I admire any player that can sit down at the online poker tables and emerge sane ten or more hours later. It is a skill that I do not possess. I cannot blame the wonderful bwin poker tables, which use great software or even the risk of losing money because you can play poker for free at bwin, it is simply the way I am made. I move from one thing to the next and am constantly searching for ways to feel fulfilled. When poker fails to do that I move onto something else. Because of this funny quirk in my character I must find ways to stay on the game in Poker.

One way was to start a poker website and I say you take any advantage you can get in this tough poker climate. That advantage could even be grinding freeroll tournaments but whatever works for you I say do it. For me, writing is my saviour but writing is no fun at all unless someone reads it. So thank you, by the way, for reading this and thus making me feel a lot better!

When you play poker you must stay focused and you must really focus on thoroughly going through each decision properly in every hand. When you start clicking before thinking that really is the time to switch off. For volume players it can easily become a game of instinct so you need a keen eye on how you are feeling at all points of the game. There is a difference between feeling tired after a long session and feeling bored with poker and you must be able to spot the difference and act accordingly. A small comfort break, a complete break or a can of Red Bull. Which one works? That depends on the situation and you remembering some wise words; know thyself.

My website also helps me to learn strategy thanks to various submissions by dedicated writers and websites that I post articles for. Research is very important and if anything I have the balance tipped more in favour of study than playing. Many players suffer the opposite but having a poker blog is excellent if you tend to play and not leave enough time for assessing your game thanks to hand history review sessions and other reviews coming a distant second to getting your targets met in terms of volume for the month.

Playing winning poker in 2010 is about volume and efficiency. I advocate a look at your game and a careful look at what makes you tick as a person. I have found a little trick in running my site that helps me get the hands in that I want to each month. You might have another trick like having friends review your hands which makes you try hard so you make less errors. Like I say, whatever works and makes you a stronger force at the poker tables; do it.

By Malcolm Clarke

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When playing online poker we have the benefit of clever poker software to help us see these trends, but I am purist who believes the true poker player does not use such pieces of software that could become a crutch. I prefer to spot things myself as this indicates true progress in my poker game. The use of software is not nearly as satisfying.

Much of this two part feature will help the live poker player as well as the online poker player. Remember that bwin.com, my favourite poker site, offers you the opportunity to win satellite poker tournaments to gain seats to many large poker tournaments that offer huge prize money for those players good enough to excel in them. Much of what we discuss can also be used in online poker, particularly the classifying of opponents betting patterns.

Tight or Loose, Passive or Aggressive?

The first classification you should make is the overall style your opponents use. A poker player who plays tight plays few hands, usually in position and you can guess that the hands he does choose to play are probably the high pairs like AA, KK, QQ, JJ, and TT down to 66. The other hands that are likely holdings are AK, AQ, AJ, KQ, KJ and QJ. Really tight players may not play anything lower than 88 or KQ. Loose players will visibly play a lot more hands and be constantly involved in pots. This suggests their range is significantly wider than the tight player and a very loose player could literally have any two cards. Whilst this makes them vulnerable to stronger hole cards, they can catch concealed monsters so these players are by no means weak if they know what they are doing.

Passive or aggressive play links in with their overall tight or loose style. A tight player must put their chips into the pot aggressively to make up for the blinds they lose and the multiple hands they fold due to their tightness. Aggressive players raise and bet three quarters to a full pot most of the time so it is expensive in terms of chips to contest a pot against them. This forces opponents to make a decision early on how they wish to proceed in the hand. Think of Tom “durrrr” Dwan in cash games, he builds the pot and makes his opponents uneasy about playing against him because they know a bit pot is coming.

If you spot a player that is playing tightly but then passively when they enter a pot this suggests they are “scared money” and not willing to gamble enough to accumulate chips. An aggressive style against this player should pay dividends. Watch the hands revealed at showdown because sometimes a tight player is not passive, but playing trappy and slow playing strong hands. This is also a beatable style because when they are betting strongly it is with either a marginal hand or a bluff. I used to unwittingly use this style and wonder why I did not get action on the hands I checked in rather than bet. It was because the opponents knew I was strong, because otherwise I would be betting!

We have much more to discuss in this article. Please click on Part 2 for the next section of this feature.

By Malcolm Clarke

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After broadly classifying your opponent’s style you need to drill further into discovering how they play. You need a good memory because in a tournament you will meet many players if you do well and cash games can see a high turnover of players. You need to learn how every opponent plays strong hands like two pair or better, how they play dangerous boards and to what extent their perception of hand values change, how they play draws, how they exercise pot control and whether they can make a value bet on the river and whether they overbet pots as bluffs or value raises. Aren’t you pleased poker is such an easy game?

The way to analyse these things is by closely following the action and before you make a bet against these players always ask yourself the following questions.

• Is my opponent good enough to understand exactly what he is doing?
• What does he think about how I am playing?
• What was the outcome of a hand played in a similar way to this in the past? Is he/she repeating for the same outcome? If not, does that suggest a bluff?
• From what I calculate their style to be, is there an opportunity for me to win the pot outright?

Stop for a moment. All of these questions cloud the key concept of poker that you must be aware of throughout each and every hand you play, your own hand strength. It would be very easy for me (and I have done this many times) to work out a player could be on a bluff or is playing passively and who should think I am tight, and then make an ill-timed bluff with such a weak hand it was not worth it. Sometimes you know the opponent is bluffing but you must nevertheless live to fight another day.

Therefore, there is one last point to remember when considering the above questions and that is,

• Does my own hand strength allow me to engage in this situation or is it simply too weak?

Creative plays are fine and it is always good to read your opponents and understand what sort of hand you are going to engage in, but do not be afraid to impose your own style on the hand. ABC Poker is a powerful style in its own right. Sometimes it is best not to get too engrossed in the technical poker concepts we have discussed and bet because you want to build a pot because you think you are ahead! Many amateur players bet because they have a good hand not realising more complex ideas that support their decision. My poker game has shown much improvement recently when I went back to basics and stopped paralysing my mind with analysis.

There is a balance between using the ideas above and your fundamental understanding of poker to decide what to do in a hand. I completely believe that being able to rationalise your thinking using the ideas listed above and in Part 1 will become very helpful for those inevitable tough decisions we all face in our poker games. That is when extra knowledge is helpful and in today’s modern online and live poker environment there is really no excuse for not learning and studying as much about poker as you can.

Hopefully the discussion here has helped you as much as it has helped me to write it! Good luck on the poker tables.

By Malcolm Clarke

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Such is the respect given to Jennifer in the poker world she was asked by Doyle Brunson to write the chapter on Limit Hold’em when he was collating information for Super System 2, the sequel to his best-selling Super System book released in the 1970’s. Jennifer has gone on the record to say she was surprised at this request but was honoured to oblige. Many readers have said this particular chapter in the book is very useful and among the highlights of the poker book. Most of the high stakes professionals say that Jennifer is the best female player of all time.

Primarily a cash game player who admits to enduring swings of over $1 million in one day playing high stakes poker Jennifer has also manufactured a good reputation as a poker tournament specialist with over $2 million in live cashes in tournaments all around the world. She is the only woman to have won 2 WSOP bracelets in open events and these wins were in 2000, where she won the $5,000 No Limit Deuce-to-Seven Draw event for $146,250 and in 2002 where she won the $5,000 Limit Hold’em even for $212,440. One bizarre quirk in her poker tournament record is that Jennifer has never cashed in the main event of the WSOP.

When Andy Beal decided to challenge the entire poker playing community at stakes of $100,000 – $200,000 poker professionals were forced to pool their resources to challenge the banking king in 2006. Jennifer was part of “The Corporation” of poker players who played Andy and subsequently beat him for over $10 million. Andy has not returned to challenge the poker players since that time. Jennifer played well throughout but it was Phil Ivey who overturned a $10.6 million deficit to Beal into a $6 million overall win.

You would be wrong, however, to dismiss Jennifer as a lucky poker player who has led a charmed life. She has had more than her share of problems and has had to bounce back from numerous health difficulties including organ failure. In 2004 she was forced to take a year off from poker when she suffered from kidney failure. Her niece donated a kidney to Jennifer that saved her life and she fortunately made a full recovery. During her time off she founded Creating Organ Donation Awareness (CODA) and she is also an active fundraiser for the NSPCA. She has raised well over $1 million for charitable causes she supports.

Jennifer is involved with Full Tilt Poker but is one of the less high-profile members of the team. She continues to play high stakes cash games and according to reports, continues to be profitable in the highest stakes cash games. She regular appears on TV shows like Poker After Dark and High Stakes Poker.

By Malcolm Clarke

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The poker room and sportsbook bwin.com offer a variety of freeroll poker tournaments that can both offer you the chance to win money for nothing and also familiarise yourself with their unique dark brand of table design, which I find very easy on the eye (and you will appreciate this after a long spell at the online poker tables).

Before you sign into the poker client and create your account it is worth looking at the brands that bwin.com sponsor. It is a list of some of the biggest sports teams and brands in the world. Real Madrid, Bayern Munich and MotoGP are just some of the names supported by bwin.com. Do you think that an unscrupulous business could afford to support these large brands and be their principle sponsors? Of course not and this amazing list of sponsors shows us that bwin.com the real deal and a big player in the world of online gaming.

The good people are bwin.com want you to enjoy your online poker experience. They understand that some people can get addicted and they care about their customers. There is a dedicated section on the bwin.com website that researches gambling behaviour and reports on their findings. They offer detailed information on the tell tale signs to look out for in both yourself and family or friends. There is the option to limit what you can bet or deposit and, if necessary, a self-exclusion facility. Their commitment to customers means that bwin.com has information from the Harvard medical school and the United Nations World Health Organization to help identify potential gambling problems for customers with concerns. Of course only some poker players have problems and many players who read our articles and play on the site enjoy a sensible relationship with online poker.

There are over 30,000 bets in over 90 sports each and every day offered by bwin.com in 22 different languages. Their customer base is estimated to be over 20 million customers, or should we say 20 million customers that trust bwin.com to deliver a great online poker and online sports betting experience. There is no reason for bwin.com to cheat their customers in the way other online poker rooms have done because they are fortunate enough to be an established business at the top of their market. There is far more to gain by being reputable and trustworthy when you are the size of bwin.com and much more to lose by acting improperly. Their customer service and quick depositing and withdrawal procedures gives real peace of mind.

You can see that I am a big fan of the whole gaming experience you can enjoy at bwin.com but you should try it out for yourself. There is still time to qualify for the WSOP Main Event at bwin.com in their satellite program and compete for large bonus prizes in their tournament leagues. They are so confident that you will love their poker software that they allow you to demo the poker client without downloading it to your computer! What other site does that?

Visit bwin.com today and join with millions of other users who trust and enjoy betting on sports and poker at their site.

By Malcolm Clarke

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A player on the site posted a video of the security flaw on YouTube. For those of you who missed this video follow this link to view it. The vulnerability apparently relates to either unsecured wireless networks, cracked wireless networks or hard wired connections to the Internet where your password is known. The data packets sent to through the networked are intercepted by the hacker and decoded. After decoding a special program identifies the cards and they are visible to the player on the poker table unbeknownst to the rest of the table. The speed of the program allows an almost instant revealing of the hole cards. Knowledge of your hole cards would see opponents make perfect decisions on your hands and you would be unable to avoid losing to the cheaters.

The Cereus network is said to have been informed of this encryption issue and are seeking to resolve this as soon as possible. The vulnerability is not isolated to the online poker hole cards however. A cyber attacker could use this method to obtain your personal information via obtaining your password and they could hack into your account and lose all of your bankroll deliberately. This has happened before when an AOL mail vulnerability caused many players, including online superstar Pearljammer to suffer a loss of bankroll in this way. Due to the difficulty of catching the perpetrators due to the anonymity of the Internet this type of crime puts players particularly at risk and any vulnerability which accentuates these risks mark a serious online poker security risk.

Whilst it is recommended that players do not play on unsecured wireless networks because data packets sent from any website can be intercepted and maliciously decoded, there must also now be a serious consideration made whether playing at this network is sensible. The XOR-based encoding used by Cereus is notoriously vulnerable to hackers yet this network preferred this method to the more secure SSL encryptions. It is clear from watching the video that while most people would not have the knowledge to get as far as decoding hands the mere fact it can be done is a fatal flaw for the cereus network software. There is no suggestion at the moment that this security flaw was known by Cereus.

Players concerned about their online poker security should forward any queries to their poker room but rest assured that with the exception of these two poker rooms and their network there have been few instances where vulnerability has been exposed. It is clear that people like the makers of the video are constantly testing the security of different poker sites looking for exploitable flaws and the fact no such vulnerability has been reported on a site like bwin.com where I play a lot of my poker speaks volumes for their ability to securely encrypt their poker software.

Security for players is paramount; therefore my recommendation for downloading the poker client offered by bwin.com might be the solution you are looking for if you are currently uncertain about where to play poker.

By Malcolm Clarke

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Fortunately it is equally difficult for your opponents to tell you how good they are. This means that the weaker players who you win money from will come back to the table for a combination of reasons believing they can beat the game and make money from playing poker. They will assess bad play as bad luck and therefore believe next time things will work out better for them. Often this is simply wrong, but without these types of players at your table you may be unable to win money. I never tell a player he is rubbish, or berate them for bad play even if they put a bad beat on me as I worry they may suddenly realise I have a point and stop playing. You should always give yourself the chance to win your money back.

Analysing your own play is a difficult to do. Often it is best to seek the advice of a poker coach and provide them with your Pokertracker or Poker Office database and let them look at your stats in their own time. You may have to pay them to undertake this analysis but the feedback you get especially if they spot a weakness that is losing you money could be worth much more to you than a small payment for their time and effort. A friend of mine noticed through this process that he was losing a lot of money playing pocket pairs from under the gun. Now that he folds everything apart from Queens, Kings and Aces from that position he is doing a lot better.

If you can discuss poker strategy with a good player this suggests you are technically competent. Your ability and inclination to gamble plays a part as when the pot gets bigger not everyone can play their best poker at that point. The metagame skills you have are very important as you will have guessed reading many of the other articles I have written. It is not just whether you fold, check or raise but how you arrive at those decisions and being in the optimal frame of mind to allow that decision to be made when required leads to profits.

The biggest indicator to your level of poker ability is your results. Although short term results, especially in poker tournaments, can show a high profit from a small sample size it is the ability to win money from playing poker over time that we all strive to achieve and maintain. Consistent cash game winnings point to a consistent able poker player and we all want to show our ability through winnings over time. These winnings emanate from dedication, ability, composure and persistence. All of these things are the ingredients to a good poker player, and you should spend as much time as you can improving in each and every one of these elements.

I play my online poker at bwin.com and constantly take notes, make observations about my state of mind and mental status. I know that if I play the hands the way I can play them I have an advantage over many of the players I encounter online. Poker is a game that rewards good decisions over time and only the good players make good decisions more often. You will make mistakes, but as you learn about why you made mistakes in the past and learn from them this will help fundamental errors being reduced to a minimum and then only variance will affect your short term results.

By Malcolm Clarke

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What you can see in terms of emotion during a tense poker hand is always related to poker as the human body reacts to what it is thinking about. You can therefore link whatever you can see in terms of emotional clues from your opponent directly to their hand strength. Hiding emotion is very difficult as human beings are designed to give out emotion. We all know that most communication between us is none verbal so firstly realise that to sit and give nothing away is not something that poker players or anyone else finds very easy to do. Very few players give nothing away, if any.

Let’s assume we are bluffing in a hand and our opponent tanks and starts thinking hard about what to do while watching us intently. As time passes we feel worse and worse about the situation and you might start shaking, nervously moving, gulping or breathing fast. Note how your body aches to give something away and how uneasy you feel during the time your opponent is in thought. You want to do something, anything! Even if you start smiling and saying how much you want called as a reverse psychological ploy you are still giving away these none verbal tells.

When you are looking for involuntary tells every movement from your opponent counts. Watch for opponents breathing, blinking, staring too hard, shaking, tapping or shuffling. Focus on what they are doing rather than what they are saying because all too often verbal things will be deliberately misleading or double bluffs so you cannot be sure it is truthful. Body movements, ticks or habitual movements are much harder to conceal and players are rarely aware of them. In their mind they are Chris Ferguson in their approach. Do not let on you know different, simply use the information to help you in key poker decisions.

These sorts of live tells are similar to using online poker software when you are playing online. Knowing that a player is bluffing can be spotted through betting patterns online and using heads up displays to show their normal tendencies. In a live setting, watching the players gulp nervously at a key moment tells you a lot even if they are deliberately misleading you with enigmatic table talk at the same time.

If you watch High Stakes Poker you will see a hand where Tom “durrrr” Dwan makes a bluff against Phil Ivey that Ivey very nearly calls. Watch how nervous Tom is during the hand. Ivey eventually folds as his hand was weaker than some of the hands Tom might be gulping over but Dwan is obviously nervous. If a great player that like that struggles to hide his emotions at a key poker moment, you can definitely spot weakness in others during a poker hand.

Start watching your opponent closely from now on, the truth is out there beneath the fake tells and you can spot them if you become a body language and subtle body movement expert.

By Malcolm Clarke

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The biggest surprise this year has been my performance in online poker tournaments. It makes sense that I have had some decent results as I play an aggressive game where I am happy to get my chips in if I feel I am ahead. I tend to either bust or build a stack and whilst I am trying to tone this down to more predictable and considered play I understand the importance of getting a stack in the early stages. Remembering you must accumulate most of the tournament chips to get even a reasonable cash this keeps me pumping chips into the pots and hoping for cards to hit that win me these pots!

Most poker player’s talk of their bad luck, but to be honest I have probably been more lucky than unlucky in the last few months. I have won myself a tournament ticket to a large tournament in May and have hopes of winning another big ticket for another tournament shortly. I enjoy these types of freerolls in big tournaments because even min-cashing means a lot. But this does not mean I play to cash, I always plan and play to win every tournament I enter, as you should.

Confession time. I must play more cash games because I have severe work to do in order to make them profitable at a level I want to. This takes work, losses, lessons and hard review. These aspects of learning are all things I resist. I am the type of person who does not box because I do not like to get punched, so losing and paying tuition to cash games in order to learn is not something that comes easily to me. That said I have seen much improvement in my game particularly the tough spots where I used to scratch my head and everything I did seemed to work out wrong. Poker knowledge is as much about knowing you are doing something right rather than getting a result every time. But you need to know you are doing things right so not to kid yourself things that are mistakes are bad luck. Thinking you are unlucky is a great disguise for being a fish!

Currently I am clearing my obligations to only include poker and my main job. This way I can concentrate on getting better and creating that all important poker income. My main leaks in terms of effort are eBay, Playstation 3 and blogging. I must be harsh with myself in order to achieve my poker goals. After all, there is much money to be won in the bwin.com tournaments, cash games and player jackpot tournaments that my wasting time playing games is not helping my poker game.

Modern poker requires dedication, talent and time. I plan on moving up a level in the next six months to test out if I am a good enough player or not to win at the online poker tables. Join me and find out if you are too.

By Malcolm Clarke

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100 Big Blind Stacks in Low Limit Games

I differ from Harrington on Cash Games in that I still play speculative hands when the stacks are a bit smaller than the recommended 200 big blinds. As I play lower stakes games I find players generally buy-in shorter than 200 big blinds anyway but do not adjust that well to these slightly smaller stacks. I am not saying that 100 big blinds are especially short but you should be playing differently to 200 big blind stacks. I will still play mostly premium hands and some connectors in position and I am looking to hit the flop hard and win my opponents entire stack.

What Can You Win?

If you are limping in with a low pocket pair, for example, like 6-6 to hit your set you know that when you are called you will face overcards most of the time after the flop and even without them on a 2-3-5 board you have the wheel to worry about and straights. Your goal is to hit your set. Your opponents stack size should be about 25 big blinds to make it worthwhile for you to compensate for the times you lose when you hit your set; they fold rather than call, and the times you miss hitting your set and are forced to fold. Realise that if you play to hit a set and win 5 big blinds from an opponent about to bust out of the game, it is good you won the pot but you made a mistake chasing a set in this spot.

Playing Deep Stacked Players

Deep stack play is what the professionals love to play because you do not reach a spot betting half pot and pot where the last bet is always all-in. Often it works out this way, but not necessarily. This leaves room for creative and skilful plays and separates the good poker players from the weaker players.

You should bet the pot and be aggressive when the stacks are deep. You will get some folds, some calls and when you win your opponents entire stack this will make up for the time when you lose chips using this aggressive method. Harrington on Cash games volume 1 proves this theory by using tables and math to show why you should play this way. Even as a general concept you should know putting your opponent to a tough decision is the way to beat the game. The math just happens to agree.

I recommend you read the book Harrington on Cash Games volume one and two which goes into great detail on some of things to think about whilst you refine your online poker strategy. Perhaps we will sit on the same online poker table in the future; I play at bwin.com and would highly recommend it as an online poker room with good software and games.

By Malcolm Clarke

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