A good way of describing the middle stages of a Speed Poker tournament is to draw your boundaries from the introduction of the antes to the bubble. It’s a crucial time of an event and one where you are going to need to understand a variety of different strategies such as deep stacked and shove and fold poker, because you will be facing stack sizes of so many different shapes and forms.
The first difference you will notice when the antes kick in is the experienced players widen their pre flop opening ranges and make their bet sizing smaller. The current modus operandi is to min-raise when the antes kick-in. The reasoning is simply because there is so much more money in the pot to be won when the forced antes join the small and big blind. So when you reach this stage of the tournament you too should also be opening wider if your stack size allow you the freedom.
Given the fact that you know a lot of players are opening a lot wider means you can now three-bet wider. Just make sure that you focus your attention on the more aggressive players and it is particularly useful if your three-bet is aimed at a player whose only options are to four-bet jam or fold as this remove their ability to four-bet light as often.
If you are on the receiving end of heavy three-betting then you need to do something about it. Either stop opening so wide so the next time you are three-bet you have a strong hand to counter, or fire in some loose four-bets of your own. Once again make sure you are deep-stacked before putting a large percentage of your stack at risk.
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‘Keeping Up With the Joneses’ is a phenomenon that can cost you dearly in poker. It’s a term used to describe the transition that a poker player goes through when he changes his tactics and follows those of the rest of the players at the table. The most common form of this phenomenon is when a tight player joins a table full of loose players and starts to follow the crowd. Betfair Poker News has some handy examples of this happening.
A tight-aggressive cash game player sits down to play $1/2 No-Limit Hold’em (full ring) in a live casino. The player has decided that the best way to win money is to sit tight and play a tight range consisting of premium hands, with a little more looseness around the button.
There is a limp and a raise to $4 before you look down to see [Ad] [Kd] and make it $20 to play and only the limper calls. The flop is [Tc] [6d] [2c] and your opponent check-calls a $20 c-bet. The turn is the [Kc], and the same action ensues this time for $45. The river is the [6c] and your opponent leads for $70 and you make the call with top pair and your opponent turns over [Th] [6s] for the full house.
The sight of the [Th] [6s], is like showing a bull a red pair of underpants.
“He called my $20 three-bet with ten six off suit?”
Before you know it your game has lapsed. You are listening to their calls to straddle and are doing so. You start to open every single hand and flat three-bets with abandon because you are desperate for the one upmanship between you and the ‘ten six’ guy. Before you know it you have lost your stack through ‘death my a thousand cuts’ as you decided to keep up with the Joneses and didn’t hit a single hand.
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Poker gets the chemicals fizzing in the bloodstream. Actually, that’s not true. It’s money that gets the chemicals fizzing in the bloodstream, and poker is the vehicle that drives the money to the party. Without money there is no fizz. The game goes flat and nobody likes a flat game of poker.
There are numerous types of money, but one type you do not want to see sat in front of you during a game is scared money. Whilst you definitely don’t want to see it occupying your stack, you do want to see it in others.
Scared money is simply money that people cannot afford to lose. There could be a wide variety of reasons that the player is scared, but they invariably revolve around poor bankroll management.
Let’s imagine you are married with five children. You have just received your pay packet and have stopped off in the club on the way home for a well-deserved drink. There is a poker game going on and you sit down in it. That weekly pay packet is only going to pay off your debts and feed your family for the week. In the first hour alone you have lost two-thirds of it. That final third is scared money. You simply cannot lose it and that means your decisions will be made based on the cash and not the correct poker odds.
When an opponent is playing with scared money they are exploitable. Good players can put pressure on with excessive bluffing, because the player with the scared money cannot call without the nuts. If you notice someone playing with scared money then you should also take the same line.
Always play within your bankroll. Do not bring scared money to the party.
Find out more by playing the new iPoker Betfair game. Or, if you want to play something slightly, different, why not try backgammon?
The Royal Flush is the piece de resistance for every gambler who loves their card games.
But just how likely are you to see one during your time at the tables? Get ready for some numbers of Rain Man proportions, as we delve into the world of the rare and sleeping giant – the Royal Flush.
If you are playing table games like Caribbean Stud Poker, Let it Ride, or any form of Intercasino poker card games, you are going to see a Royal Flush, in your first five hands, an average of once per 649,740 hands.
In fact, you are more likely to spot a jaguar playing a banjo in the Amazon Rainforest.
So Royal Flushes are rare. But if you want to improve your chances of seeing one, then you are better off playing games like video poker.
The reason is speed of hands. If you are playing a table game such as Let it Ride, over a sample size of 50-hands per hour, you are likely to see a Royal Flush an average of once per 12,995 hours.
When you play video poker, you can cram in hundreds of hands per hour. The Royal Flush will come eventually, and so it comes down to playing a large number of hands.
If you are desperate to see that Royal line-up, then switch to video poker and get through as many hands as you can. It is there; you will see.
This week saw quite a few changes in the higher echelons of the Global Poker Index (GPI).
Jason Mercier is back in pole position, after lending top spot to the enigmatic Frenchman, Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier, just for a few weeks.
“Mad” Marvin Rettenmaier has moved up one place from fourth to third. The German live grinder just seems to be getting better year in and year out.
Here are Rettenmaier’s earnings from the past 4-years: 2009 – $32,150, 2010 – $510,362, 2011 – $827,953 and 2012 – $1,608,780.
Rettenmaier added 5th place World Series of Poker (WSOP) cash for $68,151 to his recent World Poker Tour (WPT) win at the Bellagio for $1,196,858.
Vanessa Selbst continues to dominate the females playing poker and, if she carries on her rich vein of form, she will surely become the top professional outright.
Selbst leaps five places from tenth to fifth; she has already made two final tables (including her second bracelet) and the WSOP 2012.
Michael Mizrachi moved twenty-six places to take him into the tenth spot vacated by Selbst.
The grinder won his second $50,000 Poker Players Championship at the WSOP for $1,451,527 (his fifth 7-figure score to date).
The GPI also welcomes sixteen new players this week, led by the gorgeous Maria Ho (thanks in part to three WSOP cashes).
Viktor “Isildur1” Blom and Barny Boatman also make it back into the top 300, but the biggest rise of the week belongs to the Portuguese businessman Fernando Brito.
The former European Poker Tour (EPT) Player of the Year moved one hundred and twelve places, in part due to his 3rd place finish in Event #46: $2,500 No-Limit Hold’em at the WSOP.
As a connoisseur of poker literature you have probably read a lot of interviews with poker players. A question that is often asked is, “who is your most difficult opponent?” Commons answers include, I don’t know, Phil Ivey, Isildur1 or Doyle Brunson to name a few. Have you noticed that none of the interviews ever end up with the answer: MYSELF.
Poker so often mirrors life, and in both, your battles with yourself are always the most difficult ones to win. If you create a pie chart to monitor the number of ways that you lose money seated at the poker table or on online poker sites, the largest slice will be taken up by personal mistakes.
These mistakes are made because of your inability to control your own actions and emotions. So once you have taken advantage of poker promotions online you may be need to take a step back before diving right in with no real strategy. In fact a lot of the time you will know you are making the mistake before you even make a conscious decision to make it – a good example being calling a bet on a flush draw with the incorrect odds. Other beefy slices of that pie chart include tilt induced rants, misreading players actions, finding yourself in dominated situations, lapses in concentration and being impatient.
Your opponents could never hurt you as much as you can hurt yourself. They are simply shapes that exist around the table while you play the game you love. Shapes that can never reach the lofty heights of pain that you manage to inflict upon yourself.
One of the biggest mistakes amongst novice player in poker is they look to bluff too often.
There is no denying that bluffing can be a useful strategy in your armoury, when used at the right moment, however, once you overuse the tactic, it becomes useless, and if anything, ends up being costly.
What makes bluffing work so well in the game is the element of surprise. For example, a tight player who only usually places bets when they are strong would catch their opponents out if they were to play an unpaired two low cards with a raise. The rest of the table would not expect the bluff and are likely to then fold, despite having the best hand at the time. People using online poker sites should remember this.
At the other end of the spectrum, if an aggressive player were to bluff regularly, others would be more likely to make the call. They would have noted how many hands the player had gone into the pot with so far and any failed bluff attempts in the past. You should not fear calling such aggressive players if you have a solid made hand, the size of the bet could be an attempt to put pressure on you and folding would be a major weakness on your part. Anyone who gets involved with poker freerolls should bear this in mind.
If you are new to poker, it may be worth reserving any bluff attempts until you get some experience at the game. Stick to playing good solid poker that considers the pots odds and percentages of winning a hand. Once you get more confident, then you can slip the odd bluff into your game to hopefully deceive your opponents.
Big pots are what make and break our game and there is only one way to play them and that is to bet big to win big. Strategies and tactics all go out the window as it comes down to a test of resolve, and who is brave enough to bet their hand to the end.
It goes without saying that the more big pots you win, the better placed you will be to win a tournament, or show a profit on the day in cash-game poker. Watch how big pots are played in GSOP live Greece to see how it should be done.
If first to act on these occasions, you should be dictating the betting, this will leave your opponent on the back foot. By betting big, you are signalling full confidence in your hand. The aim is get them out of there and the only way of doing this is if they think they are second best. By simply checking at this stage you are telling your opponent that you are undecided about who is in front at this part of the game.
Once pots get to a substantial amount you have to think about going all the way, even if it does mean pushing in with the remainder of your chips. Those playing in GSOP VII should remember this.
There is simply no value in trying to slow play a big pot. Both players are probably already committed at this stage so any type of deception will not work, your opponent will know you have something decent otherwise you would still not be around.
Betting during each street is important to maintain a slight edge mentally and to leave your opponent with the big decision on whether to call each bet.
Jackpot 6000 is a three-reel, five-pay line slot machine created by the software development team at Net Entertainment. The game’s theme is all about its jackpot hence the title. Those familiar with the Betfair Casino Download will enjoy this.
The game is available to be played online in a wide range of online casinos and it can be played for free or for real money. The free version of the game is a great idea because it enables the player to experience the game without having to risk any of their bankroll. When you are ready to start splashing the cash then there are a number of options available to you with cash denominations ranging between $0.10 and $1 per spin and up to a maximum of two coins.
The game screen has been taken straight out of the brick and mortar casino and looks just like a classic one-armed bandit. The top half of the screen contains the pay table and the bottom half contains your reels and buttons. It’s a look that helps it rival the best online casino websites.
Jackpot 6000 has two central features, its heads or tails gamble feature and the super-meter mystery jackpot feature. Here is the heads and tails feature explained. Each time you create a winning combination during the game, the heads or tail gamble feature will be activated. You have a choice to ignore the feature, gamble for some of your winnings or gamble for the lot. If you choose to gamble for some of your winnings then click on the “transfer” button to bank some of your winnings before using the remaining amount to gamble. If you want to gamble the lot then just press either the heads or tails button. This gives you a 50/50 chance to double your money.
Panther Moon is a five-reel, 15-pay line slot machine brought into the cyber world by the software developers at Playtech and onto sites such as jackpot party slots online.
The game screen is set against a moonlit backdrop with a very delightful but confusing purple colour. The symbols on the reels are a panther, owl, dog, flowers and the playing cards nine through to ace. The game has a scatter symbol and wild symbol. The scatter symbol is the moon scene symbol and the wild symbol is the panther symbol.
The jackpot in the game is 10,000 coins but you have to be playing maximum coins in order to win it. Five jackpot symbols on any active pay line will do the job and you can win smaller jackpots if you are playing for fewer coins per line.
If you can hit three or more scatter symbols anywhere on the game screen you will receive 15 free spins on a 3x multiplier. The game lacks a bonus feature, which a shame, but it does have a handy gamble feature. The gamble feature allows you to bet half or all of your winnings on a high-low playing card basis.
Without doubt Panther Moon is not a online slots game full of depth but it does have a certain charismatic quality about it. The purple screen and nice calligraphy on the wheels make it aesthetically pleasing to the eye and the audio samples don’t drive you straight to the mad house so it is definitely worth a punt.
$500 9.2Review
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