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/

Sign up bonuses are the key to survival

In my years as an online texas holdem poker player then I have been only too aware of how external financial incentives are vital for any online poker player. I have learned over the years that the key to making serious profits in online poker is to actually treat the entire thing like a business. This means that you are not essentially just concentrating on playing poker hands. You are concerned about reducing your costs of doing business but also you are also interested in getting as much external monetary assistance as you possibly can. This is done in two key areas and I will go into those shortly. I would also like to take this opportunity to inform regular readers that Pokerroom has opened its doors again for business.

Some years ago then this used to be my favourite poker room for cash poker for reasons that I will go into. However they have a sign up bonus of 100% up to $1000 and so this is a fantastic start up cushion for any new player looking to try and make poker a career. You will inevitably make mistakes as a novice poker player and this needs to be cushioned somewhat. So you are looking for the best sign up bonuses and rakeback which allow you to earn money without it having to come from the actual games themselves. So in this instance then the $1000 sign up bonus that you get on Pokerroom could just be the cushion that helps you make it as a winning poker player.

Let me put a scenario by you, imagine a poker player starts out playing micro-stakes levels and loses $500 as part of his education of learning. That $500 may be the catalyst that causes them to stop playing poker. However if you have taken advantage of a $1000 bonus then you are actually $500 ahead during that same period of learning! This will then really give you the confidence to move on and possibly play higher levels. I mentioned earlier about my reasons for playing on Pokerroom and they are as follows. Firstly the site has around 40,000 players at peak time and this is something that is key to being able to make money from the game.

Secondly I find the software to be pretty good and especially the lobby screen which is a vital source of information that needs to be tapped into for maximum effect. For example I need to see clearly how big my potential future opponent’s stacks are before I sit at the table. If they have middling size stacks or several of them do then I know that this game will be lucrative. This is because serious players in no limit holdem will tend to have either full stacks or minimum stacks. They either want to capitalise on their opponents deep stacked errors or they want to get all in as soon as possible. Both strategies are viable but good players do not play in between stacks.

Trading is the new poker in 2012

Regular readers of my blogs will know that I am just as much a fan of trading and sports betting as I am of poker. In fact it wasn’t poker at all that was my first venture into gambling but blackjack. But there are numerous connections with all of these fields if you look closely enough. Having too many bets is the key mistake that kills sports bettors and stops them from making profits. This is the same as someone who plays too many hands at poker and bets too big on too many hands in blackjack when the count is negative.

Also too much trading can lead to you simply not being able to overcome the transaction costs even if you make a good trade. The term selective aggression is often used in poker but the term is equally factual to nearly any risk based market. For me then financial trading simply suits my personality more than what poker does. I tried for years to find the best form of poker to fit my personality and that eventually turned out to be NLHE.

However this does not alter the fact that the variance is very high when you risk money in this way irrespective of how good you are. Losing 25%-50% of your bankroll and it being normal has never really sat well with me over the years. If I made a $1000 trade then I may lose no more than 5-10% of that trade if it moves against me and so my maximum loss may be $100. If that same $1000 was in a NLHE cash game then the entire grand could be gone on one hand and it will do that at some stage.

Not only this but my next buy-in and the next and the next can all go the same way. This can never happen in trading and your risk and variance is far lower if you find a very good trading system. So 2012 will see me playing a lot less poker and I am not really sad about that either. But I will still be playing poker at www.pokerstars.co.uk  and so keeping a look out for my trading and poker results being placed here on a regular basis.

Mass tabling tips in no limit Texas Hold'em

It is often the case when looked at in terms of game theory that whenever you complicate a process that you then require a simpler strategy to execute that process. Multi and mass tabling online poker is one such situation where the process of playing poker can be made all the more complex. Heaven only knows that many poker players struggle as it is playing one table and over complicate that and so imagine what would happen if they tried to play 16 tables at the same time? 
 

One of the key areas that millions of players get wrong at sites like www.pokerstars.co.uk  when they try to add more poker tables is that they think that playing sixteen tables for example just means that you are playing poker sixteen times faster and seeing sixteen times the number of hands. This is true of course but once you have made these connections then you have largely finished. The underlying theory behind mass multi-tabling is that you are sacrificing accuracy for volume and hopefully volume will overcome the accuracy.  However you still have to reach a certain standard when you play more tables but it is a standard that many players fall short of.

When you complicate a process then you need to simplify many of the aspects of it to make the entire thing workable. So playing sixteen tables means that your thinking time is a lot less. This is can be fatal if you are for example involved in too many post flop situations in poker games that require too much thought. So you need to simplify the process and this means play more of a pre-flop game. This also means that you also need to almost make your game “automated”…..if that is the right term for it.

When I play more than ten tables then I am always looking to reduce the number of flops that I play. So this means that I am often three betting or folding and only calling or limping in if my hand is easily playable post flop like with small to medium pocket pairs for example. I know that whenever I call a raise and a call with a hand like 4c-4d then I am essentially playing fit or fold poker and that suits me fine because it is an easy way to play. I may not make as many ptbb/100 playing this way but I will make more $/hour by being able to play more tables.

Building a big hand in PLO full ring

Someone asked me the other day if PLO poker games were a tougher game to play then NLHE.  I responded by saying that this all depended on whether or not you wanted to play full ring instead of six max. In full ring then a lot of the game comes down to hand construction. What do I mean by that? Well firstly a full ring PLO game is more orientated towards the nuts than any other form of poker that I know. So you absolutely need to adjust in this way otherwise you are going to be toast.

In no other form of poker is it correct to fold the current nuts on the flop but it can be in PLO. If you had say J-10-5-5 and the board came 9-8-7 with two suits and you didn’t have the flush draw then you are basically nearly always drawing with other players who have basically the same nut straight but who are free-rolling to a flush. Also you may be against someone holding a set as well and so any paired outs will decimate your straight.

In games like PLO/8 at www.pokerstars.co.uk  for example then you are often warned about the dangers of being quartered and this is often seen when you have hands with an A-2. A Hand like 8-8-A-2 with no flush draw is not shaping up too well on a K-7-3 board. You have the nut low draw but if someone else has the nut low then you have no fall back for high with nothing but a pair of eights and an ace overcard.

So in a multi-way pot then you are often drawing with one player who has another A-2 and losing to another player who has a better high than you at this time. But a hand like 8-8-A-2 is barely playable in PLO/8 because its high potential is minimal. I like hands likes A-2-Q-J where the ace is suited meaning that I have a nut low draw, wheel draw to the high, flush draw to the high and A-Q-J straight drawing potential to the high. This means that I can scope the pot or win three quarters of it.

In full ring PLO then you are essentially looking for the same or similar hand construction in principle where you are looking to scoop entire pots. This is why looking at how big of a hand you can make is critical in full ring because you need to be on the right side of a big pot.