Top World Series of Poker stories

Having reached the half-way point of the 2010 WSOP, I reckon it’s about time we turned around and took a look at the stories yielded by the Series so far, because they have been plenty and plenty diverse too.
First on the order of the day is the British invasion. It’s not a secret that the Brits are generally good poker players, but this year, their contingent has pretty much surpassed all expectations so far. No fewer than 3 Englishmen walked away with WSOP bracelets, and that fact alone doesn’t even begin to describe their dominance. Praz Bansi, James Dempsey and Richard Ashby were the ones who grabbed bracelets during the first half of the Series. Dempsey is one of the prime candidates for the WSOP Player of the Year title, having won a bracelet and having come pretty darn close to winning a second one too.
Praz Bansi was the one who started the “invasion”. He won his bracelet in the $1,500 NL Holdem event. Dempsey followed him with his bracelet win, then Ashby captured the title in the $1,500 7-Card Stud event, proving that NL Holdem was not the only game in which the Brits excelled.

The other big story of the 2010 Series was – and I probably should’ve put this one first – Michael Mizrachi. There’s no doubting the fact that Mizrachi was one of the hottest up and coming young players a few years ago. It’s also no secret that his subsequent evolution as a poker player was quite a disappointment. Not content with heading back down the path to anonymity like so many before him, Mizrachi made a stellar comeback in the 2010 Series. His win in the $50k Players’ Championship event was an awesome one, but he did not rest on his laurels in the wake of that achievement either. He followed it up with a 6th place finish in the 7-Card Stud World Championship event and a few more deep runs in other – smaller buy-in – events.

When it comes to individual performance, we just have to talk about Vladimir Schmelev. A virtual unknown before the 2010 WSOP, Schmelev burst onto the scene in a more than spectacular fashion, surviving all the way to 2nd place in the Players’ World Championship, which Mizrachi eventually won.
He made his second final table in the $10k 7-Card Stud World Championship, and eventually finished in 7th place. He appeared near the top of the ranks in pretty much every World Championship event in the Series so far.
Though he seems like he’s been in a rut lately, the Russian may yet have a few tricks up his sleeve in the remaining 20 or so events.

Tom Dwan has definitely stolen quite a bit of the spotlight this year. He did so not by winning bracelets though, neither by finishing near the top in various events. Rather, the most radical representative of the new nosebleed stakes online poker generation drew attention through the ridiculously large prop bets he made with fellow poker professionals and through his eagerness to play in as many of the small buy-in events as possible. Dwan came tantalizingly close to securing his own piece of WSOP gold in Event #11. He fell just short of the goal though, losing to Simon Watt heads-up, and thus failing to win an untold amount of money in side bets. The Series is still on though, and Dwan still has plenty of opportunities to turn life extremely sour for Daniel Negreanu and Mike Matusow, two of the players who probably have quite of bit of money riding on the said side-bets.

Full Tilt’s Rush Poker: boom or bust?

These days, the online poker world is abuzz with Full Tilt’s newest (copyrighted) invention: Rush Poker. It looks like everyone I talk to has already tried the new game, and they’re all delighted with it. They’ve all won at it too.

Now, that leaves several possibilities open. It’s either that all my friends are excellent poker players and they have all indeed taken cash off the Rush Poker tables, or that they’re just a bunch of liars, or that everyone playing Rush Poker wins. That however is highly unlikely as it raises an even more unsettling question: if everyone wins, where the heck does all the money come from?

Anyway, let’s stop the jest right here and let us take a serious look at the things that Rush Poker has going for it and at the things that it doesn’t. A few days ago I read a poker forum somewhere where a poster said something like: this will either be a huge success or a huge bust. Which one will Rush Poker be?

 

Most players who’ve given it a go and most professional players who have expressed an opinion about it, seemed to love it. After all, what is the most annoying thing in online poker as we know it today? The down-times, of course. You pick up an 8,2o, you fold it and then you’re forced to sit there and watch those lucky enough to have picked up better starting hands, play. While this may be great to establish reads on your opponents, everyone will agree that it’s boring as hell.

Rush Poker eliminates all these downtimes. Don’t like your hand? Click “quick fold” and off you go, to another table where the prospect of a monster starting hand awaits you. This allows players to log an unheard-of number of hands each hour, forever changing the face of promotions like sign-up bonuses, rake races, and that of the bog bad wolf itself: rakeback. Rakeback and poker rake are the key words in Rush Poker and I’ll get back to why that is the case shortly.

What other advantages does Rush Poker offer though over its traditional counterparts? In addition to the change of pace (that’s an understatement if I ever saw one), it offers players more privacy, not to mention protection against data mining. Don’t shrug that off…the Isildur1-Brian Hastings incident has drawn a lot of attention to data mining and to its negative effects on the industry lately, and some poker networks have already begun implementing anti-data mining measures to prevent such incidents from ever occurring again. Rush Poker deals a devastating blow to data mining through its very nature. Whisked from one table to another at the speed of light (well, at the speed allowed by their internet connections anyway) players have no time to create profiles on opponents, and not too many reasons to do so either: after all, they’ll be playing their next hand at a different table, so what’s the use of reading one’s current opponents?

 

This “advantage” that I just presented above, is Rush Poker’s biggest shortcoming in the same time, and it’s not a small deal at all. It’s not just a grain of sand caught up in the cogs of the mechanism, it’s a big piece of dirt, one that may end up derailing the whole project. Why? You may ask… Simply because the fact that you’re continuously jumping from one table to another kills the very essence of poker. Poker is supposed to be a game of skill, based on a combination of math and psychology. Take away any of these two components and you’re left with an empty shell. That’s exactly what Rush Poker did. It took away the psychology aspect and left people with a math-based shell that’s relatively easy to abuse within the confines of its own rules. No longer will skilled players be able to make use of their prowess, and skill will once again take a back seat to luck.

Some worry that Rush Poker, as attractive as it may be for beginners, might turn into a trap for them. Weaker players who can barely handle playing at two tables, are definitely not ready for Rush Poker, yet right now they’re over there jumping from one table to another by the thousands.

Since optimal Rush Poker strategy is extremely simple (think one of the simplest, most radical versions of ABC TAG poker), there’s another danger: once everyone catches on, the Rush Poker tables will turn into a hopeless give and take, and not even the best players will be able to wring any juice from them. What that would mean is that the only way to make any sort of money at Rush Poker would be through rakeback.

That takes us to another hidden pitfall that Rush Poker comes fitted with: the poker rake.

Players love the idea of logging as many as 2,500 hands per hour. It’s awesome: it takes the downtimes out of the game, it kills the boredom, and it takes the money out of your pockets through the rake at a never before seen rate. I bet you never considered that. The increased speed of the game will mean that the edges successful players will be able to exploit will get ever smaller, which in turn means that the poker rake will become a bigger and bigger enemy.

Whatever direction Rush Poker evolves in, in its current format, “playing the player instead of playing the cards” as advised by the pros, will be quite impossible.

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.

How to play pocket pairs

Beginners are always extremely glad to see two similar cards in their pocket and most of them will treat those cards as if they were a care-free ticket to a big fat pot.
The way these hands should be played however is much more complicated. First of all, if your pocket pair is a small one, it is not exactly a hand you should risk you stack or tournament life on. Think about it this way: a small pocket pair will find it extremely difficult to improve in any way as it will be hard for it to make straight a flush or a set.

At a full 10-handed table, with many people seeing the flop, the odds for a small pocket pair are rather dismal. How should you play your pocket pairs then? Are they a hand that should be mucked? Not by a long-shot.
In poker, among the multitude of odds, the implied odds are probably the most important. This is what good players exploit all the time when they’re playing on a deep stack, and this is exactly what makes the playing of small pocket pairs worthwhile.

Trying to see a flop on your small pocket pair every time is a very healthy strategy because sometimes you will flop a set which is a huge hand meant to take down huge pots. Certainly, most of the time you will not make your set and that’s going to cost you money, but the few times that you do make it, will yield you a revenue big enough not only to cover those costs but to leave you with a nice surplus too.
In this respect, your aim is to see the flops as cheaply as you can which means there will be a lot of limping. Seeing cheap flops will minimize the money you spend on seeing your flops, and this way it’ll maximize your winnings when you do make the set you’re looking for.
In short handed games, which often tend to be much more aggressive than full 10-handed tables, limping along will not be the best way to play your pocket pairs.

In this case, you need to play them aggressively, raising them preflop. Isn’t your goal still to spend as little as you can on the fruitless flops? It certainly is, but in an aggressive game, the circumstances make it pretty much impossible to lower your flops-seeing costs if you limp. Therefore, you have to play your pairs aggressively, because under the given circumstances, such an approach will provide more ways to win a pot than any other.

If you raise preflop and do hit your set, you’ll already be dealing with a nicely built-up pot, and it’ll be that much easier to pot commit someone.
If you miss you set (which you will most of the time) you’ll still be able to play good old fashioned poker on the flop. Firing out a second bet will often earn you the pot right there, and on top of it, a continuation bet like that will only be a semi-bluff as you’ll still stand a chance to hit your set on the turn.