Poker Articles

My 10 poker tips

In this article I want to share a few poker tips, on which I have lately built up a successful strategy at online poker tables.

1) How much you care your money – Everyone likes to win of course, but the important thing is that you don’t go mad if unluckily you lose. DON’T TILT!

2) How much you care your hands – All we hope to win with a good hand. But pay attention to the board, calculate odds and throw away those wild cowboys if necessary.

3) Spend time in training – You are an athlete and you must train. The more you train, the more the experience you get, the more the chance your play improves.

4) Read books – Well actually it’s part of training.

5) Keep track of your session results – It will help to control your profit/loss status and, at the same time, to evaluate if the poker strategy or specific technique you are adopting is better than another one.

6) Patience – Patience is perhaps the best skill, and for sure the most important, of a professional player. Not just patience to wait the right hand for winning the pot, but also patience to accept losses as a part of life, finding inside yourself the ability to use them at your advantage. Expect to experience several losses at poker tables and remember that, often, losses come before huge gains.

7) Don’t play too many hands and don’t exceed your prefixed budget – Choose a number of hands you are willing to play before you start your poker session and break as often as necessary to regain energy in your play. Many pro have their opinion on this. For example Annie Duke suggests to use the 30 bet Rule, that means never lose more than 30 big bets in a game. By limiting your losses to 30 big bets, you are effectively minimizing the time you spend playing poorly, maximizing the amount of time you spend playing your premium game.

8 ) When the ship starts to sink, don’t wait, jump! – It’s an axiom for many traders in finance. Make this sentence yours as well.

9) (NOT FOR ALL) Play sometimes what I call unrational poker or when playing 7-2 is the good thing to do – Sometimes it may be very fruitful, especially if your opponents are particularly emotional.

10) … and always it is true that if you can’t spot the easy target at your first half hour at the table, then you are the easy target.

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Poker Odds

In this article we are going to show how mathematics and numbers are closely linked to gambling and casino table games in general.
Many scientists and mathematicians have dedicated part of their studies to explain the inner mechanisms of such games and how mathematics is able to foresee and help to win a bet or a pot.

Already on 1663 Girolamo Cardano, a Renaissance learned of Pavia, Italy, keen on table games and gambling, published the treatise “De Ludo Aleae”, about dice game, which started the history of probabilities in gambling. After him, other eminent scientists, masters of probability theories like Pascal, Fermat, Huygens and Bernoulli, have been fascinated by the world of gambling.

Others came over years, who sharpened classic theories into modern theories (Montecarlo method) and axioms (Kolmogorov).

But what may probabilities theories teach you in practice?
Let’s start with a simple example.
Let’s say you are playing at roulette and the ball stops 20/30 consecutive times on the red box. Anyone would say: “Well, it’s time to bet on black!” Wrong! Probability tells you that any spin of the roulette is independent with respect of all the previous spins.

This and many other aspects have to be deeply understood by professional gamblers who play any day with probabilities trying to maximize their return, minimizing the risk.

For sure learning how to properly count your outs and non-outs, and figure out pot odds is a fundamental requirement of poker games, such as Texas Hold’em. Both if you are an experienced player and a novice “The Theory of Poker” by David Sklansky is something you should not miss. In this book Sklansky focuses on the math of poker, how to calculate odds, pot odds, reverse implied pot odds, etc. and psychology and how combine all these factors to make the correct decisions at the poker table.

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How to Win at Tournament Poker, Part I

How to Win at Tournament Poker, Part I
June 20th, 2005 – Classic Tip
People often ask very specific questions about how to be a winning tournament player: How many chips am I supposed to have after the first two levels? Should I play a lot of hands early while the blinds are small, then tighten up later as the blinds increase? I seem to always finish on the bubble. Should I tighten up more as I get close… (read more…)
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FTOPS IX

The best online poker series is back and bigger than ever. FTOPS IX kicks off on Wednesday, August 6th with more than $15 million in guaranteed prize money spread out over 25 pro-hosted events. In the meantime, go crazy with Sit & Go Madness and claim your share of more than $75K in cash and prizes just for playing your favorite SNGs.

In big tournaments like FTOPS, everyone’s got their eye on the final table, and making that happen requires solid strategy from start to finish. Before you sit down to your next tournament, here is Allen Cunningham’s tip on making the most of early tournament play.

Allen Cunningham
Early Tournament Strategies
Allen Cunningham – July 30th 2008
Many players’ first exposure to poker comes from watching WSOP and WPT tournaments on TV, and I think that’s great. It’s entertaining and you’ll see some interesting plays, but viewers have to understand that they shouldn’t model their games based on the action they see on TV… (read more)

FTOPS IX Sit & Go Madness
FTOPS IX
Sit & Go Madness
Online tournament poker doesn’t get any better than this. FTOPS IX is bringing you 25 pro-hosted events with a total guaranteed prize pool of more than $15 million, including:

  • The $2,500 Two-Day Event on Saturday, August 16th
  • The massive $2.5 Million Guarantee Main Event on Sunday, August 17th
  • Four other events with at least $1 Million in guaranteed prize money each

It all begins on Wednesday, August 6th, at 21:00 ET with Event #1, a $1 million guaranteed No-Limit Hold ’em tournament. You can buy in directly to any of our FTOPS events or satellite your way in for as little as $1 or just 50 Full Tilt Points.

See the full schedule here to find your favorite events, and check out the video highlights of select final tables from FTOPS VIII to learn how the action played out.

Don’t miss out on your chance to become the next FTOPS champion.

Sit & Go Madness returns this weekend. Play in your favorite Sit & Gos from 16:00 ET (21:00 GMT) on Friday, August 1st to 16:00 ET (21:00 GMT) on Sunday, August 3rd and you could take home your share of more than $75K in cash and prizes.

Look for the SNGs in green in the game lobby to join the action. The 48 hours of Sit & Go Madness is divided into 24, two-hour blocks (e.g., 16:00 ET to 18:00 ET, 18:00 ET to 20:00 ET, and so forth) throughout the weekend. There will be a Leaderboard for each of the four groups ($1 to $2 SNGs, $5 to $11 SNGs, $20 to $33 SNGs, and $50 to $110 SNGs) during every time period, with the top seven players in each group getting paid at the end of every two-hour block.

There’ll also be an Overall Leaderboard for the entire weekend, with the top two finishers from each group winning a seat in a $5K Sit & Go Freeroll. In addition, for every Sit & Go that you win during the weekend, you’ll get one ticket for the Madness Raffle. We’ll be giving away tournament entries to FTOPS IX and some great gear from the Full Tilt Store.

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Poker Tips

If you are looking for a game that offers the best possible odds and the most significant edge, you should get to know online Texas Holdem. At treasurepoker.com you get instant access to hundreds of free poker strategy articles for players of all skill levels.