summit Points they get the chance to play in a daily satellite which sends the top 15 finishers on to the weekly final.
Faster game play is often encouraged in these qualifiers, either by their Speed or Turbo structure, or by the 6-player tables they feature.

Those who are not keen on messing about with satellites can buy their way directly into the weekly $2,500 for 1,000 Summit Points. Players who are not present at the Finals’ start are removed from the tournament in 5 minutes. Those who satellite their way in won’t be allowed to unregister.

Take down a nice bonus at Titan Poker

By simply playing in a cash game at Titan Poker, you offer yourself the chance to win a $100 bonus by hitting the best hand of the day.
In order to qualify, your hand must be bigger than 4 Ks, and it must fulfill a set of additional conditions: at least three players need to be dealt into the lucky hand, your best hand of the day needs to win the hand and if all your opponents fold, you lose the bonus.
You need to use both your pocket cards in the winning hand in order to qualify.
It is the first player who hits a qualifying hand who gets the bonus each day. Only Texas Holdem cash tables qualify for the promotion.

The Bad Beat Bonus features a much bigger reward for the lucky player who ends up a victim of Lady Luck’s caprices. The player who loses on a hand of 4 Ks or better, wins $250 on the spot. The hand in which the unlikely loss occurs needs to go to showdown and it has to feature both pocket cards as parts of the losing hand in order to qualify.
The winner needs to claim his bonus by sending an email to Titan Poker’s support.

Sign up to PokerStars now and take part in their New Depositors’ freerolls

Every PokerStars player who makes his/her first deposit during the month of December will receive a special Holiday opportunity: he/she will get a free ticket to the New Depositors’ freerolls which feature no less than $75,000 in total prize-pools. All you have to do is make your first real money deposit at PokerStars (this means players who have already made such deposits in the past do not qualify) using a special bonus code featured at PokerStars’ site and to register for one of the daily $500 freerolls by going to the PokersStars lobby and selecting tournaments first then freerolls. You can play in as many of these freerolls as you like.

If you manage to reach the cash in one of these daily freerolls, you’ll automatically earn a seat in the freeroll final which takes place on December the 28th and has an impressive $5,000 up for grabs.

Make sure you sign up now and take this excellent opportunity to get into the flow of things while winning real money. You’ll also get the regular 100% sign-up bonus that PokerStars offers to all its new players.

If you’re a good enough player, you’ll build up a nice bankroll through these freerolls to aid your first steps in the world of real money online poker action.

The poker rake

As a complete beginner, you should always start your online poker adventure at the play money tables. While these tables may not teach you much strategy-wise, they will make sure you learn the game rules properly and that you become familiar with the user-interface too. One more thing: if you cannot beat the play money tables consistently, you’re probably not ready to move on to real money just yet.

Anyway, it won’t be long before your ongoing poker education requires you to leave the play money tables and get some real money experience under your belt.

Once you begin playing at the real money tables, you’ll be confronted with 2 distinct hurdles: one of them is the fact that you’ll be playing against much better opposition and games will be much tighter, the other is the rake. The poker rake is a formidable opponent for players of all skill levels and understanding how it works is the first step towards knowing how to circumvent its negative effects.

An online poker room makes its money through the rake. The rake is a small amount of money taken off each real money pot. In general terms, poker rooms take about 5% of each pot, up to a maximum of $3, but this percentage may be bigger on higher stakes and some of the micro limits may not feature any rake at all. Some poker rooms take more rake on the same limits than others.
Regardless of how you turn it around, the rake is a constant leak in your poker winnings, taking a good bite out of them when you are indeed a winner and making your losses worse when you’re a loser.

One common misconception among rookies regarding the rake is that it is only the winner of the pot who pays the rake. After all, the pot is his and the rake comes off that doesn’t it? Not exactly… The pot doesn’t really belong to the winner until after it’s been raked. It is raked first then given to the winner. Before being raked it is a standalone entity at the table, one that all those who have put money into the pot have equity in. That means the rake is in fact paid by all those who put money into the pot, regardless of whether or not they turn out to be winners or losers at the end of the hand. If you put money into the pot, you’ll pay rake alright…

This fact is also reflected by the different rake calculation methods poker rooms use. The dealt rake method (which distributes the generated rake among all those who were dealt in) is the least accurate method because it assumes everyone who gets cards pays rake.

The contributed rake method is closer to the truth because it only distributes rake-contribution among those who have actively taken part in the hand, that is, put money into the pot. This is still not a 100% accurate way to determine individual rake contributions because some people put more money in there than others.

The weighted contributed rake calculation method is the way to accurately determine who gets the most credit for the generated rake. This method awards the most contributed rake to the player who put the most money into the pot. It is a proportional rake calculation method: if you put more money into the pot you get credit for more contributed rake, if you put less, you get less rake.

Rakeback and prop deals represent some of the solutions you can adopt in your battle against the rake. Generous sign-up bonuses, cashback deals and various value-added promotions are also efficient ways to claim some of your rake back.

EPT Prague ends up as an all-Italian affair

The European Poker Tour’s Prague stop featured a largely anonymous final table, and – according to some experts – plenty of questionable play decisions.
Italian player Salvatore Bonavena started the final table play with a solid chip lead, which he then promptly squandered at the end of a few weird plays.
Over the course of 12 hours, which was as long as the final table lasted, Bonavena blew his lead twice and regained it both times.

The final table play – considered the most sophomoric ever by many – began at 1 PM CET, with the two Italians who would eventually battle it out heads-up in 1st and 5th on the provisional chip leader board. No time was wasted as the send hand of the day marked the first elimination, that of Raul Mestre who probably found the pressure too much and went all-in on his Ac, 7c against Fredrik Nyberg’s made hand: a pair of 9s. The mandatory Ace landed on the flop, however fate had another twist up its sleeve for this pot. On the turn and the river, Nyberg hit a flush and sent Mestre packing. Eliminated in 8th, Mestre still took down a very nice prize of €71,800.

As play went on, it was quite obvious that besides Nyberg, Nasr el Nasr and Andrew Chen, the rest of the participants were effectively lost in space.
As luck would have it though, it was one of the guys who actually knew what he was doing, Nasr El Nasr, who exited next.
His Kd,Jd almost filled up for a flush, but Chen’s 10,10 eventually got the better of him. His 7th place finish meant a prize of €99,500.

Andrew Chen was in his element as he kept building up the short-stack on which he started the final table, past the dinner-break. All sorts of dubious decisions on the part of his opponents made his task rather easy.

One of the biggest loose-cannons of the final table, Francesco Cirianni met his tournament end at the hands of Chen, when his Ah, 8h failed to measure up to the latter’s A,Q.
Chen cemented his status as the final table favorite when he busted Alexiou Konstantinos’ bluff and took down a huge pot to assume the chip lead. Konstantinos didn’t hang on much longer after that. He shoved on a pair of 3s against Bonavena’s K,Q, and the board gave the latter a K, thus spelling the end of another player who many commentators suspected of not being any more skilled than themselves.

“Don’t try to bluff a donk” the saying goes, because chances are he just won’t get it. Chan committed his only mistake of the day firing no fewer than 3 bullets into Salvatore Bonavena who blissfully called him down holding a bottom pair, and thus crippled the favorite.
It didn’t take Chen long to bust out after that, and sure enough, a few hands later he ran his K,Q into Bonavena’s A,6 to finish 3rd.

The heads-up play was a show of weird calls and decisions from both players as Bonavena quickly surrendered his 3-1 chip lead losing to hands like 10,2. The final hand was also an illustration of the skill (or lack thereof) of the two combatants. All the money was shoved in on a flop of 8h, 3h, 2h with Bonavena holding 8d, 7d for the top pair and Di Cicco holding A,4. The turn and the river bricked out giving Bonavena the title and the €774,000 prize.

Effective odds and implied odds

The odds comparison presented in one of my previous blog posts, which is supposed to clue you in on the mathematically correct way to proceed in a hand, is only valid for the turn card. If you have a 4-card flush on the flop, you can only accurately compare your pot odds with the odds of making your hand on the turn. After the turn, there’s another betting round and another card to hit the board which will alter the input of your equation dramatically.

First of all, if the turn misses your four card flush, your odds for hitting your flush on the river will slightly improve as a non correct suited card has just left the remainder of the deck. This, you can calculate accurately.
The pot odds however represent another problem. There’s no way to know how much your opponents will bet and how he will therefore alter your pot odds. You can only make an educated guess, and based on it you can calculate your effective odds, which basically tell you how your estimated pot odds stack up against the odds of your making your hand on the turn or the river.

Implied odds are a little more complicated than that, yet understanding them is probably the most important break-through you can accomplish while studying poker strategy.
Implied odds are at the base of healthy poker play and they explain the relationship between your stack-size and the type of poker strategy you have to adopt, so eloquently put forth by the Harrington system.

Let’s try to illustrate implied odds with an example to make the concept easier to understand. You’re deep-stacked and you’re playing in a 6 handed cash game which is neither tight nor overly loose and aggressive.

Since you’re holding the equivalent of about 300 BBs in your stack, you know you can act comfortably, within the limits of healthy tight aggressive poker play. You pick up a pair of 4s. What do you do?
If you take your pot odds and compare them again with the probability of your small pair improving with the board, you may not like the results, especially not when you approximate your effective odds. Still, the right thing to do here is to call the BB to see the flop.

The flop may hit you with a set, by landing a third 4 on the board thus giving you a monster of a hand, 66.6% of which stays well-disguised in your pocket. You do understand that most of the time, the set will not come by, and therefore, by making this call over and over you’ll end up losing money. Why is it a good call then to see the flop on a small pair like that? Because the few times that your set does fill up, you’ll take down huge pots on that hand. As a matter of fact, these pots shall be so big that they won’t just make up for all your previous losses, they’ll generate you revenue too.

These are your implied odds in action. Every time you decide to see the flop on any pocket hand that you picked up, you’re hoping to be hit by the flop for something, knowing that you’ll lose money on all these flops you see, but you’ll more than make up for these losses when you do land a good hand.

Nuevo Vallarta LAPT Event cancelled

With the second event of the LAPT season in full swing at the Marival Grand and Club Suites, the unexpected happened.
Tournament Director, Mike Ward called an unscheduled stop, after which the players were called to leave their tables and to head to the ante room. The TV crews and reporters covering the event were also cleared from the game room.

Play had been in swing for a while and only 89 of the 242 players were left in contention when the unscheduled break was announced.
The action had been rather upbeat with Victor Ramdin and Greg Raymer atop the provisional leader-board.
Alex Brenes, Ryan Fee, and Maria Mayrinck were also among the survivors.

4 hours after the break was announced, it was still unclear what had happened. Tournament director Mike Ward filled in the remaining field after midnight about the apparent causes of the incident. Mexican authorities, who kept watch for 10 hours of play, eventually decided to rescind the license of the Mexican partner of the LAPT responsible for the organization of the event.

LAPT officials engaged into negotiations with the government in order to gain allowance for the remainder of the tournament to go ahead as planned. Ward told players to return on Saturday for a possible chance to continue the action, however not long ago news broke that after a day of negotiations and deliberations, the tournament has in fact been altogether cancelled.

The $2,500 buy-in event attracted 242 participants. The 89 players who remained standing at the time of the cancellation will share the prize-pool the following way: everyone will get $5,000 out of the prize-pool, and the remainder of the money will be distributed among those who finished the highest up on the provisional chip leader board.
The only problem is, because the Marival Resorts and Suites has been locked down, the chip-count cannot possibly be accurately determined, so prizes are likely to be distributed on an estimated basis.

Although the Mexican gaming authorities’ decision may come as surprise to many, those who are familiar with the ambiguous nature of Mexican legislation regarding live poker, know that something like this is always in the books whenever a live tournament is held on Mexican soil.
The murkiness of the affair will probably mean that no clear conclusion will be drawn from the LAPT incident in regards to the future of live poker in Mexico.

One thing seems to be quite certain though: anyone who plans to hold a poker tourney in Mexico will think twice about whether or not to go ahead with it in the future.

In a short statement, the LAPT has confirmed the cancellation of its Nuevo Vallarta event, and re-iterated the fact that is had fully cooperated with the Mexican authorities all through the event. According to the LAPT statement, the cancellation of the event was a direct consequence of the suspension of the Mexican partner which had obtained the ruling needed to organize the tournament from Mexico’s Ministry of Interior.

CPC 2008 first prize goes to David Lloyd

The Caribbean Poker Classic may not be the highest prize-pool tournament out there and as such, it is probably not something you’ll read a whole lot about on different high profile news portals. The reason I decided to feature it in this blog is the following: most of our readers are and will be online poker players. At the Caribbean Poker Classic, the cream of the crop is formed by online qualifiers, in a word: players like you and I.
Now then, given the skill level of some of these players, the difference between a middle stakes grinder and a live poker headliner can be very little these days. The CPC represents one of the main staging areas for tomorrow’s poker headliners, an event where the potentially huge names of tomorrow’s live poker scene are taking their first baby-steps in live tournament poker. A prime example in this sense is Danish player Peter Jepsen who got his live tournament start at the CPC last year. About 6 months after he took first place (it was a chop actually) at the CPC he won an EPT title.

Enough small-talk though and let’s see who did what n the 2008 CPC. The first day of the event was an endurance grind, and the second one an all-in frenzy. Towards the end of the tournament the blinds were so big compared to layers’ stack sizes that they didn’t really get a chance to put their hard-earned skills to work. They just shoved and the luckier one survived. This is probably why Canadian Sol Bergren, who appeared to be superior in skills to just about everyone else failed to actually take down the big one. He did make it to heads-up play though, and he did eventually walk away with the substantial share of the prize-pool, but he didn’t win and you know what they say: the runner up is the first among the losers.

Bergren was unfortunate enough to run into Eventual winner David Lloyd in the heads-up stage of the final table, a player who did an excellent job of adapting his style to the above described circumstances. He kind of snuck into the heads up stage undetected, and once there he threw the tightish play that got him that far out the window, and kept pouring on the pressure. While Lady Luck certainly had her hand in the outcome of this tournament too, one must admit that Lloyd played his chances exceptionally well.

He and Bergren started the heads-up battle about evenly stacked, but that would soon change as Lloyd’s preflop raises and three-bets soon had Bergren on the ropes. While these sort of abilities are usually a mark of greatness in poker, the lack of hole-card cameras made it quite impossible to accurately assess the finesse behind Lloyd’s calls.
The fact that when the game tightened up on the final table bubble he kept focused on building his stack was not only of great help for him later, it was also something that screamed he was a skilled player.
Anyway, congrats on the first place finish and on the $91,200 prize. Time will tell whether we have a true talent on our hands here or not.