The World of Professional Poker Part 2

The 2000 WSOP winner Chris “Jesus” Ferguson renowned as one of the best players in the world once went 18 months without seriously cashing. If players as good as that can experience runs like that then what price the lesser players. It is why behind the scenes, players are constantly swapping pieces of each other in tournaments and doing deals that the public never get to see. Then we have the mystery financial backers that are behind a lot of professional players, these are the guys that make the money without even playing poker as long as they tag on to a good enough player.

In short, the named players do not need money because they know that they can get it from somewhere or someone. If a player had to finance themselves these days to play on the circuit, there would be hardly any big name players. The top players know how demanding tournament poker can be and is why they frown on the publicity thrown on certain players all because they have won a tournament or two. They know that the reverse can easily happen and especially in some of these tournaments with speeded up structures where literally anyone can win if they are aggressive enough and have enough gamble to try and amass a big stack.

But the way that poker is promoted and marketed, it advertises BIG tournaments with BIG prize money to lure players into the game in the same way that the National Lottery attracts people to buy lottery tickets by making the jackpot well into seven figures. They know that if they spread the prize money more evenly that many people would lose interest once they knew that even if they did win that the amount would not be a life changing sum of money. But players perceive that they are in with a shot of winning these tournaments but for the vast majority of them, this is an illusion.

You will no doubt have heard of the term “dead money”. It is a term used by the pro’s to indicate the players in the tournaments that have no chance…it is just a polite way of saying it. But if you asked one hundred players if they viewed themselves as the “dead money”, how many would say yes? But when one of them gets lucky by winning one of them by overcoming astronomical odds then they are touted as the next poker superstar. Look out for part 3 of this series coming soon.

Play poker with The Dean at www.pokerstars.co.uk/poker/getting-started/free-poker/

The World of Professional Poker part 1

I want to lift the lid on just what professional poker actually is in 2012 and to wipe away the crap and the smokescreen that is created. The reason that I have included this topic in my blog is very simple. During your poker life, you will be constantly bombarded by pictures and stories about all things poker on TV, websites and magazines and such. Some of it is good stuff and some of it is not so good.

Something can be bad in many different ways, it can be bad if it is misleading and someone is trying to learn from that piece of material. In fact MIS-LEADING is probably a better phrase for the image of the poker world seen through the eyes of the average person. Let me tell you a few home truths about tournament poker. There are not many players making it pay operating solely on their own and this is not my opinion but common knowledge within the industry.

What the successful professionals are doing that you hear about is cushioning their participation by other means. Many of them have big sponsorship deals from magazines and poker sites that actually pay for or heavily subsidise their tournament buy ins. Any player that plays on the big circuit needs at least $650,000 in buy ins alone every year, add to this the air fares and hotel expenses and everything else that goes with it and it is approaching a million dollars.

A player has to win close to a million dollars a year just to BREAK EVEN. If they have a bad year then they could very rapidly get into serious financial difficulty of which many actually have. A couple of years ago, a big name World Series of Poker bracelet winner had to pawn their bracelet in a Las Vegas pawn shop because they were skint. The entire thing was kept under wraps and to avoid any embarrassment for the player, I will not name him as I know people who are good friends with him. But these stories are common in the poker world, the variance in these big tournament fields these days is frightening. I will going deeper into this topic in part 2 and so look out for that.

Come and play poker with Carl at www.pokerstars.co.ukhttp://www.pokerstars.co.uk/poker/how-to-play/strategy/

I can still play this game you know

It has been a while since I last posted but I have been busy of late playing more poker than I have in ages. In fact I have had a change of strategy since Christmas and I have been playing more deep stack games.

That has seen my earn rate rocket because of the fact that I have not been handicapped by the minimum stack regulars. In actual fact I have doubled my earn rate from around $45 per hour to around $80 per hour multi-tabling NL100 full ring. I have had a fantastic three month period and made around £10,000 in that time and so I am pretty pleased with how things have been going.

It is pretty difficult to put any tracker stats on my earn rate because I largely haven’t been using one as I have built up the number of tables to 12 and that has been going very well. Yesterday I won a massive 300bb pot with J-J. I open raised from early position and a A-Qs called as did pocket tens on the button. The flop came K-J-10 which was pretty sick as I knew that short of someone having A-Q that I had the lead. I bet out and the next player raised and the button shoved all in.

I called only to hope that the board paired but obviously not the ten as that gave the guy with tens quads. The turn card was another king and so I have jacks over kings and the straight is dead. River card bricks out and I win a huge pot and that has been a while since that happened. In fact I got AA vs KK twice during the same session and also managed not to lose my buy in with KK vs AA as well. The total session win was around five buy-ins which is huge considering how tightly I play! Now that my earn rate is higher then I should hopefully be playing more.

Come and join me at www.pokerstars.co.uk/poker/getting-started/free-poker/