Archive for April, 2014

General Tips on How to Excel at Poker

Thursday, April 24th, 2014

Become a Regular in Strategy Forums

If you want to excel at poker you must go through the strategy forums and evaluate how better players are thinking. It would be a good idea to jot down specific difficult situations you came up against while playing and post them in the appropriate forum for others to evaluate. The number one most common concern from players who do not usually post in the forums is that they don’t know who is correct and who is not. To solve this problem, you can look to see how many total posts a specific poster has, and use this as a vague indicator of their reputability – if they have a lot of posts, it is probably safe to assume that they have also read a lot of strategy themselves. Make sure to get the opinion of a few of these reputable posters on the subject that you are discussing. Remember, there is not always a clear correct answer for every situation in poker – but there are definitely wrong answers and wrong ways to play in a specific situation.

Join a Skype Group

If you search the forums you will find plenty of players willing to join Skype study groups. By creating or joining these groups, you will hear the thoughts or players who are better and worse than yourself – you will quickly find out who has the most knowledge and you should strive to pick that person’s brain. Continually ask questions – even if you think they will make you look stupid. Remember, even Phil Ivey had to ask the simple questions at the beginning of his poker career, no one is born with this knowledge.

Get a Coach

Getting a coach is a great way to excel in any sport or game – poker is no different. Just like other sports, private coaching can be costly, and in the poker world you will see rates that range from forty-dollars per hour, to one-thousand dollars per hour. Obviously the coaches that are charging astronomical rates are coaching higher stakes and need to make their hourly rate high enough to cover their expected value of playing for that hour online. Find a coach that is suitable for your stake, and make sure that he/she proves their adeptness by showing you their graphs, win rate, etc. Make sure you come prepared with questions to every coaching session in order to get the most out of your time. If you are tight on cash you may find that you only need a few coaching sessions to have an eye opening experience. You will be amazed at how small adjustments will positively impact your hourly rate online.

Avoid Enduring an Expensive Learning Curve

Try to avoid having to go through an expensive learning curve. There are plenty of people out there that had to lose a lot of money online in order to come to the realization that they need to learn more in order to beat the games. Don’t be the guy that blows copious amounts of money before he figures out that he needs to get better.

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Could Virtual Reality for Poker Be the Next Big Thing?

Monday, April 21st, 2014

Virtual reality gaming has been the dream for first person shooter (FPS) game and massively multiplayer online games (MMOG) for ages, but it hasn’t been thought of as an addition to poker until now. Talks of incorporating the Oculus Rift with online poker have recently surfaced and are getting players excited.

Introducing the Oculus Rift

oculus rift virtual reality

Image via Flickr by Sergey Galyonkin

If you haven’t seen the Oculus Rift before, it’s a sight to behold. The product is essentially a pair of “goggles” that work seamlessly with certain games to provide an incredible virtual reality experience.

Just recently, the company was acquired by Facebook for $2 Billion, a major investment into the future potential of online gaming. Your eyes see a 1080p resolution on a 7-inch OLED screen. It keeps track of your head movements and relays them to the game, introducing some amazing possibilities. For the most part this technology is still in the testing phase of its development, only being released to game developers to work with, but should be coming out for consumer use in late 2014 or 2015.

How Does it Work for Poker

As noted initially, poker and traditional gaming doesn’t really go together, but virtual reality might just make it feasible. Not only would it be fairly simple to build a realistic poker game (compared to other video games), it would be able to add some of the environment that online players often miss.

Some players are unable to play live due to disabilities or sickness, while others are simply too far away or have no way of getting to a nearby casino or game. A virtual reality headset would allow you to immediately be immersed in a live poker situation.

Another way to think of this type of gaming is as a hybrid between live and online poker. You can combine the best aspects of online poker, with the look and feel of live poker, essentially getting the best of both worlds.

A likely setup would be to combine a virtual reality headset like the Oculus Rift (or any of its competitors) with a gaming system with motion-sensing capability like the Xbox One’s Kinect. This would allow you to not only look around and sense the environment, but to interact with real chips and hand movements. Until the holodeck from Star Trek is invented, this will be the closest you will get to immersive poker in your own home.

While all this could still be a year or two off before it comes a reality, the fact that pieces are in motion means that this is a very real and exciting possibility for poker players around the world.

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Tips for Attending the Wsop/Las Vegas this Summer

Saturday, April 19th, 2014

As per my Weekly Shuffle article last Sunday, this article will hopefully provide some more helpful tips on the WSOP and Vegas living. The series is coming up and many aspiring players will be taking their shot on the felt in hopes of finally hitting that big score and attaining the financial freedom required to travel the circuit year round. If you are anything like most of the players living in Vegas for their first summer, or even just coming out for a week – you will definitely benefit from these tidbits of advice.

1) Make sure to pack shorts with deep pockets, or cargo shorts to hold your cash, tournament receipts, etc. After you have been deep in thought for a long period of time – or a gruelling grind on the felt – you are less likely to realize that something significant had fallen out of your pockets while at the table, and by the time you figure it out, it may be too late. Cargo shorts are the best option because they have multiple pockets and most of them have large pockets on the side that button up. The same goes for jeans and pants – make sure the pockets are deep so your belongings can’t fall out of them while you are sitting down.

2) Photo copy your passport, other personal forms of identification, credit cards, and anything else that may cause you to end up in a world of trouble. This may seem a little over the top, but you wouldn’t believe how many players lose their passports and wished they had made a photocopy.

3) Staying in a casino hotel for weeks at a time can become very expensive. If you are just staying for a week, there are some great deals on various travel websites that probably won’t cost you an arm and a leg for a two-way flight and one week’s hotel stay, but if you are staying for more than a week, you will be hard pressed to find an amazing deal. If you are staying for a month or more, look into renting a house with a bunch of friends – the housing economy isn’t doing so well in Las Vegas right now so it won’t be hard to find a good deal that you can split with your mates – get five guys together and you probably won’t have to pay much more than five-hundred dollars each for a decent house in a subdivision not more than twenty minutes from the strip. There is also the option of renting a condominium on the strip, which will still only run you about half the price than staying in hotels would.

4) If you are like me and live outside the U.S., you will probably find that it is super expensive to operate or pay for a plan to use your cellphone in Vegas all summer long, or even for a week. I would suggest making your way out to the nearest phone dealer and buying a pay-as-you-go phone. You can purchase the phone for as little as twenty dollars, and load however many minutes you need on it. I found that buying the phone and fifty-dollars in minutes was all I needed for a whole month – this is still much cheaper than what my service provider here in Canada would charge me if I were to work out a plan with them. So if you have a smart phone, you can still bring it to use for the free wifi that is provided by many of the casinos, but make sure to use your pay-as-you-go phone for all your calling, and disable everything else on your smartphone.

Be sure to check last week’s Weekly Shuffle article for more tips on attending the WSOP this summer, and good luck at the tables!

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6 Live Poker Tells That Will Give You an Edge

Wednesday, April 16th, 2014

If you are relatively new to live poker, you probably still know that tells are something you should be looking for. But instead of eating an Oreo in a certain way (like Teddy KGB from Rounders), you should really be looking for tells from body position and actions. Here are some of the most common tells you should keep your eyes peeled for:

1. Great Posture

The posture of most people sitting and playing at a table for hours will naturally decline. If you all of a sudden see someone sit up straight on the edge of their chair, it likely means they have a strong hand and are interested in the action.

2. Listen to the Voice

One of the easiest things to lose control of when you’re nervous is your voice. Think about when you have a big hand, you can typically talk in a calm, controlled manner. If someone is hesitant to speak, or speaks in an unusual tone, it’s likely because they don’t want to talk to give away information or are anxious because they are bluffing.

3. Unnatural Chatter

My favorite players to face off against in a live game are the ones who talk non-stop. Not only is it entertaining, it’s usually obvious when they have a big hand and their focus shifts from inane topics to the hand being played. A silent chatterbox is almost a sure sign of a great hand.

4. Feigning Weakness

poker players tells

Image via Flickr by Play Among Friends

This might shock you, but poker players are not actors…at least not very good ones usually. Most beginner players will make over the top gestures of weakness when they have strong hands. This typically includes sighing when betting, making whimpering sounds under their breath, or even frowning as they lament being “forced to bet”.

5. Watch how the Chips Flow

A lot of new players have severe betting tells. When they have a weak hand they will try to scare people away by throwing in their chips and trying to make their bet look stronger than it is. Conversely, players with strong hands will often slide their stack of chips in as silently as possible.

6. Glancing at Chips

Here is one that is very reliable because it’s an instinctive habit that’s tough to break. Watch a player as he first looks at his hole cards, if his eyes immediately dart to his stack, he probably wants to play the hand. This trick applies for all streets, pay attention to the eyes ones a card is flipped over.

Tells can be massively profitable once you get good at spotting them, but it’s a skill that you will have to cultivate over time. Learn to pay attention to a player’s normal behavior and notice what they have when they act differently. Finally, don’t reveal that you know someone’s tell or they could use it against you.

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WPT’s New Innovation: A Shot Clock for Live Poker

Friday, April 11th, 2014

The World Poker Tour (WPT) has long been the ambassador for televised poker. While poker may be enjoyable to play, most games wouldn’t be too interesting to watch. The WPT has been able to bring tournament Texas Hold’em to the masses in an exciting format. The latest proposed innovation is a 30 second shot clock, is this good for poker?

The idea is to limit everyone to 30 seconds per decision, after that their hand is declared dead and discarded into the muck. In the past players have been able to call for a clock on players who consistently take too long to make decisions, where the tournament manager would come and enforce a time limit, usually a minute. This shot clock would apply to everyone automatically, which would speed up the game substantially.

Adding Suspense to the Equation

poker shot clock

When you watch a player try and make a decision, you unconsciously put yourself in their position. This is why you feel nervous and maybe even break out into a light sweat when watching intense action.

A shot clock adds even more pressure to the situation. As if hundreds of thousands of dollars weren’t already enough to risk on a single decision, players would potentially have to make a decision within 30 seconds. From a fan’s perspective this would be great, adding even more excitement to broadcasted final tables.

Is this Fair to the Players?

Most decisions at the table are made within a few seconds, but when players consistently take a long time to actually make their play, it drags out the game considerably. Standard habits like playing with chips, adjusting their glasses or cards every single action to not give away any tells wastes everyone’s time.

There are however, certain situations where a player might need more than 30 seconds to make a tough decision. Not all the rules pertaining to a shot clock have been decided yet. One possible option is to allow for a set amount of time extensions for big decisions. This is similar to how the NFL allows coaches to challenge calls that they believe are wrong.

At this point it appears that the shot clock will be implemented in future WPT tournaments at some point, but will likely be introduced on a trial basis. If all goes well, some small tweaks may be made and then it will be used full time. It should result in faster play, more exciting play and could be a great move for the poker industry.

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Russia Taking Action Against Online Poker

Wednesday, April 2nd, 2014

online poker ban in russia

Image via Flickr by Chingster23

If the past has taught us anything, it’s that the legality of poker will fluctuate time and time again. The United States has been the big example in recent years, but as legislation improves in the U.S., online poker is taking a hit in russia.

On March 21, 2014, all of Russia’s Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have prevented customers from accessing over 600 gambling related websites. This includes all of the well known sites like Poker Stars, Party Poker, Titan Poker and Unibet.

The strange thing with this sudden takedown is that the order being cited as the reason for action was given almost a year ago, in June of 2013. Pokerstars.com was blocked last year in September as part of this order, but had since existed through Pokerstars.net/ru.

Another point of note is that while people in Russia cannot access these websites, client functionality is still working for the time being, which means you may not have noticed any changes at the table. This will limit the amount of new players being able to sign up and is overall a step in the wrong direction for poker players in Russia.

This blockage was largely unexpected, as it is not illegal in many jurisdictions in Russia to play online poker. What remains uncertain is whether this is part of a larger plan to eradicate online gambling in the country, or if this is simply an action taken based on existing policies.

Gaming Intelligence claims to have inside sources, which led them to write “while a limited number of gaming domains currently appear on the list, it is believed that this is the start of a much wider crackdown on online gambling,” earlier this week.

If you don’t live in Russia you may not think this is a big deal, but just as Black Friday took a toll on the poker industry as a whole, blocking online poker in Russia could have a significant effect. A smaller player base affects everyone, and it could lead to legality issues in countries that have close ties to Russia.

While there isn’t much you can do right now to support Russian players, let this serve as a reminder to get involved and support online poker in your Country whenever legality issues are discussed. Poker is a fair game of skill and should be treated as such.

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