Very briefly, the challenge stipulated that I start with $20 on my favourite poker site bwin.com and the idea is to carefully build that into something more substantial. Surely my years of writing about poker stand me in good stead for this challenge I thought, but there were initial teething problems when I first sat down at the poker tables. Most of the problems were my own approach to the lower limits and until I had a semi-tilting chat session over Skype with a poker friend of mine I feared the challenge was going to end in failure. I would be pretty embarrassed to have to admit that.

My first sessions started with me being too liberal from early and middle position and it is vital for the lower limits and micro limits in particular that you are tight. There is no room for making fancy plays at this level, something I was woefully ignorant to in my early hands. When you have a good hand you bet and when you do not, you fold. It is really as simple as that and therefore your sessions are decided largely on your cards. Players are inclined to call with anything so checking the flop to barrel on the turn does not do you much good. I am just sorry it took 25% of my bankroll to confirm this concept I was already aware of in my mind!

$5 down with my bankroll begging me to re-evaluate I took a break and looked over a few hands. I was disgusted to see the sorts of hands I write articles about and criticise. Not good for an aspiring poker writer and player to admit so I gave myself a harsh verbal bashing and returned to the tables. My friend over Skype said “When you get something you bet, bet, bet like a madman”. What he meant was bet hard and do not be overly creative. A heavy dose of that strong poker pill immediately cured my fancy-play-itis and I returned to the bwin.com virtual felt a new man.

After much more simple poker that was a little boring I emerged a winner from those games and less than a dollar down overall. A 5% tuition fee was a small price to pay in order to learn that the fancy plays must be backed up with a solid foundation of ABC poker. I hope to carry on from where I left off and continue to improve my bankroll. Confidence is key in poker and I finished the session at the right time and am looking forward to my next one.

Stay tuned for more updates on my poker challenge and perhaps we will face off on the bwin.com poker tables in the near future.

By Malcolm Clarke

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Liv Boeree

Liv was an Astrophysics graduate from Manchester, UK who moved to London and took part in Phil Hellmuth’s “Ultimatepoker.com Showdown” reality TV show where six poker newbies were taught the game. Carrying on an interest in Poker after the show she became Gutshot TV’s representative at the WSOP in 2006 and began playing poker more seriously. Her English accent and good looks have kept her in high demand and she recently signed a sponsorship deal with a large poker room that many people on the Internet have claimed will earn her in the region of $35,000 per month. When studying her Astrophysics back at University Liv would have never believed she would end up being a professional poker player travelling the world as a model and player. Liv is regularly featured in many of the Poker magazines that are issued monthly in the UK.

Lacey Jones

Lacey is a model and poker player who is constantly in demand in America as the face of many poker products and tournaments. She has a very big presence in Las Vegas. She often interviews people for pokernews and her website is laceypoker.com. She loves to play and admits that she was a bookworm at school and plays up to the image of being a “dumb blonde” which could not be further from the truth. Watch out guys, she is very smart! She has a degree in Political Science/French from the University of Arizona and has attended Law School. She speaks fluent French which she perfected after a spell of living in Paris. Lacey is sponsored by Absolute Poker and in her spare time she enjoys reading books on Quantum Physics. Clever girl!

Michelle Orpe

Michelle got her big break in Poker presenting live on TV on Sky Poker where with an expert panellist she analysed the play from the various ongoing tables on the Poker Channel. Prior to that she was a presenter for a motorsports show. After doing this for a while she got a sponsorship deal at Purple Lounge and travelled the world dealing at poker tournaments, compering at events and playing in UK poker events and WSOP events. She recently landed the cushy job as presenter of the European Poker Tour for Pokerstars. It looks like the sky is the limit for Michelle in Poker and you will see more and more from her on Poker TV in the coming weeks and months I’m sure!

All of these attractive ladies have done very well for themselves carving a place in Poker thanks to good looks and plenty of brains. There are those that argue poker should refrain from sponsoring good looking girls and sponsor the good players instead, but we all know sex sells. But do not let their good looks or table flirting fool you, they want your chips and are good enough poker players to take them!

By Malcolm Clarke

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Dead Man’s Hand

In true Wild West fashion, this hand owes its name to cowboys, gunslingers, the gold rush and, of course, poker. Back in 1874 when gold was discovered out in the Black Hills, many prospectors and travelers quickly made their way there and established a town known as Deadwood, a place known for its wealth as well as its lawlessness, as bandits and thieves came and went to prey upon the countless gold miners in the area. Two years later, Mr. James Butler Hickok, commonly known as the gunslinger Wild Bill Hickok, traveled to the town himself. While little is known about the true reason why Wild Bill went to the town, one thing is for certain; it would be his final destination.

While at a local poker game in a saloon, Wild Bill settled down for a few hands of poker, one of his few vices in the world. There, while in the midst of drawing a hand, a long gunman walked into the room and shot Wild Bill in the back of the head, killing him instantly. As he fell forward, his hand was revealed, showing a pair of Aces, a pair of eights and a fifth unknown card. Because of the infamy of the event of the death of one of the most famous gunmen in the West, the hand quickly became superstitious to poker players around the world, and to this day remains in skepticism when drawn in a game.

The Texas Dolly

Back in the World Series of Poker (WSOP) in 1976 and 1977, over three decades ago, this hand became famous in its own right when it won Doyle “Texas Dolly” Brunson the championship title two years in a row. Up against well-established opponents in both rounds, Brunson entered into the final round of the championship in 1976 against an experienced player carrying only a 10-2; while his opponent (Jesse Alto at the time, a well-known player in his own right,) started off with a much more appealing Ace-Jack. As the game progressed and an A-J-10 was laid on the table, Brunson looked like he was in trouble, holding only a pair of 10s while Alto had a pair of Aces and Jacks. When the turn yielded a 2 to give both players a full house, Brunson went all in, putting the pressure on Alto. Alto naturally accepted, and when the river revealed another 10 Brunson successfully made a full house and took the championship.

The following year, Brunson found himself in exactly the same position again, holding a 10-2 against his opponent (Bones Berland this time,) who held an 8-5. The flop yielded a 10-8-5 to give Berland two pair, with the turn giving another 2, placing each player in a position with two pair. Berland went all-in this time, and when the river gave Brunson another 10, for a second full house in a row, the championship was sealed once more and the “Texas Dolly” hand went down in history.

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They have looked shocked when I have declined. In nearly all cases, the players involved had only been successful online and in my mind, that does not constitute automatic success in live poker games. Streetwise live players will come at you in numerous different ways that online players cannot and this was why I decided to combine online poker and live poker play in my articles.

Don’t expect hand charts or tables or hundreds of hand examples in any of my articles. These articles are about playing poker at an expert level and hopefully will go into areas that few other articles don’t. I expect to get criticism for some of the material are in my articles.

To that I say fine, bring it on. I have used material and strategies because I use them personally and I know that they work and I really have no problem with criticism when I know myself to be dong the right things that work for me personally. But getting back to my all time favourite poker saying, come on now, you remember…… “evolution not revolution”, it would shock the vast number of people just how long that it actually takes a player to totally evolve.

So how long does it take a player to evolve? How long is a piece of string? It all depends on numerous factors just like most things do in poker. It depends on where you received your poker education from, it depends on how current and up to date that education is and how qualified the person giving the advice is.

It depends on how good the author is at imparting what he knows. It depends on just how well the student comprehends what he reads. It depends how much ongoing work the student does on their game. It depends on how pertinent the information is as all good material is not necessarily conducive to winning you money.

I could go on all day quoting obstacles and questions and the more that I think about this subject the more question marks crop up and the more I could mention. But one of the key areas that I have just touched on is regarding information that is “pertinent”.

This is absolutely vital because there are literally thousands upon thousands of poker sources out there that a player can get their education from. There are some great poker books out there but many of them (even strategy books) are not conducive to earning you money.

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

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It is a well known but not often contemplated fact that the material that is inside poker books ages along with the book itself and this leaves much of the current material out of date for the modern game and especially the online poker game. Then we have problems arising from the authors of even world renowned books making generalised statements because they simply do not know each individual reader personally.

To be fair, they have no choice because understanding every single person who buys your book is impossible. Selecting the advice that is worth following and taking on board from the stuff that isn’t is really very difficult for most people. Only when you get to a very significant level of understanding and sophistication can you really ascertain the good from the bad.

One of my all time favourite statements with regards learning poker for novice players is “evolution not revolution”. I love this statement because it brings together in three short words what all poker players should be trying to do. This is to make the goal of mastering the game (if that can ever be done) or earning money a far off goal.

But the problem with today’s modern world is that people crave success and results almost with immediate effect. Whether it is losing weight, being richer, making a business successful or becoming a successful poker play….people want it sooner rather than later.

People see poker on television and in magazines and on the internet and then hear about players winning six and seven figure sums of money. They learn about professional players who play the game for a living who don’t even have to leave their own homes as they can play online poker.

All this news and hype is highly seductive by nature and leads to people wanting to emulate the people that they read about and because many of these people have started online, they feel that all this is within their grasp. So now we have millions of people worldwide who crave to either pack up their jobs to play poker or to make the game a serious revenue stream for themselves.

I was very lucky when I started out in online poker back in 2002. Why is this so? Simple, the overall calibre of players back then was nothing like what it is today. I was able to play online and make a living while only having a fraction of the technical skills that today’s online professionals have.

I basically learnt my trade as I went along and slowly adapted to online poker adapting. But the new generation of poker player is entering into a much tougher world than the one that I entered just a few short years.

Actually this all makes me sound like some old time road gambler from the swinging sixties and does not sound like I am only talking about eight years ago when I first played poker professionally. I would stick my neck out and say that I would like to meet the man (or woman) who has studied and worked harder on their game than I have.

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

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I think that one of the most important things that any player will come to realise when they first start out in poker is that you are not going to master this game in any short time frame. In my mind, poker is as difficult a subject to learn and master as any other out there in my opinion. It’s a bit like studying outer space, the more that you study and learn then you realise that what you are actually looking at is an awful lot bigger than you first thought.

But even so, reading any material that you thought would not teach you anything can still throw up surprises. The mistakes that I was referring to earlier were mistakes in how I was going about learning the game of poker.

I started out just like most players, I read as many books as I could lay my hands on and just read and read and read. Reading and educating yourself is not necessarily a bad thing of course but the problem with reading gambling material is that most people who are reading it are contemplating at some stage with putting what they have read into practice and in gambling, this means putting their own money at risk.

It is a lot different to reading a book on say the industrial revolution. If the author of that book has failed to do his research or is incorrect with his opinions and conclusions then the only harm done is that the reader will now have the same incorrect and warped opinions as the author. But it is a lot different with gambling books because the people who are reading them are doing so because they are seeking education in that field with a view to putting what they have learnt into action.

This is the major difference but an even greater obstacle which confronts players who begin their poker journey in this way is that they find it very difficult to distinguish between good books and bad books and good authors and bad authors. I want to take a further look at this in part two as I feel that it merits a several part discussion so do please look out for that.

But even if you successfully learn to differentiate the good from the bad, then a whole host of different problems are waiting for you around the corner. For instance, the poker world is a forever changing moving landscape and this makes learning poker from books problematic.

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

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First and foremost, one of your first stops should be to find a starting hand chart relevant to the poker game you are interested in. There is no one set chart out there as poker players and professionals alike are constantly debating over what may be a stronger or weaker starting hand, yet a solid-looking chart from a respected and trustworthy source will help give you a good idea of what you yourself should be looking for when you go about your poker plays.

While examining this chart, pay careful attention to the mid-range hands and the best possible hands to get, as well as what plays are generally associated with them. Statistically speaking, you are not likely to regularly receive one of the top starting hands; after all, that is why they’re considered the top hands in the first place. By focusing instead on a more comprehensive view and examining the mid-range hands as well as the top possible hands, you can give yourself a better overall understanding of how to best use what you are dealt in any particular round.

Carefully examining some possible plays that  players could make based on the different starting hands can also help give you a better understanding of how your opponents may act should they receive one of these hands as well. This knowledge can allow you to better anticipate what cards they may be holding, and you can use this to your own advantage. Of course, this isn’t a guaranteed way to successfully anticipate what they may have or how they may react, as there are countless different starting charts and approaches available out there for different players to use, but many similarities still exist between them and close examination for improved insight is worth more than anything you would otherwise be able to glean.

Once you feel you have a good understanding of what starting hands would be most beneficial for you, your next step should be to focus on the plays at hand and your opponents in particular. The early stages of a game can tell you a lot about what to expect from a player, giving you a more solid read on what they may hold later on and how they may act in different situations that may be presented to them. Use the time available to you at the beginning of a game to thoroughly analyze your opponents and get a better picture of what they may be holding in their hands, as well as how they may react to any particular play you will make in your favor.

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Because the pay off seats in tournaments are very heavily weighted towards the top three places, this means that many players who are playing the tournament will rightly or wrongly be taking very substantial risks to try and accumulate chips.

It is an obvious fact that the player that wins the tournament ends up with all the chips. But a tournament is over in a relatively short time frame which means that the players have not got time to hang around. Keep in mind that I am not referring to SNG’s here. This means that many players will be taking risks and going into marginal situations looking to double up because the clock is ticking and other players are increasing their stacks and you run the risk of becoming short stacked if you wait for strong hands and good situations for too long.

Because of this fact then many players shift from tournament poker play to cash game play and don’t slow down enough. I play aggressively in certain situations and often with absolute junk but I am not doing it all the time, I am a long way removed from being overbearingly aggressive. But these super aggressive tournament players are my favourite because they have one gear and one gear only and that gear is fast. They don’t seem to realise that many of them could in fact be successful online poker players if they would only stop haemorrhaging money in the cash games.

The reverse is true of course and many cash game players lose in tournaments simply because they play their same plodding cash game strategy when they sit in a tournament. They play a cash game style and get quite deep into the tournament just missing the money and then think that they were unlucky and that they will eventually win one of them…..an illusion!!

The experienced but not necessarily great tournament players have correctly figured out that rather than just limp in to the money places short stacked, the best way is to simply go for it and take risks and try to accumulate that big stack that will take you to the final table and beyond. This is the type of poker that many players see on television, rapidly escalating blinds with big jumps in prize money from one place to the next. This leads many of them to get a totally skewed view of just what is exactly happening.

This is something that you yourself are going to have to guard against if you start to move from tournaments to cash games and vice versa. It is not so critical with SNG’s but you still have to be careful all the same. It can be even more of a problem online where the sheer ease of being able to bet or call is made all that much simpler by not having to physically move chips, all that needs to be done is to click a mouse.

It can be frighteningly easy to simply get swept along with the momentum of online poker and especially when players are multi-tabling and many even multi-table when playing tournaments. This is fine if you are a net plus player but I feel that many players get seduced by this speed and actually get high from it some of them. Then they go into a cash game and need to slow down but cannot do it straight away.

It is a bit like doing high speeds on a motorway for several hours to then come off the motorway onto a much slower road. Before you know it you are travelling fifty miles per hour in a thirty zone because you have not mentally adjusted yet to the decreased pace. This is something that you will definitely need to be aware of if you also start to play a substantial amount of tournaments. Don’t let excellent cash game results be ruined by your craving to play for a big prize pool, many people have made this mistake and paid the penalty for it.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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Many successful live players have failed online and vice versa of course and wondered what the reasons were. Well you need to understand that if you play 20-40 limit hold’em in a live card room then it is not going to be the same online despite the fact that you are still playing 20-40 limit.

Your poker game should be workable in any environment and this was why I needed to add this because any player that can really only play in one or the other is quite handicapped, a bit like a car driver who can only drive automatics and not manuals. For instance many players who have only ever played live poker and especially the older ones can struggle with the vastly accelerated pace of online play.

Especially when those audio prompts start to kick in which I find really off putting when I am contemplating a big decision in a big NL Texas Holdem pot. When that starts to happen, it is very easy to just get swept along with the momentum in some kind of “brain freeze” where all you end up doing is staring at the screen blankly. Likewise if all you have ever played is online poker and you play in a real card room, you have been playing entirely in an environment where showing your emotions does not matter because no one can see you.

But behaving in a way that makes your hand strength an open book to savvy street wise players has turned many a good online player into a live game loser. Also the mentality of the players can change as well from site to site, do not make the mistake of thinking that all of the sites are the same. This was another mistake that I made early in my career. I used to assume that the players on any one site would be more or less the same mix….wrong.

I was a very good Limit Hold’em player early in my career and yet I was struggling to get ahead early in my semi-professional career (before I turned pro). Then the reason for me dragging my heels struck me. I was playing on a site that was populated very heavily by Americans and the players over there are far more skilled on average at Limit play than anywhere else, I mean that is the form of poker that they are brought up with. The Europeans just do not play limit poker in any quantity, it is pot limit over here and pot limit Omaha especially.

Then it hit me, my edge would be seriously diminished by playing against more skilled players, sure I was earning money but it wasn’t enough. I am a far better Limit player now than I was then and I have to confess that this may have attributed for part of the problem at that time but the fact remains that you want to be playing on a site where your edge is at its maximum.

So I shifted my action to European sites whenever I was playing Limit Hold’em and never looked back. Suddenly I was playing the same game but this time against Europeans who did not understand that game on average as well as the Americans. Now that I have switched to playing No Limit, the game is so widely played and so well known that I cannot see any discernable difference between the players in Europe from America on the whole.

Also even in No Limit Holdem poker games, there are subtle differences from players that come from different countries. Some are more aggressive than others, some like to limp in and see flops while others will only enter the pot raising. It is well worth being aware of the geographical location of the players on your table and what this could potentially mean.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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Where do you think you will earn the most money over time. Let us say that you want to play 10-20 limit Texas Hold em poker and site A offers a $600 sign up bonus if you buy in for enough while site B offers nothing. But site A is populated by US players who on average are much stronger at Limit play than Europeans while site B is populated entirely by Europeans.

At site A, your earn rate is 1.25 big bets per hour ($25) while at Site B, your earn rate is 1.75 big bets per hour ($35). Playing even part time (20 hours per week), the difference in an average week will be $200 between site A and the much better site B. It would take you less than a month to claw back the difference of the $600 sign up bonus. For a full time working poker pro, the difference in sites is over $20,000 per year. Imagine the difference if the game was 50-100 and not 10-20 and we had the same differential in earn rates, that would make the difference $100,000 per year.

Who in heavens name can afford to throw away that kind of money, the point is that people don’t even realise that they are and all because they wanted the feeling of initially being ahead by $600 at the very beginning and some sites don’t even offer bonuses as high as that. But this is also the reason why many very good players fail in poker. They know that they are good and because they are losing money, they think that this should not be happening and that the poker site is crooked.

Game selection is a critical part of poker and is a major factor for why players fail. Let us take that difference of $100,000 in the last example. If a player who would have earned $64,000 playing at site B had played at site A, then this would have meant that he had now LOST $36,000 and would have left him scratching his head as to the reason because he knows how good he is.

But sometimes in poker it is not enough to be good or very good for that matter. Fine so we can say that many players think that they are good when they are not but I am talking about the ones who ARE good here and they could still lose because of poor game selection. So you not only have to be a very good player but you also have to measure your skill against the opposition. Let us finish with an obvious statement, if you are not better than your opposition then how can you possibly earn money? I think that the lessons are clear here don’t you?

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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