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Many poker journalists dubbed 2010 as the “Year of the Brit” after British players had some amazing results at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, Nevada. British players hauled in a total of five WSOP bracelets; Praz Bansi won his second bracelet, whilst James Dempsey, Richard Ashby, Mike Ellis and Steve Jelinek all [...]

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For many people their route into the world of poker is being introduced to fixed limit Texas Hold’em, a game that is still popular in many parts of the world and in online poker circles, but also a game that has lost some ground on its No Limit cousin due to the latter being seen [...]

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A poker player’s worst enemy is very often himself, not the other people at the table. Aside from poor poker strategy, a player is his own worst enemy when he lets emotions guide his decisions. The poker player is then said to be ‘on tilt’.

What does being on tilt mean?
Tilt is a state of mind that is feared by both new and experienced players for very good reasons. It usually occurs when a player repeatedly gets his premium holdings beaten by some dude who plays almost anything and always seems to get lucky. In frustration over his ridiculously unfair bad luck the player starts to play badly. Tilting also occurs when a player is tired or bored because he never gets any playable hands, or when some real life problem makes him astray. There are many factors which can be a cause of tilt in online poker.

The effects of tilt can cause various problems on the affected player. He may fold good hands just because he knows that he will be outdrawn anyway. He may play overly aggressive and try the most unlikely bluffs to win a pot. He might play starting hands that he normally would have folded without a thought. Whatever it is that the tilt causes the player to do it will definitely cost money. Even just a few hours of serious tilting can eat up the earnings from many days at the tables – and minutes at the online poker tables!

I’m not stupid so I won’t throw my money away!
You may think: “I’m smart and have a good portion of self control, I won’t be so stupid that I let my emotions take control over my play.” Yes you will! Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow but sooner or later a series of losses will make you mad and you this will affect your decisions negatively. And this will cost you. And it will happen more than once. You have been warned!

That is some bad news, huh? Well, the good news is that since you know about this problem you can be prepared and therefore avoid any heavier losses caused by the dreaded tilt. You now know how important it is to control your temper at the table and by training this skill you’ll gradually be better at avoiding tilt, or at least identifying it earlier and quiting a session when you can see it’s negatively affecting your game.

Also, you now know that when you get that feeling of murderous rage after losing a pot that “should have been yours” the best thing to do, unless you can calm down quickly, is to stop playing immediately and come back some other time. Don’t play when you lose the most and enjoy it the least. Don’t play when you’re on tilt – and if you can do this then you’ll be streets ahead of the competition, because tilt is the biggest profit killer among online poker players.

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Once you have mastered the basics of Texas Hold’em poker games you will want to begin to work some more strategy into your game in order to improve performance.
There is no point in cashing in your Party Poker discount codes simply to go on playing the same entry level game as this will not bring [...]

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It’s been a while since my last post. I’ve been slacking! If I told you I’ve spent all this time reviewing my poker hands, I’d be lying. But I have recently spent some time looking over hands – and I found some massive leaks in my game. I’m aware that there are still a lot of poker players who don’t review their hands. So, my comeback post is going to focus on the importance of reviewing your poker hands.

In order to improve your poker game and gain an edge over your opponents it’s important to regularly analyse how you played hands and fix leaks or flawed logic. There are hand replaying tools out there if you prefer the more visual version, but even reading the raw hand history itself is also fine. The most obvious place to start is your losing hands. How many big blinds did you have left? What position did you get involved from? How did the betting go? (was it all-in pre-flop, or all-in on the flop with a hand, or chasing a draw, etc). Note down these details along with obviously the starting hand. As you go through more of your losing hands you will likely start to see trends that can indicate weaknesses. For example you might always find yourself pushing all-in from a short stack, or you might bust regularly with weak aces, getting dominating calls.

When you look at hands individually try not to be too results orientated. i.e. just because you lost the hand doesn’t necessarily mean you played it badly. Don’t try to fit a better line to all hands with the benefit of hindsight, some hands you can just write-off as unlucky. Take 5 minutes on the crucial hands to think through the betting line and if anything else could have been done better. And don’t just focus on hands you’ve lost, but pick out winning hands too. Yes, you might have won the hand, but was there a better way of playing it?

There are some great tools to help you analyze your poker hands, some are free, others are not. Some of the paid options include Poker Tracker and Hold’em Manager (I prefer Hold’em Manager – just a personal preference). These allow you to filter hand types or hand groups, so you can more easily see leaks. For example you may want to pull up the outcomes of all low pocket pairs. If these are showing as a loss then it could be that you’re over playing them.

If you find you’re regularly getting knocked out from a shortstack of around 12BBs or less, then you should go back over some of those whole tournaments and details. Are you passing up good chances to build a stack. Are you playing too cautiously and fearing your opponents have a decent hand too often? Sometimes it is better to take some more risks when your stack is more in the 20-30BB range rather than getting chipped down so often.

Another crucial anaylsis method is to use simulators. One of my favorite sites is Hold’em Resources, which is completely free. Use their tools to simulate the equity of your crucial hands. Pick out or note down hands where you had more than a 30% chip swing and got a showdown. Run the hands through a simulator at the points where the majority of chips went in. From this you will be able to simulate the EV of the hand, and compare the EV to the pot odds. So if it’s costing you 2000 chips to win a potential pot of 7000 then the pot odds are 2000/7000 or 26.6%. In ratios that is 2:7 or 1:3.5. Now if the simulated EV for your hand when those chips went in is greater than 26.6% then it was a good decision. There are some sites that take this process to a slighlty higher level such as Poker Stove (another free tool), where the simulation will be done against an opponent’s range of cards rather than their specific cards. Obviously whatever you use it is only really as good as the data you put in it, so if you are trying to work with ranges then take some time to think through what is most realistic.

It is also useful to discuss some hands with others and poker forums are ideal for this. You will usually get a very wide range of answers so the importance is to concentrate on the ones that make most sense to you. There are a lot of bad players out there and they will be offering opinions too. So use the forum replies to make you think more and consider different lines, or approaches, or elements, or factors. Never just blindly take the advice as gospel.

And remember, don’t rush to change a million things at once, but try to incorporate elements and see how they work out for you at your level.

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In all walks of life there are conspiracy theories used when people simply cannot understand a particular occurrence or event and the world or poker, particularly online poker is no different. Due to the fact there is a lot of money involved in the online poker industry and not everyone can win for obvious [...]

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Although many are unaware of it, block theory and the Gigabet Dilemma related to it should be familiar to anyone serious about poker SNG tournaments.
If you never heard about it before then now is the perfect time to understand what it is !

The name and the theory itself were coined by Gigabet, former TwoPlusTwo poster [...]

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One common trait amongst winning poker players, even the very elite, have is the fact they never stop learning or trying to improve as a player. The game of poker is one that is constantly evolving with new theories, concepts and moves coming out all the time and not trying to keep up with [...]

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For a lot of people the enduring image of John Malkovich, aka Teddy KGB -holding an Oreo to his ear - is responsible for them seeking out a poker game in the first place.
The movie Rounders, featuring poker enthusiasts Matt Damon and Edward Norton first released in 1998 is the people’s choice of most popular [...]

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