Masters’ Club – Almost all top professional poker players have endorsement and contractual deals with some online Poker website where they play regularly. These professionals are forthcoming with tips and help to make amateurs, novices and even intermediate players improve their game. And, the advice is all free. If you were to go for professional training you would have to pay a hefty fee but just switch on the Internet, join a Poker room and chat with the celebrities. You can play some games too and get real advice that will surely take your game at least a notch up. The professionals will give you an insight into their mind and tell you how they are thinking. This is one of the best ways to improve at Poker – rather at any sport.

Your peers – Most often if you’re an amateur, someone three levels above you will not be able to help because their advice will not be properly understood. If you join and online Poker room or chat room you can hook up with your peers and others at the same level as you. This way you are more likely to understand the basic problems with your game and move up as a group of friends to the next level of Poker play.

Latest info – The latest information about books on Poker, discussions and analysis are all available in Poker forums and rooms. Even if you’ve missed out a particular tournament analysis or don’t want to buy a particular book, someone or the other can give you a great and helpful summary in a Poker room or forum. Many top professionals have their own Poker blogs where they give you some of the rarest of rare insider tips.

Keep the spark alive – online poker rooms and discussion boards will give you the latest dope on what your favorite Poker hero is up to, lead you to the best Poker gear sites, help locate new tips, ideas and concepts of Poker play. This will keep your interest alive and mind alert. The more you enjoy Poker, the more you are likely to learn and improve. Don’t let Poker playing become a dull automatic activity that you use as a getaway nook from other things in life.

Personal style – If you want to graduate to playing Poker professionally, you will need to pick one single variant to master at first. Poker rooms are best to help you try out Texas Hold Em or Omaha etc before you finally decide what you want to peg all your energy and spirit into. Online Poker rules will help you narrow down to a particular Poker style too.

Options for practice – In online Poker you can truly slug it out with almost 100 hands in an hour. If intent on really learning this is kind of intensive training. If you were to play in a brick and mortar Poker room at a casino you would not be able to notch up more than 15 hands in an hour because of practical reasons. In online Poker, with some of the most modern programs available to simulate Poker room environment and deals, you’ve got a huge advantage if you’re looking at some intensive practice sessions.

No time constraint – The best part of playing online Poker is that you don’t need to miss out on practice sessions. You can play from any time zone and from anywhere in the world. You could be awake at 3 am and catching a guy half way across the world sitting down to play at 6 pm. This also gives you a truly international experience with a wide variety of Poker players to cope with as compared to if you stuck to playing at your local casino. For those who want to eventually graduate to playing professionally, this kind of a variety-experience is worth all the time spent playing online Poker. You don’t even have to worry about whether a table is free or not!

Lower stakes – One of the biggest advantages of practicing poker online is the really low limit games you can try. Poker rooms allow a $0.01/$2 games too. In brick and mortar casinos you will have to shell out much more for a few sessions of practice. You can even play for free at the simulated Poker games online.

Vibes – Even though you won’t get enough practice in studying body language in an online casino but an online Poker room will make you feel much more comfortable if you are a beginner. You won’t have to worry about players who already have a popularity in the brick and mortar casinos and tend to intimidate new-comers. Once you’ve become somewhat good at Poker online your confidence will be greater and you can tackle playing live games at a brick and mortar casino room.

Comfort level – Of course playing via the Internet gives you the most comfort. You can be dressed as you like and follow up daily chores intermittently as well. This makes for great practice sessions and you save time too.

Celeb tips – Often you will find professional celebrity poker players coming to Poker rooms to advice and help amateurs and beginners. This is a great way to improve. You are unlikely to meet professionals in a casino giving out advice as openly as in online Poker rooms.

However, in the long run, use online Poker play only as a practice and run-up to casino play because eventually you will have to learn to handle pressure in real time and read your opponents’ body language. The dynamics of casino play in live games is entirely different and the best way to learn it is to face it.

So I will play at the $10-$20 level mainly when I play limit but I also sometimes multi-table at levels like $2-$4, $3-$6 and $5-$10 if the rake is reasonable and I can obtain decent rakeback. I have never had an ego to massage by insisting that I always play at a certain level. In my mind the best poker games are the ones where I have to work the least in order to obtain an hourly rate that I deem to be worth my time. I remember hearing an old saying from the world of Darts some years ago that went “trebles for show and doubles for dough”. Basically this meant that scoring high on the trebles was fine but worth little if you could not finish.

This is similar to poker in many ways. People see and hear about top players playing for high stakes but let me tell you one thing. Many of those top players will not be winning players and the only reason that they are playing at that level is either because they have the money to do so or because it feeds their ego. The high stakes poker games may be very “showy” but for the vast number of players this isn’t really where the money is. There are many players earning $50,000 to $100,000 a year in online cash games. These amounts are being earned in middle stakes games or through lower limits and multi-tabling. This is not as news worthy and flashy as someone who is playing $300-$600 no limit at the Bellagio.

But getting back to the point, at the higher levels in limit hold’em then good players will still find them tough to beat and you can spend more time finding an acceptable game than you can playing. I don’t know about you but if I had to choose between playing forty hours a week at $10-$20 and earning 3 big bets per hour, and sitting and watching and waiting for twenty hours and then only managing twenty hours of playing time in what will be a far tougher game while only earning one big bet per hour at say $20-$40 then I know which game I would rather choose.

One scenario is earning me $2400 a week while the bigger game is earning me a mere $800. If your livelihood depends on playing online poker then it is better to be playing poker and earning say $20 an hour than not playing at all in my opinion. I have played full time in the past although at the time of writing this article, I am no longer a full time player. But there have been times where I have done whatever it takes to earn my money by the end of the month.

I have put in extra hours and played at levels that were well below what I normally played at in order to pay the bills at the end of the month. But I want this series to teach you one thing and that is to be flexible in not just how you are learning poker but also playing poker and this applies to cash games as well as online poker tournaments. Read this series and re-read it but under no circumstances should you blindly copy what I have said. Selecting the proper limit in which to play is not a straight forward process and depends on many factors.

What levels of money you are prepared to play for and lose for one, your bankroll size, your level of skill compared to that of your opponents, the rake, rakeback…..I could go on and on. But I feel that it is worth repeating one more time, finding the proper limit to play at is a key process because playing too high and you will run into the top players and playing too low with the affect of the rake will also kill you and especially without adequate skills.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson
Author – “Winning Cash Game Poker”

Vanessa Selbst

Vanessa is a 25 year old professional poker player hailing from Brooklyn in New York and she is currently attending Yale University where she is studying law and hoping to specialise in civil rights law when she graduates. Vanessa first came to the public’s attention when she won the 2008 WSOP $1,500 PLO event which was her first bracelet after six previous cashes. Her speciality, however, is Limit Holdem. Vanessa is a regular on the high stakes cash game tables and does very well from them, particular in heads-up competition. She is an executive producer at deucescracked.com which is a large poker video website and her videos are extremely popular especially when discussing both PLO and Limit Hold’em.

She recently won the main event of the Main Event of the NAPT in Mohegan Sun. This $5,000 buy-in event netted her a prize of $750,000 for first place.

Dustin “Neverwin” Wolff

Neverwin was a Pokerstars prodigy who started beating the high stakes limit holdem tables in 2004 beating all before him. He was so difficult to beat that many players suspected him of being a poker bot before he revealed his true identity on his controversial website Neverwin Poker. He went on to become a famous limit player thanks in part due to his website, in part due to his amazing fall from grace suffering heavy losses to “texaslimitking” where he refused to accept he could not beat him, and in part due to his amazing partying stories from Las Vegas.

After a recent fall-out Dustin continues to run his website minus the controversial forums and now offers a range of Texas Holdem poker tips for players wishing to emulate him in his poker successes, which include cashing for $504,000 profit in the 2005 WSOP and being in profit every year since.

Todd “Dandruff” Witteles

Another former member of NWP and now a prominent online poker radio host Todd came to the public’s attention when he entered his first WSOP Limit Holdem event in 2005 and won it! He then entered another and came in third place. Todd was a former computer engineer who discovered a talent for limit holdem. He has crushed both the online and live limit holdem games for many years and has built up a reputation as a trustworthy character in poker. He was instrumental in uncovering the Absolute Poker and UB poker scandals in 2007 and earned himself the nickname “Detective Druff” from two plus two poker forums. Unfortunately due to a dispute with Mason Malmuth Druff and everyone associated with the NWP and Donkdown.com websites are banned from two plus two.

Witteles continues to host a weekly poker radio show and travel every year to the WSOP although he has not managed to have any notable runs of late.

Will you be the next Limit Holdem superstar? Have a game on bwin.com, this could be the game you have been looking for!

By Malcolm Clarke

Limit Poker is a very technical game that has faded into the background since the poker boom of 2003. As Holdem became more widely played it was Pot Limit Omaha and not Limit Holdem that became more popular. Amidst all of this there is a dedicated poker playing community online that continue to play high stakes limit holdem. It is a variation of poker that is particularly useful if you want to learn about betting and playing after the flop on the turn and river. Your play of drawing hands, implied odds and the ability to recover from bad beats will be improved by learning this version of poker.

No Limit Texas Hold ‘em is all about psychology. You can win a pot by frightening your opponent away with big bets and offering them terrible pot odds to make a call. Finesse is required in limit hold ‘em with pot odds usually being attractive for most calls to be made. In fact the worst odds you can be offered in limit holdem is 2 to 1. Rather than the focus being on psychology the limit poker focus is on math, logic and legitimate poker skill. The more players in the hand the more improved the pot odds become. It can appear you suffer more bad beats in limit because players are able to chase cards with more ease therefore drawing is far more common in limit because of this.

Any limit game of poker requires a good knowledge of your odds to win at all times. You will learn to quickly calculate odds for your chances of winning the hands based on a range of potential hands your opponent could be holding. Rather than facing big bets for large swings in stack size you will need to outplay your opponents in a limit game and make better decisions more often to win. Whilst it is possible to get lucky and win a poker tournament more often than not it is a skilled limit holdem player that wins through.

For anyone wanting to improve their math in poker, use Limit Holdem to help you refine that part of your game.

The most common criticism levelled at limit poker is that it is boring due to the lack of big bets and exciting action. Certainly in the early levels of a poker tournament it can seem extremely quiet given the small pots that develop and it is difficult to get motivated over pots that are 5% of your stack maximum. But the truth is that not many poker players know how to play limit holdem well. It is widely accepted that limit holdem heads up can involve bigger swings than in no limit holdem due to the hands you must call down and you can have big runs of good and bad luck.

All of the large poker rooms offer Limit Holdem as a playing option and I found it complicated but fun and not the boring game many brand it. It is a technical game and it will suit any player who enjoys out manoeuvring their opponents. Extraordinary profits can be earned by heads up specialists in limit holdem and we will look at some of the big names in the limit holdem world in part 2 of this article.

By Malcolm Clarke

The dictionary.com definition of sport is “an athletic activity requiring skill or physical prowess and often of a competitive nature” which looks definitive at first because poker is certainly not an athletic sport. But Sport is also “a diversion, recreation, or pleasant pastime”. Entertainment is, of course, anything one enjoys and many bizarre things can be classed as entertainment if you enjoy doing it so poker is certainly entertaining to most, if not all people who spend their time playing it. The real debate is whether or not it is a sport.

My personal belief is that poker is not a sport but a game that players find very entertaining. For me I must focus closely on the first definition of sport and interpret the athletic element of sport as using cardiovascular endurance with which to participate in it. This allows me to make a clear distinction between games and sports; otherwise the two become very confusing. A game is something that is entertaining but involves more mental combat than physical ability, e.g. chess, backgammon or poker and sport demands mental skills plus endurance e.g. running, football, and tennis. These sports could be classed as games, but the endurance element to them defines them specifically as sports.

That pretty much seals it for dictionary.com, but other dictionaries use the phrase “A specific diversion, usually involving physical exercise and having a set form and body of rules; a game.” Now it gets a little more complicated. The use of the word “usually” means that sport could “sometimes not” use physical elements. Examples of this are Pool, Snooker, Golf and motor racing (yes I know this is hard but you are still just sitting there it is the car that moves quickly!). An interesting debate on its own is golf. Considering you walk between shots to your ball is this part of the game or do you simply play golf when you swing your club because if not you also walk around the pool table before you make a shot although obviously not as far.

Poker is primarily a mental challenge. You are playing pots to try and outwit and outplay weaker opponents to get their chips. In a large poker tournament luck plays a part but overall a good tournament player can perform well given average luck. You could argue that maintaining focus for 90 minutes in a soccer match is hard but poker players do this for twelve hours at a time during large poker tournaments for days on end!

To conclude, whilst I appreciate poker is not a classic sport the mental focus that is required is far in excess of what an endurance athlete is required to maintain. They are therefore very different and challenging in different ways. A poker player may struggle to run a marathon, but a marathon runner may struggle to play poker for five days straight for twelve hours at a time. Perhaps it does not matter if it is a sport, but it is a challenge that offers rewards in excess of the money available in many sports if you are successful. There is no reason why you cannot play poker and other sports and enjoy the challenges of both types of mental and physical engagement.

Now go and break up that debate at the bar because it is still raging!

By Malcolm Clarke

Listen to your Opponents

I do not advocate listening to music or iPods all of the time when you should be listening to your opponents especially in the early part of a poker tournament. Often in table talk key clues are given to the players chosen style, level of poker playing ability and current focus. If you are missing these things because you are listening to your iPod you are missing out on information your opponents are freely offering you. This could cost you chips.

My recommendation is to use your iPod sparingly either when there is little action, you have a big stack and are awaiting premium hands or when you feel a little bored and need some mental stimulation.

Relaxing Music or Ambient Sound

Daniel Negreanu has said that he often has ambient sounds on his iPod like birds singing or the ocean tide. These types of sound are very relaxing and keep his mood chilled out so he is not feeling under pressure at a point of the tournament where this is not required. As you are sitting for consecutive days for long periods if you do well in a poker tournament staying relaxed is important. In my view it is worthwhile having some of these sounds on your iPod for when you are in the mood or require something to relax you. Getting fired up too soon in a poker tournament will be harmful for your chances of winning when your mental fatigue kicks in.

Poker Podcasts

This is my little secret. I enjoy listening to poker podcasts and hearing interviews from good players. I think it is worthwhile having a few hours worth of podcasts to listen to as it is something new to hear rather than listening to a tune over and over again. I normally have over twelve hours of poker related audio to listen to whether that is tuition mp3’s or radio-style podcasts.

Another idea is to record little reminders into an audio file and play them when the tournament gets critical. Things like “Fold to a three bet re-raise when the opponent obviously has Aces” and other strategy snippets are useful for you to refocus the mind at key moments in a potentially life changing poker tournament.

Music?

Have a wide variety of music on your iPod. Heavy metal is fine but it is no use getting fired up when you are only going to sit there for a while. Have mood altering music loaded on your mp3 player that can fire you up and calm you down. Your mood throughout the poker tournament has a big effect on your end result, so think about that before you load your heavy metal music only onto the iPod.

Be Aware of your Battery Life

One of the best investments for a poker tournament specialist is a long-life battery. If you are playing for twelve hour sessions your iPod battery that only lasts for two hours will not go very far. This is a reason for using it sparingly, but having a battery that lasts means when you charge it each night, which you should do, ready for the next days play you get the most use from it. A flat iPod is not much use in your pocket when you want to use it!

By Malcolm Clarke

My monitor has a 22 inch screen. I can play up to nine tables before things start to get a little too small be comfortable. When you multi-table make sure that your pokertracker is set up to automatically import all the hands you have played into the database because you will get through a lot of hands quickly without the chance to replay or study any hands during your session. That type of review must be done later and having all hands available is very important.

When you first log in to the poker room you should join as many tables as you are comfortable with, searching for opponents you know you can beat and joining tables that have players holding healthy stacks. I would recommend you avoid short-stackers as much as possible as you want deep stack play situations so your poker skills have a chance to shine. Once you have loaded each table you should check the box that says “auto post blinds” and, when prompted, wait for the big blind. This not only means you do not post needless blinds but gives you time to get all of your tables set up before play begins.

Rather than re-sizing and positioning the tables as you go, you can click a button on most poker rooms to tile the tables for you. In less than a second, the tables are resized and positioned correctly as per your monitor’s capability. If you have two monitors, which I do not, they should tile accurately across both monitors and because of the extra screen space you have you will have larger tables. This helps you follow the action and you should take notes as much as you can. If you do have two monitors there are lots of poker forum posts to help you get them set up correctly.

Some players use cascaded tables in order to have each table pop up that requires a decision. This works well for some players and you should try both options to see what suits you best. I find the cascaded tables a little frantic and can get anxious playing that way. This does not help me make better decisions and I certainly perform far better when I am in a tiled table situation. Play a set of low-limit sit and go poker tournaments in order to test which method of table presentation works best for you.

At the end of your multi-table session, once you decide to stop playing you should wait until you are in the hand before the big blind and then leave the table. If you forget to close the table then play one more round. Whilst it is free to play a hand you should take advantage. Do not worry if you lose a big pot in this last round, as you are playing many hands each month the quality of your play is what matters and we all lose pots we wish we could have won or wished we had logged out before playing.

Consider your set-up for poker carefully. When you are risking your own money and looking to maximise what you can win from playing online poker no stone should be left unturned. Your seat, your screens and your approach to multi-tabling are all important considerations to make along with your poker strategy. Good luck, and see you on the bwin.com poker tables very soon.

By Malcolm Clarke

Stack Sizes

Deep stack sizes means there is more of your opponents stack to win. It is worth noting, however, that the strength of your hand needs to be higher the more chips go into the pot as two pair or worse is unlikely to be best at showdown against most players. Ideally you want your last bet to set your opponent all-in and be around a pot sized bet, so the final value bet or bluff can be designed to put the maximum pressure on your opponent to make a mistake. Whether or not that mistake is a call or fold depends on the strength of your own hand and the board cards.

Bet Sizing and Actual Hand Strength

The actual strength of your hand depends on your opponents actual hole cards, but as you do not get to see them you must assume that this monster is indeed the best hand. Unless you have a royal flush, you can be outdrawn but with a monster you need to push the hands strongly and bet strongly. If you are timid at this point when holding a really strong hand it would be difficult for you to find a moment where you would be bold. You should bet the flop with either a pot sized or 60% of the pot sized bet most of the time. Checking to induce action gives your opponent the chance to outdraw you before they commit chips to the pot. This is a common error by amateur players as they do not want to scare their customers away but they actually give a free chance for the opponent to catch them in the hand.

Turn and River Play

The reason you should bet on the flop is that if you bet on the turn there has been a free card that could have beaten you and many opponents will fold on the turn realising their missed draws are now increasingly weakening as the pot grows. You are better off winning an uncontested pot on the turn without giving the free card. If the action goes to the turn at least you have the bets won from the calling of your flop bet. A hand won is a hand won even though it feels you deserve rewarding when you hit the flop hard and hold a monster hand like a flush, full house or better. Remember that out of position, poker strategy tells your opponent to look to fold unless they too have hit a great hand.

We will re-visit this concept looking at specific stack sizes in the future, but for now you should take away from this article the importance of building the pot when you have a good hand. Opponents will often think you are bluffing in any case, as standard play often sees a new player check when they are strong and bet when they are weak. Always betting not only increases the size of the pots you win, but creates your deception when you do the same thing whether weak or strong. It is very hard to work out what to do against players who do the same thing with varying strength hands.

By Malcolm Clarke

The costs of playing poker tournaments as your main source of income are high. Paying for flights, hotels, food and general spending increase when you are travelling the tournament circuit and you also have the tournament buy-ins to pay for too! Things get very pricey very quickly. I have read numerous blogs of tournament professionals who say that you need about $500,000 to $1 million a year to finance life on the road if you are constantly travelling and playing poker.

This is why many poker players look for stakes and take percentages of other players. Relying simply on your own skills is difficult. Could you cash for $1 million each year just to break even? Would you want those sorts of overheads? This leads us to another part of being a tournament professional, engaging financially with other players.

When I first started researching the realities of life on the road as a professional poker tournament player I was surprised at the extent of swapping percentages with other players and staking. It is not uncommon for one player to have 50% of their own action and 10% of five other players’ action. This means that if they bust they have five other chances to make some money back from the tournament. They have done a straight swap or bought straight into the other players.

Tournament stakers also roan around the casino lobbies looking for players who need a stake in return for some of their action. Eric “Sheets” Haber is a prolific staker who had a large piece of Joe Cada when he won $8.5 million when he won the World Series of Poker Main Event. Neil “Badbeat” Channing of the UK also stakes a large stable of players. They get good value for their money as they only stake players they know to be winning players and you are unlikely to get a stake into a tournament unless you can show an excellent record in live and online poker tournaments.

The reason I play poker is looking for that one big score. If I hit that score, travelling the tournament circuit only to be broke two or three years down the line would seem a waste of that big prize. Others would disagree and see the freedom of living life to the full as a great way of using that money. After all, you never know what life will throw at you tomorrow. I prefer a safer approach, although most poker players do not live life particularly safely in terms of financial planning.

You need a liberal attitude to money to be a tournament pro. You need to be willing to risk it to win big and keep risking it and believe you will eventually get everything back that you invest with interest! It can be a bumpy ride as a tournament poker professional, but if you have the guts and the tenacity the rewards can be very high if you are good enough.

By Malcolm Clarke