In this article we are going to take a look back at the 2009 World Series of Poker and some of the stories that emerged from it.

Multi Bracelet Series

Incredibly one poker player won three bracelets at last years WSOP and a few players won two bracelets. Phil Ivey, regarded as the finest poker player in the world, entered many events and won two of them. Phil won event 8, the $2,500 2-7 Draw Lowball and event 25 the $2,500 Omaha/Seven Card Stud Hi-Low-8 or Better. He then made the November nine and was hotly tipped to become the main event champion. That was not to be but Phil capped a marvellous series where his image as the world’s best poker player was enhanced. Brock Parker also won two bracelets winning event 14, the $2,500 Limit Hold’em Short Handed and he won event 19, the $2,500 Limit Hold’em Short Handed.

The star of the WSOP was undoubtedly Jeff Lisandro who won the triple crown of Stud events winning event 16, the $1,500 Seven Card Stud, event 37, the $10,000 World Championship Seven Card Stud Hi-Low Split-8 or Better and event 44 the $2,500 Razz. Although he had to have had some luck this goes down in history as one of the finest ever WSOP performances.

Notable UK Performances

James Akenhead showed that his runners-up position at the 2008 WSOP event 2 was no fluke as he made the November nine eventually finishing in 9th place. He also finished in 9th place in the WSOPE main event and won the Full Tilt Poker Million for $500,000. He is surely to have another chance at a bracelet and is regarded by some players to have talent in the mould of flawed poker genius Stu Ungar.

Roland De Wolfe won another bracelet winning event 27, the $5,000 Pot Limit Omaha Hi-Low Split-8 or Better beating Brett “Getcrunk” Richey into second place. John Kabbaj also won a WSOP bracelet winning event 45, the $10,000 World Championship Pot Limit Hold’em for $633,335. It was a great year for UK poker at the World Series of Poker 2009.

The Main Event

6,494 players contested the $10,000 main event with many more turned away amid a controversial start to the tournament. Phil Ivey, Jeff Shulman and James Akenhead were big names that made the November nine final table. 21 year old Joe Cada beat self-employed tree logger Darvin Moon when things eventually got to heads up into second place and claimed a first prize of $8,547,042. For second place Darvin took home $5,182,601 and thousands of new fans who appreciated his play and dignity in defeat.

Download the poker software at bwin.com and practise your poker tournament game before heading to the WSOP. You will need to be sharp, be able to concentrate for long periods of time and be able to play well under pressure. You can learn all of these things at bwin.com and possibly become one of the stories of this years World Series of Poker 2010.

By Malcolm Clarke

Of course the toughness of the games will vary greatly and also from site to site but in my experience, you really do not want to be paying much more than around two big blinds per hour in rake in most games even if you are a good player. This of course applies to the lower stakes games, the effect of the rake is greatly reduced the higher you play and this is because of the rake cap which is usually $3 in most games.

The only problem of course with playing at the bigger limits is that the effect of the rake may be greatly reduced but the opposition is also a whole lot tougher. Games at the $15-$30 level and above can be very tough to beat and once you reach the $20-$40, $25-$50 and $30-$60 levels then you are going to be locking horns with some very good players.

Before you start to look at yourself and say “well that does not bother me because I am a good player” then you better remember that being a good player online is far different than being a good player in a live casino card room. Good online players are dedicated, they data mine games relentlessly, they use trackers to get information on their opponents, they share and swap data with friends and acquaintances in online poker forums and other avenues, they use sophisticated software to improve their own game and the list goes on.

Do you have this same commitment to improving your game and doing all of the things that I have just listed? Well come on now, answer this question honestly because your future as a winning poker player online could just depend on it……do you? If you are not doing the things that I have just described and have no intention of doing them then you had better shelve all plans about playing at the middle limits and above at any form of poker online.

Playing at the middle limits online and being successful is not just about knowing your poker. Most players at those limits know the game. But the real consistent winners, the ones with the earn rates are the ones who make the effort to do all of the other things that contribute towards the making of a winning online poker player. At this moment in time, I find the $10-$20 level the best for a good strong limit player to earn money at short handed and even heads up. Look out for the third and final part of this series coming soon.

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

As we already know, game selection is critical in all forms of poker but in limit Texas Holdem it can literally be he difference between life and death. You will be presented with numerous problems in limit hold’em. If you play too low then the rake can be your most formidable opponent on the table and if you play too high then you are going to be locking horns with some of the very best players in the world.

If you are going to be serious about your poker and want to treat it more like a business than anything else then you are going to have to look very carefully at just what costs you are incurring as a result of operating that business. The primary cost for an online player of course is the rake. With online limit poker games getting tougher and tighter all the time then it is common knowledge that you could be the best player on the table in many games and yet you are still in the negative expectation camp.

It is really beyond the scope of this article to delve too deeply into anyone subject but take it from me, please do your research as to how much rake you are paying in an average hour. Many sites have game statistics which allow you to see how many hands you are playing per hour or have played, what the average pot is and how many hands you have won. You can use these stats to find out how much rake you are paying. Simply go to the section of the site that explains the rake and this will inform you how much you are paying based on the limits, number of players and pot size. Based on your own individual style, you can then calculate how much rake you are paying per hour.

But the cheapest sites are not always the best to play on as bonuses and rakeback and various other things can greatly impact what is the best site. At this moment in time, many poker sites pay good rakeback and bonuses which are a very nice cushion and one that is vital for low stakes limit players. But these rakeback deals and bonuses change on a daily basis so telling you what are the best deals now would be silly as this will have surely changed by the time you are reading this. Look out for part two of this mini series coming shortly.

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

I don’t multi-table much and also I don’t play as many hours as I used to. Another problem with trackers in a game like no limit hold’em is when you start to play the bigger games. By this I mean games at the $10-$20 level and upwards.

When I play serious no limit then I tend to play at the $25-$50 level online and sometimes at $10-$20. But once you start to play against the calibre of opponents that you find at $25-$50 then you can easily be up against some of the best players in the world. This means that you have to approach the game totally differently and I have my own way of operating that has stood me in very good stead.

Trackers in my opinion lose much of their effectiveness against poker players who are very adept at situational trickiness. I am talking about players who only make certain plays when certain criteria align themselves. They don’t even know what they are going to do themselves until they do it. Or how about the player who makes his mind up before the hand even starts that he is going to try and move you from the pot here even if it means going all in with junk.

You raise pre-flop with A-Q, the player on the button calls you with 6s-4s. The flop comes 10d-7c-2s and you continuation bet the flop and get called. The turn brings the 3h giving your opponent a gutshot draw and you fire again on the turn only to face a big raise or an all in bet. Just how do you combat that? How can you combat with statistics someone who has never previously done something and will not do so again in that session? Fine so you can remember that move for later for when you play him again but the next time, he will come at you in a totally different way than before. He will make you lay down once again but in a different way to last time.

Why? Because he is very good that’s why and your tracker statistics are not going to be of much use to you here. You could get two separate players with the exact same statistics of VPIP (voluntary pot $ in the pot), PFR (pre-flop raise percentage) and AF (aggression factor) and yet the way that they obtain those statistics could be totally different making each player totally unique.

But I have found that at the higher levels that concealing your own play is just as important if not more so than finding out about your opponent and this applies whether you play holdem or Pot Limit Omaha or whatever. No one will ever convince me otherwise and if anyone wants to criticise then fine, they can play poker their way and I will play it my way. I will simply not allow dedicated online professionals to data mine me or swap information about my methods and strategies and likely ranges so that they know how I play before I even sit down.

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

Being able to win one hundred big blinds in one single hand of poker makes many games that would be otherwise negative expectation games profitable. Quite often I have sat in a no limit game myself where everyone has been playing well. But there might be one player who I know from having played with him before who has the capacity to tilt after a couple of beats or who has a certain weakness with laying down big hands and in my mind, this makes the game potentially profitable.

But limit hold’em or even Omaha is not like that, you extract the money in limit piece by piece rather than in one big blow. You have to continually make better decisions over the weaker players and slowly but surely bleed their bankroll while also enduring many beats along the way. But the capacity to only be able to extract a very tiny amount of money from any one situation or pot makes game selection much more important in this form of poker.

Do not get me wrong here, I am not saying that game selection is not important in no limit hold’em. It is critical in all forms of poker and you simply cannot win in any game unless you have some kind of superiority over at least some of the players in your game. This is why it does not necessarily matter how good a player you are or how much you know about the game. That is only part of the overall equation. What matters most is how good you are and how much you know compared to the other players who are seated in your game.

This principle that most players ignore applies to all forms of gambling and not just poker. If you do not choose the correct time and place in which to do battle then you will lose not only the battle but also the war.

There will be many people who buy this book expecting to be told or taught about software like Poker Office. Well I am sorry to disappoint you but you will not find much by way of software my articles. Much of the material regarding cash games in my articles deals with live play anyway so discussing trackers would be pointless. Plus, I am not the world’s greatest expert on it so it would be unfair for me to tell you basic simple stuff or to rehash some previously published material. This is not my style, I want to write my own poker articles using my own methods and theories and not other peoples.

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

But in my mind the presence of the flush draw provides me with extra outs because it allows me to represent the flush if it hits. My opponent also had a big enough stack to make another bet on the turn as long as it wasn’t too big and then to pass when I moved all in. Here my opponent bet $475 on the turn and I moved in for the rest of my money…..they almost timed out before folding.

This is a style of play that can rapidly get noticed and if you stay on any site for too long then you are going to find that your aggressive raises are getting called more often even by the weaker stacks and this can happen in any form of poker and even in poker tournaments online. This is why I pay careful attention and keep a record of who I have played against. Although it has to be said that players watch games without you knowing about it and they also share information with their friends. When you factor in things like tracking software into the equation then there could easily be a whole library of information out there all waiting to be used against you after a very short space of time.

This is why at the higher levels, I switch poker sites frequently. It is something that I believe in and something that has earned me a lot of money. This is why I really pay no attention to people who criticise my methods, they may say that I played a certain hand incorrectly and they are probably right in some instances. No one plays correct poker all the time but I am convinced that the way that I operate (or have operated in the past) has been totally correct for me personally and especially in the bigger games.

You do not need to resort to this measure in small games against weak players, their overall bad play will simply make it profitable along with sound play on your part, rakeback and sign up bonuses and all the rest of it.

But in this situation where several thousand dollars are going into the middle in just one hand of poker then I really don’t see how important rakeback is. A great rakeback deal certainly would not sway me into staying on any one particular site because the penalties for the other players figuring out my style would be severe and cost me far more money than I could ever earn with rakeback.

I also think that it is worth mentioning what size stacks I like to attack when I have used this method. I like to target the middle sized stacks. So in this game with a maximum buy in of $5000 and with some players sitting on more than that and some on much less, I like to target the players who have between $2000 to $3000 on the table.

This strategy does not work as well against big stacks for the reasons mentioned earlier but it is also vulnerable against small stacks as well. Small stacks really are sitting down hoping to get lucky the vast majority of the time. I have yet to see a player sit down with $1000 in a $25-$50 game and then proceed to throw their money around. So when they start to commit chips, they can have a tendency to go all the way and especially if their starting stack has dwindled further.

Against small stacks, I cannot take advantage of the fear element once they have decided to commit. It’s a bit like a person who is about to take a bungee jump for the very first time. They are afraid to move and are almost frozen with fear but once they propel their body forward then there is no going back. The bigger poker stacks have a way back, they can get involved in a hand for a percentage of their stack and fold and still have a workable stack.

So what this means is that I will only get involved against big stacks and small stacks when I have some kind of a hand. Obviously when I say “involved” what I actually mean is to make a big move. I will only look to make big moves in general against medium stacks because in my experience, it is these that demonstrate the most fear.

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

Well they got the first two parts of the equation right because I was certainly taking a shot in the poker game and I also did not have an adequate bankroll for those kinds of stakes. But what they got totally wrong was in how I was going to play when I sat down. I never intended to play like the average Joe who sits down with a medium sized stack and I was certain that this would throw them a curve ball and get me the edge.

I used to like it even better when the other players had similar sized stacks to me because they were precisely the ones who I would target because these were the guys who were in fact playing on short bankrolls and taking a shot themselves. You also see this sort of short bankroll philosophy with online poker tournaments as well.

What I did not want to be doing with a $2500 buy in and with hardly any bankroll was picking on players or getting involved in pots with players who I knew to be good. The strong players nearly always had big stacks and kept them topped up and heaven only knows what size bankrolls they were sitting on.

But strong poker players with large bankrolls tend to look you up more often and that wasn’t going to help me at all so I carefully steered my way around them and played pots with players who either had comparable stacks to me or smaller stacks.

But when I got involved with these players then I played my stack as though it was a big stack because I knew that most of them were playing on scared money. The reason that I was reticent about putting this into the article was simply because of how successful I have been as a result of using this tactic. I amassed winnings of over $100,000 during the first six months of playing and that wasn’t even full time hours.

This was far better than the hourly grinding that I had been doing playing limit hold’em and it was also far more interesting to me than simply sitting down and playing multiple tables.

But it is a fact that I simply could not have got away with this tactic playing limit hold’em because you cannot be as aggressive with players who are playing with short bankrolls or shot taking in that form of poker. But one such shot taker got themselves involved with me in this hand. It was folded to me in the cut off and I raised it to $150 while holding the 9s-8s and the small blind passed and the shot taker called in the big blind with a $2000 stack. Look out for part three of this article coming soon.

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

But there was one tactic that I really wanted to avoid putting in this article, in fact it is more than just a tactic but more an extension of my poker philosophy. But the more that I thought about it, the more apparent that it became that I could actually put this in the article without it really hurting my game too much.

Most people who read this article will not play as high as $25-$50 and even if they do, they will not have the identical circumstances to me in order to make this work. What I am referring to by identical circumstances is my financial situation plus my own individual attitude towards bankrolls which is something that I think probably should not be emulated and for that reason I am not going to go down the avenue of explaining it simply because it can do more harm than good for the people reading it.

But it is common knowledge that many players take shots in bigger games and the regular players in these games can smell the shot takers a mile off. In a $25-$50 game with a 100BB maximum buy in then strong players who are properly bankrolled will tend to buy in for the maximum and top that up repeatedly should they fall short of that during actual play.

But I sometimes will purposefully sit down in a game with a table consisting of several very strong players but do so with a reduced stack of say $2000 to $2500. I realise that this may seem to contradict what I have recently said about game selection and seat selection but stay with me on this one. Most players who buy into these poker games for these reduced amounts of money tend to be shot takers who are there to try and get lucky and play solid cards.

In short, they will do nothing fancy and their action can be pretty predictable. Because I site hop an awful lot (not as much now) then I encounter many players who will be seeing me for the very first time. But because I have been ghosting the games sometimes for as long as several weeks then I come to know many of the regulars and know what types of players they are and what they like to do at the table and more importantly, what their objectives are at the table. This can also be applied by players who play poker tournaments as well.

In the following articles then I will be expanding on what I am saying here which hopefully should start to make more sense. So do keep a look out for part two of this article series coming soon.

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

In order to be a great poker player you have to adopt the techniques of bluffing as well as point out the bluff placed by your opponents. It is true that bluffing is an extra quality that helps you to get some extra potentiality while playing poker. It adds some positive attributes to the player. Even if you don’t want to use bluffing in the game, you must have the skill to locate the bluff placed by the other players. Otherwise you will be the loser.

Bluffing is not a difficult thing. It referred to the ability to make other players think that you have hands that you really do not. For an example, if you have a bad hand you may win the game by only real type of bluffing. This is not so easy to do. Because, if you call with such a bad hand you will surely lose if any of the players have stand and continue to play. But on the other hand, you will win if they do not dare to stand.

If you want to become a real good bluffer, you must have the strength of mind. It is not easy for every poker player to become a good bluffer. It needs a plenty of time, skill, practice and quality to become a real bluffer. A real bluffer always makes a mystery about their bluff. Never try to bluff in every hand. Make your opponents to think twice when you are bluffing. You have to practice a lot to be a good bluffer. There are a lot of common techniques about bluffing. If you have the ability to spot bluffs made by your opponent, you can easily make them lose. This is related with the skill of bluffing. For that you have to have an excellent observation power. You must have the ability to separate the characteristics your opponent plays before place a bluff.

Finally, bluffing is an obvious part of poker. A lot of players become a good poker player for their ability of bluffing. It also increases your chance to win. If you want to become the best of the bests, you must have an excellent skill in bluffing sector.

What I will not allow myself to do in bigger limit games is to get caught in the middle of being aggressive and then passive because very good players will feed on this. Everyone expects their opposition to be aggressive in games like these and when you bet and get raised then you cannot always trust that raise and the player doing it.

It is a large part of my overall poker strategy to steal from the stealers in the bigger NLHE games simply because conventional play is too easily combated and beaten these days. But when I sit down to play in any session of poker then I am really not looking to do anything special. I will sit and watch the players for maybe an hour or so and try to really get a feel for what everyone is doing and what they are trying to achieve at the table. Then I will basically sit down and play good solid poker and then look to make one or two well timed big moves per session.

The types of games I am referring to of course here are the bigger games at $10-$20 and $25-$50 NLHE. At the time of writing this article, I have a very substantial offer on the table to be financed to play very high stakes online poker. As of yet, this is still in the preparation stages but I know that I can win at this level. By the time that you are reading this then yours truly may just be playing $200-$400 and $300-$600 but we will have to wait and see.

But my philosophy of stealing from the stealers is paramount in how I play high stakes poker and the more aggressive the game, the more it fits my style of play. The type of games that I don’t like are the types where the players are basically tight playing rocks because these are the hardest to extract big chunks of money from. But this hand and the ideas and concepts that are in it takes us on very nicely to the next hand where I am now going to totally contradict something that I said earlier or at least it is going to seem that way to many readers.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson
Author – “Winning High Stakes Poker”