This week at b5media’s Sports channel we are celebrating the fun of summer, which in the world of poker usually doesn’t translate to much: the light of day does not touch most players, we are lurking, we are pale and glowing from our computer screens, or hidden in the folds of some casino where we haven’t seen the outdoors in days probably.
So, in the spirit of summer fun, how about today, if you are an online poker player, take a minute to forget about the tables and go outside and take a walk? Breathe something clean? Jump in a pool?
Okay, brush it off.
Flopping a straight feels about as good as sun light anyway, yes?
One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen in the past few weeks playing .50/$1 no limit hold em online is the tendency for players to have absolutely no idea how to bet their hands. So many players seem to be paying no attention to the size of the pot or the previous bets before them in order to gauge what kind of is really the best. It’s some of the worst poker moves you can make, allowing your opponent to get in too cheaply and catch cards to beat you.
#1, if you are going to a raise a pot, please, for the love of god, raise more than the minimum!
I can’t tell you the number of times, probably at least 2-3 times around at some tables, where people just love to raise a dollar. It’s a dollar blind, 4 people have limped in, it gets the big blind, and he raises ONE DOLLAR.
Not only is this bad in that you are putting more money in without any extra levity of the other players folding, but you are also giving other players the opportunity to reraise if they limped with a big pair.
There is absolutely no value in min raising in a multiway pot.
The only time I ever minraise is in the rare event that I get a big hand and want to induce players who are just as sick of the minraise to reraise me due to my feigning weakness, but this is a very rare and specific tactic that can work only sometimes against very aggressive players when I also happen to have showed a certain kind of image by not playing a lot of hands strongly.
Maybe worse is when people end up in a big pot and bet out $1 into say a $15 or $20 pot, just screaming for people to raise or worse, call and draw cheaply to inside straights that are hard to put a player on.
Most of the time if I plan to enter a pot I hit the bet pot button. Sometimes I will vary a little depending on position and hand, but you can’t do bad by raising pot preflop, and if you do it every time it becomes impossible for your opponent to assign you a hand based on your bet.
After the flop, I tend to bet 2/3rds of the pot or the size of the pot if I am going to bet at all. There’s simply no reason not to.
Get rid of the minraise. It’s probably the weakest move in poker, unless you have a very specific reason for doing so.
Sigh, when they come they come together, it’s always fun:
Here’s evidence to why when you play a hand bad and you are feeling dumb or angry about it, you should quit and wait for a more level headed time. I can’t tell you the amount of money I’ve spent after playing for weeks of excellent poker, getting into a funk and messing up.
Here are two hands I played tonight in a bad mood when I could have walked from the table and kept my money ok.
In this first hand, I hadn’t had a hand in forever, got QQ a few off the button, raised, got reraised, and another player reraised all in. An easy fold really, and I said aloud, ‘I am against kings or aces, fold.’ Then proceeded to disregard myself and call all in, to of course KK (though they player who’d gone all in had 99). Bad play, I should have quit after that.
The next hand I didn’t quite play bad, could have folded preflop with a suited ace to a raise against my limp, but was kind of annoyed after the last hand, called, saw a flop with nothing in it, the player who’d gone over the top with 99 last hand bet 2/3rds of the pot, I angrily called him thinking my Ace high could be good, the next player reraised almost exactly the minimum.
I can almost never make myself fold to a min raise, especially I have a draw to the nuts, though here would have been another good chance to fold, but I again, angrily and against my better nature, called.
Then I hit the nuts on the turn. My belly buster filled in. I checked and got put all in, called.
Of course the guy had a set, of course the board paired on the river (oh, how many times have I been in the exact opposite spot and not boated up??)
Anyhow, this hand is less about me complaining about my own bad play and coolers, but more a note to self and all else that when you aren’t in the best of minds to be playing, STOP PLAYING.
Even if you are still putting money in with the best hand, you will lean yourself into spots where you normally would fold and end up maximizing the gamble rather than playing profitable solid poker.
There’s not much of a more fun matchup you could ask for, Phil ‘The baby’ Hellmuth vs Sam ‘The baby spanker’ Farha.
Phil’s betting on this hand is just so weak, I don’t know who he thought he’d beat with it, especially Farha. You really think you can play like that with these guys? This is a pure example of the kind of weak betting you see all the time online, guys betting $1 into a $12 pot, etc. If you are going to be, especially against a player like Farha, then bet well, or don’t be surprised when you get beat by Q6.
Moreover, lying about your hand while you are whining, acting like you were ahead when you really weren’t and when you know everyone is going to see you complaining while you were actually behind the whole time, it doesn’t help your already sad image.
Phil: “I thought the six hit him.”
That’s just too ridiculous for me to continue commenting.
Overheard tonight on the 2007 WSOP Main event, from an amateur and rather rugged-looked long-haired player late in the game after getting busted in a huge pot by Scotty Nguyen:
“Gitchee another bracelet.”
Only in poker or trailer park honeymoons does it come out quite like that.
Most of the time in poker you hear about how being aggressive wins the money, and in the long run this is true, but in my last few weeks playing no limit online with a wide variety of donks, I’ve thought a lot about the skill of ‘inducing the bluff,’ or getting the player with no hand to bet hard at you.
Most of the time you hear this as ’slow playing,’ when you make a huge hand and you let others catch up or try to knock you off thinking you’re weak, but what about when you don’t necessarily have the nuts, but know that an average holding (like say top pair) is likely good against a super aggressive player, and that if you act weak they will bet at you.
I’ve been in several spots this week where I’ve flopped a decent top pair (say, J or Q) with a weak kicker in the big blind and taken it heads up against an extremely loose aggressive player, who when I check on the turn or river, will fire pot sized bets to try to make me lay down. Feigning weakness with a hand like that against a normal player will often not help you, and even frequently cause you to lose the pot, but when someone is going wild (as at least once a week I tend to run into someone like that at the .50/$1 no limit tables), inducing the bluff with top pair can sometimes get you paid when betting out will just induce a fold.
This tends to work pretty well against players who are ‘acting of control’ a little bit, though you have to be ok with getting donkey punched.
Outside of bluffing, there’s nothing quite as sweet though as winning a pot when you didn’t even have to wait for a big hand.
World’s Largest Online Poker Tournament Set to Begin
PokerStars.com presents the seventh Annual World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) Guaranteed $30 Million Prize Pool
ISLE OF MAN (UK), JULY 3, 2008 – The seventh annual PokerStars.com World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP), begins on September 5th with a guaranteed prize pool of $30 million – double the total of last years’ event. The WCOOP is truly a “world championship” series of events, featuring a menu of 33 different events in total, covering a wide range of poker games including Hold’em, Omaha, Stud, Razz, HORSE, 2-7 Draw and many new events:
·$10,300 High-Roller No-Limit Hold’em
·Eight-Game Mixed tourney
·Four-Max No-Limit Hold’em
·Mixed Hold’em
·PLO with one rebuy, one add-on
·$25,500 High-Roller Heads-up No-Limit Hold’em
·Six-Max Mixed Hold’em
·No-Limit 2-7 Single Draw
·Six-Max No-Limit Hold’em w/ rebuys
This year’s WCOOP will be the biggest online poker tournament series in the world; attracting players from across the globe competing for millions in cash prizes and coveted WCOOP commemorative gold bracelets. Each WCOOP event has a huge guaranteed prize pool, with many in excess of $2,000,000.
“Prestigious tournaments such as the PokerStars.com World Championship of Online Poker are the ultimate way to improve your game and experience the excitement of big tournament play” said Joe Hachem of Team PokerStars Pro. There are hundreds of live tournaments to play in, but nothing compares to the all online series that the WCOOP is – for millions of players it is the ultimate online poker championship.
The WCOOP is hosted exclusively by the world’s largest poker room, PokerStars.com. The WCOOP will run across 16 days, from September 5th -22nd, starting with the $215 buy-in NL Hold’em tournament. The series culminates with the $10,000,000 guaranteed NL Hold’em Main Event, September 21st -22nd. Last year’s Main Event champion was online player ‘Ka$ino’, who won first prize of more than $1.3million
The WCOOP is a “must-play” event for the established and elite stars of poker. But with so many recent WCOOP Events won by new online players and poker enthusiasts, there is every reason to test yourself against the world’s best. No other sport allows for participation in this way by both professionals and amateurs in a true championship event. Players can qualify for WCOOP events via low-priced satellites to the series – these are running now with buy-ins from as low as $2.20. MTT satellites will start on July 6 after the PokerStars.com Sunday Million. As a bonus to loyal players, PokerStars will also be adding $1.5 million towards free entries to the WCOOP.
I’m not the biggest Jamie Gold fan in the world, but I did enjoy this play from him, reraising a bet from what seemed like a not so strong hand, restealing if you will. Nice to hear him discuss his insight. He is not as big of a donk as I have labeled him, though I would like to see how the WSOP would have gone his year if he hadn’t flopped the nuts every single hand mostly.
Restealing is a powerful move, once again banking on the idea that most hands can not withstand a large reraise, and when it looks like someone is raising simply because others are limping, you couldn’t ask for a better time to pop it.
PokerStars is leading the online TV revolution with an amazing new site that not only let’s you watch your favorite players, but also let’s you learn from the pros how to play your favorite hands. The site is chock full of incredible footage from 2008’s best tournaments like the EPT, PCA and LAPT. Included below is the full release, or you can check out the site directly at www.pokerstars.tv. Please let me know if you you’d like to speak with Conrad Brunner on this new addition to PokerStars entertainment.
It’s pretty easy to see these days how poker is pretty much covered from head to toe with swarming crud flies of overdone acting and bad acting. When I heard about the movie ‘Deal,’ a new film starring Burt Reynolds with cameos by a ton of poker pros from Antonio Esfandiari to The Grinder, I thought, ha yeah, that’s gonna be SUPER awesome. You could almost smell it stinking before they even filmed it.
But really, the stink was so strong you can’t really get a full whiff of this bad boy w/o watching it.
The premise alone should clue any poker players with an actual sense of taste that this thing has got to be a lemon straight from the Bad Movie hall of fame: Burt Reynolds plays an ex-gambler who quit when he got too over his head. He sees a ‘young gun’ playing ’solid’ but ‘not so great’ poker on TV and takes him under his wing, teaching him ‘how to tell if a player has a good hand or not,’ then the two of them go to Vegas and enter a WPT event, where Burt comes out of retirement and teacher meets student heads up at the final table.
Yeah, I’m serious.
Add to that the main character, played by no name Bret Harrison, ‘tries his luck’ applying his gambling theories to winning the heart of a practically stillborn Shannon Elizabeth, and you have some idea of absolutely worthless this movie is.
That is, unless you’re like me and you get kicks out of watching movies so bad you can’t help but laugh to avoid gagging on the one liners.
ACTUAL DIALOG FROM FILM:
“Oh my god. You beat Doyle Brunson in the world championship?”
“Ahh.. back in college.”
One of the funniest thing about this film is that whoever wrote it has such a ridiculous ideas of what makes a poker player ‘great.’ The plays made by the old legend, Burt, including calling all in bets with AK and hitting an ace on the river, then staring across the table at Antonio Esfandiari knowingly.
The scene where Burt is telling the kid which players in the casino have good hands based on their ‘tell’ (’Yeah, that guy touches his face every time his hand is good. I think he has AK.’ HE DOES!!!) is alone worth spurting orange juice through your nose at the idea that someone actually paid to produce this script.
Slow motion shots of Burt capping his cards, dudes staring one another down and flipping over aces, old timers talkin mess to the young gun about how he shouldn’t be old enough to play, scripted commentary by Vince Van Patten and Mike Sexton for some of the absolute worst card playing you can imagine. Ugh.
If you feel like laughing AT not WITH a movie, you should look at this, but don’t spend your money.
The fact that known pros put their name on this piece of filth should brand them even bigger promo junkies than we knew previously. Even Chris Monkeymaker has a few lines in this bad little puppy.
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