Top 10 Signs You’re Addicted To Poker
•1. You’ve referred to someone by their screen name in a conversation even though you knew their real name.
•2. You have more money in your poker accounts than in your bank accounts.
•3. Your computer monitor is bigger than your TV screen.
•4. You’ve made at least one major purchase with Full Tilt Points.
•5. You read that last sentence and thought, “I’d never use my Full Tilt Points because it comes out of my rakeback.”
•6. You’ve ever tried to explain why poker isn’t gambling to a non-player.
•7. You take your laptop into the bathroom with you.
•8. You would consider playing poker while having sex a threesome.
•9. The only congressman you can name is Barney Frank.
•10. The phrase, “That donk stuck it in over my 3-bet with a suited Dolly Parton from out of position and cracked my bullets when his runner-runner came on the river. FML!” makes perfect sense to you.
Twitter Poker Tour Puts A Bad Beat On Cancer
A bad beat on cancer? I think any “beat” on cancer is a good beat, but the bad beat name works. After all, a bad beat is when a player wins even though the odds are against it. For many cancer sufferers, that’s exactly the kind of win they’re praying for.
Cancer runs in my family. My grandfather beat pancreatic cancer and my aunt is fighting to beat a rare form of cancer even though she’s in the fourth stage and the doctors say that all she can do is make the most of the time she has left.
But that’s what a bad beat is, isn’t it? It’s the runner-runner flush to take down your opponent’s aces. It’s hitting the perfect card on the river to make quads when you’re on the losing end of a set-over-set situation. It’s pulling through and beating a deadly disease when everyone else says it’s hopeless.
On November 15th, the Twitter Poker Tour is running a tournament to raise money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation to help fund research and awareness for cancer prevention. It’s a worthy cause and everyone is invited to participate.
I have to work and won’t be able to play, but I still registered so my donation can make a difference. It’s a great cause and it’s worth registering even if you can’t make the game.
Those of you who can make the game are in for a treat. Not only will you get to play the best poker players on Twitter, you’ll also get to play some of the best poker players in the world.
Poker superstars like Andy Bloch and Rafe Furst are already registered as well as several other Full Tilt pros. The tournament ID is 113220604 and the password is TPTFORBBOC. Where else can you play professional players for $10?
Tell everyone you know. Tweet it, Facebook it and post about it in forums. This is our chance to make a difference doing what we love and isn’t that what life is all about?
Visit the Twitter Poker Tour website for more information.
October Summary
October was a busy month both on and off the felt. I just finished a few big writing projects and have a couple more lined up in November. I’ll also be working diligently this month to get two e-products created (one poker related) and find a way to offer free videos of my games without it costing me a bunch of money.
As for my work on the felt, I’m in 4 different poker rooms now: Absolute, Bodog, Full Tilt and a smaller site that where I prop. Table selection is becoming a HUGE part of my strategy because I’m playing $1/$2 and a little $2/$4 on a $3k bankroll, so I’m playing a very nittish strategy against the decent players and exploiting the bejesus out of the shitty ones.
I look for a table with one or two players playing 40/4 or worse and try to get a seat on their left. I generally respect their raisings (only raising 4% of your hands? Come on!), but I raise their limps with all kinds of speculative garbage.
KT offsuit? Good.
T8 suited? Raise it up!
58 suited? That’ll play.
It’s like printing money. These guys call a lot pre-flop, but fold to a lot of C-bets and double barrels. If they ever get real aggressive, I know I’m beat and can fold easily unless I catch a monster.
The best part is when you showdown a straight with a hand like 74 suited (that you raised pre-flop). People lose their shit. You can play super tight and still get action. Occasionally a good player will catch on to what you’re going and start playing at you, but that’s when the leveling goodness starts.
I’m not going crazy though. I usually make these plays only when I think I have a good chance of iso-ing my target and my stats still look fairly tight aggressive.
Overall the strategy has been very profitable and very low variance for me and it does a great job of camouflaging my big hands so I can get paid when I hit. Here’s what I’m looking at so far in each account:
Absolute: $574.65
Full Tilt: $529.88
Bodog: $1,499.98
Prop Site: $529.29
Total Bankroll: $3,133.21
It looks like $5k is still in my reach for the end of the year, especially if I can make time to play more.
Test Your Heads-up Poker Skills
Recently I’ve been studing and practicing heads-up poker – mostly because I’ve noticed that the players that make the most BB/100 are always the top heads-up players.
I’m not going to lie. It’s been tough. I tend to tilt balls when I play heads-up, but I know it’ll help in the long run.
I came across a cool heads-up bot that does a pretty good job of screwing with it’s human counterpart. Think you can beat it? Play the bot.
How to Make Obscene Amounts of Money Playing Poker (When you’re not a great player)
I make a decent amount of money playing poker. I’m better than most, but I tend to play above my bankroll which means I’m less likely to make the line-balancing bluffs needed to profit from good, thinking players. So what do I do?
I target the bad ones.
I didn’t realize what I was doing until a friend of mine asked to sweat one of my cash sessions. After we finished he said, “So you really only play against one person at the table.”
I thought about it for a minute and realize that he was right. When I sit down at the poker table I target one or two players and tend to avoid the rest of them. My targets become my bitches. I isolate them with all kinds of crap and pound them ’til all their chips are mine then I rub the virtual chips on my titties and fall asleep on a bed of money.
My point is that you don’t have to be the best poker player to make money. You don’t even have to be that good. All you have to do is find the bad players and know how to exploit them. Here’s how you can make a shit-ton of money playing poker even if you’re not the next Durrrr:
Data mine
Data mining straddles the fence of morality. Some people say that it’s cheating since you have information derived from hands that you didn’t play. Others say that it’s a tool available to anyone so no one truly has an edge. I tend to side with the latter camp.
PokerTableRatings.com makes a ridiculous amount of information available to everyone. Recently AnskyPoker.com, one of my favorite blogs, posted this information that showed the best times to play poker on different sites at different limits using Average Pot Size. Gugel also analyzed how hard it is to move up in limits using the average number of hands played at each limit. You’ll have to sign up for his forum to get the full reports, but it’s free and well worth the 30 seconds it takes to sign up.
It’s great to know when the fish are swimming, but it’s even better to tag individual fish that you can stalk over and over again. There are a couple ways you can do this.
The first thing you can do is go through your Hold’em Manager or PokerTracker database and find all the big losers at your limit. If you don’t have a large database, you can buy hand histories from PokerTableRatings.com or just use their “Biggest Losers” tool to find the people hemorrhaging money at your stakes.
Once you have your fish list, sign up for a free PokerTableRatings.com account and go to the “My PTR” tab. There you’ll find a place where you can enter your fish into your buddy list and get email alerts when they’re online. I have a Blackberry so I know instantly when one of my fish is online.
The other way you can find bad players is to get a program like IdleMiner and let it run for about a half hour before you sit down (Careful with this. Some sites have banned IdleMiner.). Find a table with one or two really bad players and sit down – preferably with position on your mark.
Identify Your Opponent’s Weaknesses
This is where Hold’em Manager or Poker Tracker really comes in handy. If your opponent has a VPIP of 53 and a PFR of 4, you should isolate their limps but respect their raises. If your opponent has a VPIP of 53 and a PFR of 32, their raise should mean shit to you and you can 3bet them wide – especially if they have a high “Call 3bet” stat and a high “Fold to Cbet” stat.
Tend to isolate with hands that are ahead of your opponent’s range or hands that can flop well. For example, ATo isn’t usually a hand you’d 3bet, but it figures to be ahead of someone who’s raising 32% of their hands. Likewise, mid suited connectors and suited single-gappers can flop big.
I prefer raising to calling since it tends to isolate the bad player and gives you a shot at him heads-up. For that reason I tend to isolate limpers more often than raisers since there’s less risk involved.
Watch Out For the Sharks
Be aware that you’re not the only person preying on your mark. There will probably be one or two good players trying to take a shot at him too and they might get annoyed with you hogging all the action. If you want to keep feeding, you’ll have to adjust to the good players too. Here’s how I do it:
1. I don’t isolate with every hand. I only use premium hands or quality speculative ones. No trash unless I’m on the button and the blinds are passive or I have a good squeeze opportunity.
2. Cultivate a tight/aggressive image. If you seem loose, the TAGs will stop respecting your isolation plays.
3. Watch out for obvious plays. I was playing on Cake once and was hammering a really bad player who called raises in the small blind and check/folded a lot. I raised from the cutoff, he called in the small blind and a strong TAG 3bet from the big blind. This is a textbook squeeze spot so I put in a 4bet and took the pot down. Decent players will make plays on you, but they’ll be obvious. Exploit them.
4. Throw some scraps to the sharks. You don’t have to be involved in every pot your mark plays. Lay down your weaker hands if there’s another shark that’s keen on a kill. By avoiding other sharks, you’ll reduce your variance. If you’re confident in your skills and are rolled for the stakes you play, you can fight the sharks. Otherwise, avoid them.
* * *
Poker is a predatory game. A there’s a definite food chain that develops. Seek out the weak players and avoid the strong ones.
This tip is one of the most obvious and overlooked tips in poker. If you want to make an obscene amount of money in poker, all you have to do is play worse players.
