WSOP qualifiers – Steps tournaments

I know that the WSOP is upon us but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t stick to online qualifiers to secure a seat. After all, the Series is long and the Main Event is still quite a bit off, giving you more than enough time to become one of the hundreds of online qualifiers who will belly up to the tables in Las Vegas this summer.

Steps SNGs represent one of the most straightforward ways to play your way to a WSOP seat. For those of you who may not know: Steps SNGs are a string of SNG tournaments you need to climb in order to play for your WSOP prize package. There are usually quite a few SNGs in the Steps ladder. Full Tilt Poker has 7 in each, which means you need to fight your way through 7 SNGs with your eyes on the prize. Each of these SNGs features progressively bigger buy-ins, meaning that you can buy into any step directly, without the need to a actually win your way up. The whole thing only really makes true sense though if you play through all the steps, to finally get your hands on the prized reward for as small a buy-in as possible (a mere few dollars). I know what you’ll say: fighting your way up through 7 steps is quite a long-shot, isn’t it? Well, not quite. You see, it’s not just the winner who advances. As a matter of fact, there’s a lot more to Steps SNGs than to regular ones in the sense that instead of just one money bubble, there are several bubbles in Steps tourneys, each of them with different significance.
Here’s a sample breakdown of one of Full Tilt Poker’s Steps SNGs: first and second place move on up to the next step. 3rd and 4th stay on the current step. 5th and 6th move down one step and the remaining players move all the way down to the first level. As you can see, first you play not to move down to the very bottom, then you play to stay on your current step and then to advance. A Steps SNG is therefore non stop action almost from the get go.

As you probably know, the money bubble is the most delicate part of a SNG strategy wise. Because you’ll have to deal with no fewer than 3 such bubbles in each and every one of the Steps SNGs in which you play, that’s exactly the part of SNG strategy you want to excel at.
When making these recommendations, I’m assuming that you’re 100% in the know as far as regular SNG strategy goes. If you’re not, I’m sorry to break it to you but Steps tourneys are just not for you then.
You should start out your Steps SNGs the regular way: being extra tight in the beginning. This approach is justified and even called for by a whole bunch of factors which I’m not going to detail in this here piece. After the initial warm-up stage though, the Steps SNG turns into an entirely different animal, and aggression becomes the key word. Despite the fact that these tournaments feature several bubbles, you need to focus on surviving the last one, because otherwise you just won’t advance. Bubbles can be played in two different ways: the farmer way and the fox way. The farmer tightens up looking to make it past the bubble with the chips he has. The fox begins stealing blinds, taking advantage of the farmers’ extra tightness to accumulate chips for the later stages. Obviously, you need to be a fox. Aggression can be extremely tricky though, as it’s a volatile weapon that may backfire in any moment. You need to be selective about your aggression by picking your spots properly.

Rush Poker: a profitable long-term choice?

Rush Poker is great. There are no downtimes and finally, there are no reasons whatsoever for you to play anything less than premium hands. All you need to do is to hit the fold button a few times to pick up a hand good enough to take to the flop against just about anyone. Rush Poker is online poker on crack. People love it, and the pace of the game is enough to hook even skeptics within a few minutes.
Is Rush Poker a viable alternative to the regular online poker tables when it comes to long term success though?

Let’s take a look at some of the advantages that Rush Poker offers. First of all, there’s the number of hands played per hour. Rush Poker is quite unbeatable on this level: in live poker games, a player can stuff about 30 hands into the hour. At the online tables that number goes up to 80-90, depending on the number of opponents one faces. At the Rush Poker tables, squeezing 250 hands into the hour is within anyone’s reach. What kind of changes does this increased speed bring about? Well, if you know how to secure a nice edge, you’ll love to play that many hands: your hourly rate will go right through the roof. You can even relax a little and exploit more marginal situations too: despite the increased variance, your hourly rate will still be a more than decent one. The problems rear their heads when you lose though. If you’re an overall loser, Rush Poker will amplify your losses and you’ll end up dropping far more per hour.
Another thing about playing this many hands per hour: the poker rake that you pay to Full Tilt Poker will sky-rocket as well. Now, I’m not saying that this is the reason behind the launching of the new poker variant by Full Tilt, but it definitely doesn’t hurt the room’s interests to collect several times as much rake at the Rush Poker tables than at the regular ones.

What this means to you is that you simply must sign up for the Full Tilt rakeback, As the novelty value of Rush Poker wears off and as players become more and more adept at maximizing their Rush Poker edges (a task which is not exactly difficult either), the edges will shrink to the point where without a Full Tilt Poker rakeback deal, you’ll find it impossible to beat the rake.
The fact that you have no history with your opponents is often listed as an advantage for Rush Poker, but most of the time it’s a huge drawback. Once you establish your basic ABC approach to the game, you’ll find yourself pressed to move on and to create new edges, only it’ll be an impossible undertaking. Good players build the majority of their edges on reading their opponents, on getting to know their betting patterns and on exploiting their mistakes, using the reads that they make. In Rush Poker, they’ll be denied all that. They’ll have to rely 100% on the mathematical aspect of the game and that will hurt their ability to go out and to create value for themselves.

This leads us to the another huge disadvantage that Rush Poker carries: players will simply see their poker skills peak and their growth as players stunted. If you stick with Rush Poker, you’ll pretty much reduce yourself to a fish in due time.
In conclusion: Rush Poker is great fun and it is excellent as a temporary solution to taking a break from the “real” poker tables. It is by no means fit to build a bankroll (let alone a career) on.

Sleep Deprivation and Poker

For serious players, the issue of sleep deprivation at the table is a stringent one indeed. Of course, I’m not talking about recreational players who only spend a few hours at the table on every session. I’m talking about hard grinders and online poker professionals for whom getting as much time in at the tables as possible is a matter of building up a solid bankroll or making a living. Of course, all those who aspire to join the ranks of poker professionals may also want to read this piece just to gain a basic understanding of what’s awaiting them once there.

Playing poker for a living is about grinding. You don’t need to look far for examples of professional players battling it out in a sleep deprived state. The durrrr challenge series had both players interrupting sessions several times on account of sleep deprivation. When you know you can potentially pocket millions in a few hours, it becomes an extremely counterproductive proposition to catch a few Zs. The problem is though that nature doesn’t really care about how much money one can make at the table, and when nature calls, top level poker pro or not, you’d do better to answer.
How exactly will sleep deprivation affect your play though? What sort of tricks will your body play on you once you deny it one of its most fundamental necessities? There’s no better way to run a case study on the effects of sleep deprivation at the poker table than taking a look at the Party Poker Big Game IV. The 48-hour long cash game marathon does push players right to the edge in every respect.

The first stage of sleep deprivation will accentuate players’ already existing weaknesses. If you’re someone who’s prone to tilting, you’ll tilt much easier. If you’re the master of the short-stack, you’ll find deep stacked play more difficult than ever. Thinking and staying focused at the poker table takes up energy. During the first stage of sleep deprivation, your body runs out of energy, thus you’ll end up exposed to a whole array of factors you dread.
During the middle stages, problems only get worse. Perception problems seep into the system as players start to misread situations. They give a bigger importance to less important issues and a smaller weight to more important ones. Memory will suffer too during this stage and players will tend to forget things they would’ve otherwise remembered.
Extreme sleep deprivation is a realm we should not even consider. It can drive people crazy and it can eventually lead to death, but obviously – as a poker player under reasonable circumstances – you will never push things this far.

Sleep deprivation – like all other things in poker – can be wonderfully exploited by those who are trained to better withstand its assault. Players who are trained to put in long hours at he tables, or who play an unusually high number of tables simultaneously will enjoy an advantage over their peers. Interestingly enough, such marathon poker events act as an equalizer, offering a fair chance to those whose skills are otherwise inferior. The long run puts good players to the test, and it does take away quite a bit from their edges. The key to staying focused over the long-run is to stay on your toes, and the key to that is adrenaline. If you’re playing at higher than usual stakes, you experience a rush of adrenaline. Adrenaline is the body’s way to keep your senses sharp under extreme circumstances. It is a valuable survival tool, one that can offer you help at the poker tables too.

The bottom line about sleep deprivation and the long-run is that those who are best when playing their worst will triumph. Everyone will be forced to play his/her worst in such games sooner or later. He who maintains a higher degree of control over his actions will walk away a winner.

PLO for beginners – part 2

Now that we’ve taken a look at PLO from a NLH perspective, detailing the differences between the two poker variants, let’s take a look at the peculiarities presented by PLO, without looking through the Hold’em lens.

The betting structure. As I’ve pointed it out in my last piece, due to the nature of the game, the NL betting structure in not a reasonable fit for Omaha. The PL betting structure carries some peculiarities though that you’d do better to take a note on before you can hope to gain a reasonable grip on PLO action.
PL betting is really tricky business. While it does limit the amount of money a player can put into the pot at any one time, skilled players can pretty much get as many chips into the middle as they want on any hand. Pot control becomes a true art-form in PLO. Here’s an example of how PL betting works: with $100 in the pot, the player who’s first to act can bet up to a maximum of $100. The player who follows though, will be able to make a maximum bet of $400. That’s because the size of the pot is $200 when his turn comes, and he has the first guy’s $100 bet to call, to which he can add his $100 raise.

Sometimes, it can be a little difficult to make the calculus, but fortunately, at the online poker tables, the computer does all that calculus for the player.
As one can plainly see, the fact that the player who was first to act decided to bet instead of checking, led to an exponential increase in the size of the pot. If the guy who’s second to act decides to take full advantage of the opportunities offered by the circumstances, the two players can end up all-in before they now it. The bottom line: a small opening bet can lead to some truly out-of-proportion consequences as far as bet sizes are concerned. Skilled players are adept at “opening the gate” and generally at controlling the eventual size of the pot through their actions.
The peculiarities of PL betting give different meaning to various actions at the table. Firing out a pot size bet for three quarters of one’s stack is way more threatening than an all-in in NL poker. The PL betting structure offers the check-raise different powers too. A player who wants to shove it all-in on a the river for instance, may not be able to do so by firing out the maximum bet he’s allowed to, but he may well be able to do so if he lets his opponent open the gate first.
Beginners need to be extra careful not to commit one of the common PLO beginner mistakes.

Stuck on the level of NLH mentality, beginners often evaluate their starting hands according to NL Holdem standards.
Beginners play too many starting hands and they call way too much on low-odds draws hoping to take down a big score.

They often miss the opportunity to open the gate with premium preflop holdings.
They give their opponents free cards, or fail to put them under pressure while holding reasonable, but not nut hands. Always remember: PLO is also known as the game of nuts.

PL Omaha for beginners part 1

PL Omaha is the new game of the nosebleed online poker royalty. If you read poker news, I needn’t tell you how PLO has pretty much swept NL Holdem aside when it comes to nosebleed stakes poker. Nowadays, PLO holds a whole bunch of online poker records: the one for the largest pot ever played (as a matter of fact, most of the 10 largest online poker pots ever played, were PLO ones), the record for the largest ever single session swing and for who knows what else. The Durrrr challenge is played at the PLO tables: nowadays, pretty much everything that amounts to something unfolds at the PLO tables. Before the popularity explosion of 2003-2004, Omaha used to be more popular than Holdem, both in Europe and in the US. Moneymaker’s spectacular WSOP win triggered a process which led to Omaha being pushed into the back seat by Hold’em. As the game continuously evolves however, apparently it goes back to its roots.

Due to the nature of Omaha, the NL betting structure is quite unfit for it. If you’re keen on tossing your dough into the middle preflop, you’d better stick with NL Holdem. The fact that it’s only played in the FL and PL betting formats, doesn’t mean PLO won’t generate huge volumes of action. How exactly does Omaha stack up against Holdem though? As a Holdem player contemplating a move to PLO, what should you keep an eye on?

First of all, because Omaha is a game of “nuts”, a predominantly post “turn” game , while Texas Holdem is a “flop” one, more players will get to see the flop in Omaha than in Holdem. Pocket rockets lose a lot of value in PLO, while suited cards and connectors as well as one-gappers gain value.

With this many folks eager to see their 4 pocket cards connect with the board somehow, the preflop pot will be larger, which means that the betting can go much higher past the flop. This takes us to another point: because of the abundance of drawing hands and because each player has 4 pocket cards, you’ll need a much better hand to take to showdown to win. A 2 pair is a great hand in Holdem: not so much in PLO.

In Omaha, bluffing opportunities are reduced. The game of nuts doesn’t leave much room for deceit: if you have the goods, you have them, if you don’t, you don’t. What this means is that tight-passive players are no longer trounced. As a matter of fact, tightening up waiting for that good hand makes much more sense in Omaha than it does in Hold’em.

The texture of the board takes on an entirely different significance in Omaha. If there are 3 suited cards on the board, you can be pretty certain someone has a flush. A paired board almost certainly means a set or even a boat.
Position is important in Omaha too. While in Holdem, being the last to act gives players a chance to win more pots, in Omaha if offers them the opportunity to control the size of the pot better.

Bitching about your bad beats

Psychology has a great role in advanced poker strategy and these days I find myself more and more tied up in psychological intricacies for some reason. The mathematical part is ok too, and it too can be interesting, but past a certain point, you’ll find yourself more and more reliant on psychology, in addition to mathematics of course, and that’s a good thing I suppose.

Complaining about bad beats is one aspect of poker where psychology is quite obviously at its best (or worst, depending on how you look at it). First of all, why do we complain? Apparently it is in our nature as human beings to feel revolted when something unjust (or something that we perceive as such) happens to us. When we see those aces cracked by another player’s runner-runner straight, we feel slighted. It was not supposed to happen, yet it did – that means it must be unjust. It probably stems from our upbringing, but we have this way of categorizing things into right and wrong. Unfortunately, poker falls outside of these boundaries that we all have in our heads: there is no right and wrong in poker. There are mathematical probabilities which never lie. You may be a 90-10% favorite in a hand, but that doesn’t mean you won’t lose. Once out of 10 times you will lose and I bet you’ll feel short-changed by fate every time it happens. It’s just human nature. This is why most players are so prone to tilting in the wake of a bad beat. Some people can control this psychological process to a certain degree.
The top poker professionals you see battling at Full Tilt Poker’s nosebleed stakes tables are likely capable of taking quite a few bad beats before they tilt, but frankly, no one is a 100% immune to it. Just take a look at Phil Hellmuth. If anybody, he should know that bad beats belong in poker, yet he is capable of some pretty spectacular meltdowns every now and then. His latest one at the WPT’s Bay 101 Shooting Star event was really something to behold. He curled up in the fetal position and remained on his hands and knees for several minutes while the spectators wondered whether they should call an ambulance or not. The bad beat and the meltdown aspects of the game lead to complaining, whining and bitching, not to mention suspicion concerning the fairness of the software used by the poker room where the bad beats occur.

One needn’t look far for such monologues spawned by outrage at being slighted at the poker table. Online poker forums are crawling with them. The authors of these posts put their thoughts online in the hopes of wringing some sympathy out of their peers, for whatever reason. If one thinks about it, there’s not a whole lot of point in the whole thing, even if one manages the impossible and gets some of the guys on the forum to commiserate. How exactly will that help you? The truth is, such complaints are pretty much 100% certain not to get any kind a sympathy anywhere. As a matter of fact, you’re a lot more likely to get bashed and made fun of than anything else. The fact that poker forums are mostly frequented by conceited 12-year olds whose first reaction to everything is to call names and point fingers – put aside, there’s a serious psychological process at work here. It has been proven by psychologists that while humans beings are certainly capable to commiserate with stricken peers, with someone they cannot identify with or with someone they have a reason to dislike, that is certainly not the case.

As a matter of fact, people seem to have no problems further increasing the level of discomfort on a sufferer they do not like. The whole thing starts out with your complain: nobody gives a rat’s ass about your bad beats, and therefore you intrude on people by assaulting them with something they’re fed up with. The fact alone that you post or voice your complaints turns you into a bad guy. Then the dissing starts as people begin to pile on the pressure and to drop more abuse on your head. While in an online poker forum this has no consequences other than to make you feel ridiculous, if you voice your complaint at the poker table, you open yourself to more meaningful abuse. The fact that you paint yourself a victim will turn you into one in the eyes of your opponents, just not the way you’d like. They’ll begin taking shots at you in an attempt to cash in on your vulnerability and to further abuse you. Poker brings out the primordial beast in humans: if there’s a hurt individual among them, they’ll all turn on him to finish him off. As a result of that they’ll gang up on you, making it even harder for you to make any sort of headway.

In conclusion: whenever you feel the urge to complain coming on, stay away from that chat feature. Swear out loud if you feel it does you good, just don’t let the others smell your predicament. Tilting’s bad enough as it is. Advertising your tilt is the one thing you can do to make the situation even worse. You shouldn’t feel compelled to show any compassion at the poker table, but you shouldn’t expect any from your opponents either.

Online poker innovations part 2

This is part two of a two article series that I dedicated to the various innovations online poker has brought about over the years, constantly shaping and changing the game of poker. For some people, these innovations improved the game-experience, for others they’ve ruined it. One thing’s certain though: it was on account of these innovations that poker managed to reach the globally known status that it enjoys today.

The introduction of resizable tables (which have since become the norm) was one move that people generally agree was an overwhelmingly positive one. Multi tabling has reared its head quite a while ago, and resizable tables appeared as an answer to the multitude of problems early multi-tablers struggled with. Players can now display several tables on their computer screens and thanks to the resizable nature of these tables, they can arrange them in an optimal manner. The official multi-tabling world record holder is Betrand Grospellier. The ex-Starcraft player set his record in front of 4 computer screens, each of which had 10 tables displayed in certain moments. Before Grospellier’s deed, Hevad Chan had been the king of the multi-tablers. He once filmed himself playing at 26 SNG tables simultaneously, apparently to counter allegations that he was in fact using a poker bot.
The advantages offered by multi-tabling are obvious. With online poker becoming ever more competitive and with edges growing smaller all the time, productive players needed to find a way to increase their hourly rates. The only way to do that was to increase the number of hands they played per hour. Playing multiple tables was the obvious solution, though in the beginning, players could barely squeeze 2-4 tables onto their computer screens.

Guaranteed prize-pools also represent an innovation you won’t hear anyone complain about. Poker tournaments used to be fairly straightforward operations back in the day. They created a prize-pool out of the buy-ins players provided (took their rake off the top in the shape of tournament fees), and paid the winners out from that prize-pool. There are plenty of such MTTs running online to this day. The truly massive MTTs feature guaranteed prize-pools though. When a poker room guarantees a prize-pool, it makes 100% certain players are paid out of a set-size prize-pool even if it means it needs to round the sum up from its own pockets. Experience shows though that such a predicament is extremely rare for the poker room. The promise of a guaranteed prize-pool is generally enough to draw in more players than needed to cover the guarantee. Take a look at Full Tilt’s and PokerStars’ massive weekend GTDs. They always exceed their guarantees by a more than comfortable margin. PokerStars’ $1.5 GTD (the Sunday Million) is an excellent example in this sense. The tournament has recently broken all records concerning registrant numbers and prize-pools. A special anniversary edition of the poker tournament, featuring a $4 million guarantee eventually built a $7.2 million prize-pool, almost doubling the guarantee.

Poker tracking software: this is where things get a little messier. In the wake of the scandal raised by Isildur1’s 2009 felting by Brian Hastings, a move which many attributed to a combination of abusive poker tracking software use and obvious collusion, a lot of attention has been drawn to this aspect of the industry. Poker tracking software, like Holdem Manager, Poker Tracker and PokerAce HUD, are often credited by experts with the ruining of the game of poker. The advantages offered to players by these table-side assistants are obvious: they get to track their opponents’ playing style as a result of which they’ll be able to spot trends and to predict tendencies easier. The same statistics can be used to analyze one’s own play too and thus to improve by plugging up the leaks. The only question is: if everyone starts to use tracking software, won’t the already tiny edges completely disappear from the game, tuning it all into one giant crapshoot? I guess only time will tell.

Rakeback is another highly controversial online poker innovation. From the players’ perspective though, things are as clear as can be when it comes to rakeback: it’s great. It can turn a break-even or a marginally losing player into a winner at the end of the month. It will give players a more than welcome rebate on the poker rake they generate and contrary to common belief, even losing players contribute a lot of poke rake, depending on their style of play, which means they earn rakeback too.
The only ones who hate rakeback are some poker rooms, which feel slighted by the addition of this great player-recruiting/loyalty rewarding scheme. Rakeback does cause some unnecessary complications for large poker networks which host several poker sites, but for standalone operations (like Full Tilt Poker) there are no drawbacks to rakeback whatsoever. Rakeback has been invented as a marketing tool that affiliate sites cold use to recruit players in a more efficient manner. Nowadays, no truly skilled player plays without rakeback, although once a player signs up to a site without rakeback, he will most probably not be allowed to switch to rakeback on that site anymore.

Live tourney satellites are arguably the best and most significant innovations ever produced by online poker. Such satellites were directly responsible for the online poker boom of 2003-2004, when players – who would otherwise have never been able to rustle up the money needed for a WSOP Main Event buy-in – went on to win the Big Dance, setting the world on fire. Players everywhere saw that the everyday Joe finally had a shot at big-time money. Online Poker satellites are extremely popular these days too, and online poker sites send more and more players to various WSOP events each year. The concept on which satellites are based is simple: give a $100 seat to the winner of a 10-man, $10 buy-in satellite. All the costs are covered and small-bankroll average guys get the chance to play in the big one.

Online poker rooms pepper their direct access satellites with all sorts of perks these days. They offer their qualifiers extra rewards for making it to a certain point in the live event. Live event packages won through online satellites routinely cover travel and accommodation expenses too for the winners.

Online poker innovations part 1

Online poker’s impact on the game is undeniable. The fact that it made poker available for millions of players worldwide at the touch of a button was certainly a huge achievement, which obviously contributed to making poker what it is today: a globally known and enjoyed game, but it was by far not the only thing online poker has brought to the table. In this day and age, we’re used to taking pretty much everything for granted and we devour novelty with ease. That’s why it probably escapes us that many of very features we appreciate so much today did not even exist a few years ago. Here’s a countdown of some of the online poker innovations I deemed truly significant.

Rush Poker. A relatively recent phenomenon, Rush Poker is beyond doubt the biggest innovation brought to the very structure of the game in recent years. Rush Poker is a carefully thought-out setup, which offers advantages to both the player and the poker room, and therefore it stands a pretty good chance to become viable and mainstream. The player has all the downtimes (that make regular poker games boring for many) done away with. He will never have to wait for a hand to conclude and for a new pair of pocket cards to be dealt again, at least as long as he stays at the Rush Poker tables. The engine that powers Rush Poker whizzes players to another table as soon as they hit the fold button. Players don’t even have to wait for their turn to act: by using the quick-fold option, they can move on to another table, leaving their avatar behind to do the folding for them when the action comes around. The poker room (Full Tilt Poker) has obviously a lot to gain from the new game structure too. Because players will play far more hands per hour than at regular poker tables, they’ll generate much more rake too. In the beginning, only NL Texas Holdem could be played Rush Poker style. Omaha and FL Holdem have been added recently too. While its structure seems destined to success at first glance, at a closer look Rush Poker will reveal its short-falls too: because players will be going up against a different tableful of opponents in every hand, the skill element is pretty much excluded from the game. Players won’t be able to make reads on their opponents and they will be denied the use of the very skills that make the difference between good and weak players in regular games.

Mac Clients. For Windows users, this may seem like an unimportant innovation, but I guarantee you that Mac and Linux users won’t share that opinion. Most online poker rooms have made their software available in flash-based no download formats over the last few years, in order to reach out to potential players who do not use Microsoft’s popular operating system.

In 2003, only Pokerroom.com (has gone under/switched hands since), had a no-download client. Nowadays, every serious online poker operation has such an option available. Whether or not the actual impact of the move was a significant one as far as player volumes were concerned is debatable, but it certainly had a huge psychological impact, taking online poker to where it had never been before.

Online training sites are supposed to have revolutionized the way poker is played these days, although I have to admit I have a few problems with the concept. The theory goes that back in the days, poker players had “only” Doyle Brunson’s, Sklansky’s and Mike Caro’s books to turn to if they wanted to improve and to evolve to the stage of being able to make money at the online poker tables. Nowadays, these players can sign up to an online training site (for a fee of course) and be “trained” by some of the most successful players in the game, through videos and other such cutting edge means. Unlike books, these training sites are supposed to feature constantly updated content, meant to keep up with the ever changing game. While I can certainly see the potential benefits, I’m not entirely certain signing up to an online poker training site is indeed the optimal way to go about improving your game. Sure, the above named books may be outdated in certain ways, the core of the game will never change and these books offer everyone a thorough understanding of the game mechanics. Keeping up with more subtle trends is something a good poker player should be able to achieve without much effort once the solid foundations to build on are secured. I am yet to learn about a highly successful player who can credit online training sites for his success. On the other hand, I’ve heard/read about several players who joined training sites, and never really managed to get anything going. In my humble opinion, players who are meant to succeed will do so with or without enjoying the benefits offered by an online training site. Likewise, those meant to fail will fail anyway, regardless of what type of poker education they gain access to.

Heads-up play. This one here is a truly important innovation. Before the advent of online poker, heads-up play was something of a freak occurrence on the live poker circuit. With online poker game mechanics so wonderfully suited to accommodate this sort of action, a whole generation of highly skilled heads-up players has appeared. As a matter of fact, most of the nosebleed stakes online poker action that makes it to the columns of news-sites and poker magazines, occurs at heads-up tables. Just think about Tom Dwan, Patrik Antonius, Isaac Haxton, Phil Ivey and Isildur1 – it’s quite self–explanatory.

Live heads-up events have also gained in popularity lately. The National heads-up Poker Championship is considered a true test of skill among the best of the best. Even the WSOP features a $10,000 World Championship Heads-up NL Holdem event.

To be continued…

Value betting the river – a feat of bravery?

Value betting the river: an issue I’m particularly interested in lately as I feel I’m not on my A-game when it comes to it. I’m not a particularly sensational online poker player. I generally win though and close out my sessions with 1-2 buy-ins profit, but I play small stakes where there are plenty of fish and I don’t think I could hold my own on higher ones, nor am I willing to dedicate myself exclusively to poker. I’ve lately noticed that one of the most frequent and costly mistakes that I made, was linked to value betting the river. You’re probably familiar with the situation yourself: you hit a monster hand and you begin stuffing the pot. There’s one caller who plays right into your plan. He calls each and every one of your moves and you begin to wonder. You put him on a monster draw based on the board, then on the river, you begin to suspect he might’ve hit his draw. When he checks the river to you, instead of firing out that value bet, you check too, afraid to get more chips into the pot, and basically settling for what’s already in the middle. That pot’s big enough – you tell yourself and you show down the monster against the other guy’s top pair of measly two pair. I know that there’s NEVER enough money in the pot yet I do sometimes commit the mistake.

Here’s an actual example for such a situation. You pick up pocket jacks and hit Q,J,2,5,4 on the board. You do what’s right and keep building the pot: you’re the one controlling the betting, but there’s this one guy who keeps check-calling everything you throw at him. You then skip the value bet on the river and show down your trips for the win.
Apparently, I’m not the only one struggling with this problem though. Winning and losing players both seem to commit this mistake, and it ends up costing everyone money. While the issue seems to be simple enough, in practice it’s not that simple at all. There seems to be a complex psychological phenomenon behind it, called the “uncertainty effect”. Apparently, we humans have it encoded in our instincts to fear and thus to avoid uncertain situations as much as possible. What this means is that when you do get yourself to fire out that all-important value bet on the river, you are in fact acting against human nature, and as such you’re basically transcending your own condition. Wow, that sounds a little intimidating…Does it really take that sort of a commitment and focus to fire out that simple bet? Apparently, it does. Psychologists know about the uncertainty effect and its existence has been proven numerous times under various circumstances. All those experiments point to one conclusion: when presented with two choices, one of which involves a very limited degree of uncertainty, people will almost always opt for the other choice. So, next time you miss that apparently simple value bet on the river, tell yourself that your instincts are the ones driving you to this mistake. If you know what you’re up against, who knows, you may find it easier to tackle the issue.

You may also want to know that the mistake is a result of the emotional cost one has to pay to make that bet. That emotional cost may be higher than the extra revenue squeezed out through that value bet on the river. Risk aversion may be extremely useful in certain survival situations, and as such it is definitely a useful legacy, but it needs to be put aside at the poker table. At the table, mathematics should guide you and logic should take precedence over everything else.

The truly weird thing is though, that sometimes this same instinctual risk aversion should come in extremely handy at the poker table too. Some people are ready to give up pocket rockets in the early stages of a tournament for instance, when faced with multiple callers, just to preserve their stack which is their tournament lifeblood. Under those circumstances, risk aversion is correct. Even though you’re quite certain you’re the one holding the best hand at the table, being faced with so many drawing hands means the uncertainty of the call becomes bigger. The potential gains are massive too, but just staying alive at that stage is your utmost priority. What it comes to survival, you should listen to your instincts. When it comes to making money though, and maximizing your gains through a well placed river value-bet, you’re better off putting them aside.

Poker is indeed a truly marvelous game, one that involves so many different psychological, instinctual, and mathematical elements that it never ceases to amaze me. One thing is certain about it: you won’t ever stop learning new things for as long as you play, provided you keep your eyes and mind open.

Using poker stats tracking software at the online poker table

Using poker tracking software may seem cumbersome in the beginning, and you may feel uneasy setting it up, but trust me: there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. It’s not date mining, since all you’ll be using is data that’s available to you anyway. Because poker tracking software can collect this data and compile it into reports you’d never be able to come up with on your own, you’ll gain a nice little insight into your opponent’s play as well as your own. As a direct consequence, you’ll be able to fine-tune your approach, while getting in-depth reads on your opponents. Your profits will soar, and you’ll get an entirely different kick out of playing.

I know that analyzing and interpreting data spat out by your poker tracker may be daunting at first, but it’s not really rocket science and once you get the hang of it, you’ll be wondering how you ever managed to get by without such a digital assistant.
Your poker tracking software displays the statistics it compiles through a HUD (heads-up display) which will appear next to your opponent’s name and update displayed information in real time. It uses all sorts of abbreviations to express the stats it’s tracking. Here’s a brief rundown of these stats, complete with tips to interpreting them.

There are two sorts of stats your poker tracker generates: preflop and post-flop ones. Both kinds are important when it comes to gaining clues about your opponent’s style of play. Let’s begin with the preflop stats.
The VPIP% (Voluntarily Put Into Pot), provides a % estimation of the number of times your opponent voluntarily puts money into the pot. Money pushed into the pot on the blinds is obviously not voluntarily contributed money. The VPIP% is relatively easy to interpret: the higher it is, the looser your opponent is. The lower it is, the tighter he plays. A normal value for the average VPIP% would be between 19-24%. Anything off that spectrum should ring your alarm bell.
The PFR% (preflop Raise) is the preflop raise percentage. This stat expresses the number of times your opponent raises preflop. This really only makes sense when used in combination with the VPIP%. A normal value for the PFR% would be between 4-5% of the VPIP. The difference between the VPIP and the PFR gives you your opponent’s cold-calling range. If it’s too big, you’re obviously dealing with a fish.

The 3b% (Three bet) tells you how often your opponent 3-bets before the flop. 3% would be a normal value for a tight player who only three bets AA, KK, AK, and AQs.
The F3 (Fold to Three bet) is the frequency with which your opponent yields to pressure on a 3-bet before the flop. If your opponent has a high F3 percentage, that means he’s vulnerable to light three bets, which means you’ve found an obvious breach in his strategy.

While you can use all these stats to pinpoint weaknesses in your opponents’ play, you can also use them keep identify your own mistakes. That way, you’ll know where you need to tweak your style in order to become much more efficient.
All these stats have a meaning on their own, but on a more subtle level, they’re also interconnected. The relations between these stats are the ones that are going to give you the most valuable conclusions.

Let us now take a look at the post-flop stats.
The AG is your opponent’s aggression factor. The normal number for the aggression factor is 1-3. 4 would mean a very aggressive opponent, while 0.5 means a very passive approach. It’s quite obvious how you should use this stat: if your 0.5 AG guy makes a post-flop raise, you’d better believe he has the goods.
The WTSD (Went to Showdown) gives you an idea about how big a percentage of your opponent’s post-flop hands get to see a showdown. This stat can give you a whole host of reads on your opponent. With the normal value set between 20-32%, a low WTSD means your opponent is either folding a lot after the flop, or he’s so aggressive he makes his opponents fold all the time. The AG will tell you which of the two situations you’re dealing with.
The CB is your opponent’s Continuation Betting percentage. It tells you how many times he chooses to continuation bet a hand that he’d raised preflop. The normal value for most players is between 55-88%. Again, to get the most out of this stat, you need to use it in conjunction with another one: the PFR%. The lower one’s PFR%, the higher his CB should be. If it’s not, you’ve just found an exploitable weakness.
The 2B tells you how often your opponent chooses to fire out a second bet after a post-flop continuation bet. This stat has to be used in conjunction with the CB one obviously, to make any sort of sense.

The FC (Fold to Continuation bet) tells you how often a player lets others victimize him with their continuation bets. This stat gives you valuable clues on what sort of hands your opponent plays. If his FC is high, it means he likes to have the goods in the pocket before making a move. If it’s low, he’s the more adventurous type, who likes to take risks on marginal hands. Using the FC in conjunction with the VPIP% is a true reads-generator.
The F2 is the number of times a guy folds to a second barrel bet. You know all those fish who chase their hands way too far and who end up folding to pressure when they realize they’re not going to make a decent hand? The F2 is the best way to spot these guys.

In order for any of the above described stats to yield relevant results, you need to have as large a sample-size as possible. Taking a seat at the table and drawing conclusions on your opponents after the first couple of hands played, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. The longer you play and the more hands your tracker gets to analyze, the more accurate its statistics will be, and the more usable its stats will become. This is exactly the reason why you cannot grow dependant on your poker tracker. Use it as an aid, as an assistant, but don’t come to rely exclusively on the data it provides. You’ll still need your own skills and poker instincts.

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