All this supposes that I play my hand well from the flop onwards of course as any equity that I had would be very quickly evaporated by poor post flop play. But I make plays like this in limit hold’em and no limit play and it once again highlights the fact that you can use tactics in one form of poker and transfer them to a totally different game and they will still be successful.

The game had gone five handed as one player had taken some time out to visit the bathroom and another player was down in the pit area betting on roulette. It always amazes me why poker players do this but then again I ought to be grateful that such avid gamblers were present in my game. I held the Ac-Ks-10d-9s which is a fair hand and especially five handed.

The player who was under the gun limped in and the player to my immediate right raised the pot. Now a few years ago the way that I would have played this hand would have differed greatly to how I have played it here. When I first started playing PLO in full ring games then I would have folded a hand like this as I would have assessed that many of my cards that I needed to make my hand would have been dead. As I played Omaha more and more and played in games that were short handed or semi-short handed then it became apparent to me that this type of play was too tight. It also became apparent to me how much gambling that there actually was in PLO and that the better players accepted this as part of the game. I also think that another factor in how certain players play their hands is in how big their bankrolls are. I have a far bigger bankroll these days and a much different attitude to risk.

The only problem with taking aggressive action with hands like these is that sometimes you can be up against passive players who have limped in with aces.

Many players don’t see the point in raising pre-flop in Omaha or don’t like raising pre-flop. I can understand this philosophy if they have poor position but having position on your opponents is a different story and I don’t agree with this line of thought at all. In my mind, when I play PLO then I treat it the same as when I used to play blackjack and this is that I am basically gambling but with a slight +EV. I really don’t think that my ROI is all that high in PLO but this is compensated by the fact that I am putting more money into play. Look out for part two coming soon of this article.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson
Author – “Winning Cash Game Poker”
Why not come to bwin and play poker tournaments?

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

But what established Brunson in the public eye was a combination of two further factors. The first being his second world title success the following year in 1977 when he strangely won the title again while holding the same hand (10-2) and making a full house with it on both final hands in 1976 and 1977.

But I think that another hugely contributing factor towards the fame that Brunson enjoys now was the launch in 1978 of the book that went onto achieve legendary status amongst poker books.

That book was called Supersystem or as many people are unaware, How I made over $1,000,000 playing poker which was its original title before it actually became known as Supersystem. This was a hugely adventurous book to attempt to compile at the time, in fact the sheer size of the book to anyone who has ever seen it is still very impressive even now…..a full thirty years later.

But for me, the most distinguishing features of the book was the sheer ground breaking knowledge that was incorporated into Brunson’s section on no limit Texas Holdem and the fact that he had somehow managed to gather five of the top poker minds in the world to help him compile the book.

Non other than the then reigning world champion Bobby Baldwin, David “Chip” Reese who went onto to become arguably the greatest poker player who ever lived, David Sklansky who is perhaps the foremost poker theorist in the world, Mike Caro and Joey Hawthorne.

Even the legendary Amarillo Slim wrote the preface for the book so Supersystem was literally compiled by the who’s who of the poker world at that time. But it was the sheer power of the information that Brunson packed into his section on no limit hold’em that had the entire poker world talking for years to follow.

Brunson’s associates were also writing excellent sections on Draw Poker, Seven Card Stud, Lowball, High Low Split and Limit Hold’em in the book. However as the years have progressed, much of the information in many of those sections is now out of date.

For instance the blind structure in the limit games has changed and the split games now use a qualifier for low and Draw poker is rarely played these days.

But despite that, the quality of the information inside this one poker book has led to various people quoting all sorts of superlatives with regards the book. Words like “great”, “ground breaking”, “legendary”, “unique” and “the poker bible” have been used frequently and in this particular case were well deserved. Look out for part two of this multi-part series.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

You intend on playing at a fair level and are looking to start in the $20-$40 poker game on your favorite site. You have what is considered to be an adequate bankroll by many leading experts and mathematicians and the prospect of earning an income from poker is exciting you as is the thought of possibly turning professional.

Your first session goes very well indeed and you win over a thousand dollars and your second session is almost as profitable…..life could not be sweeter! Suddenly after a couple of winning sessions, you have your first losing session, followed by another and another and another. You started off with a 300 big bet bankroll of $12,000 but find that your entire winnings have evaporated and with it 150 big bets of your original poker bankroll.

You try to look for reasons for it and cannot find any. The beats have been cruel and constant, you are in there with the best hand and you have lost count of the number of times that you have been outdrawn….how in heavens name can this continue you ask yourself? You find yourself getting frustrated and agitated and even angry and you want an explanation for all this but no one is there to help you.

You are $6000 in the hole and conclude that limit hold’em cannot be working for you so you take your remaining $6000 and play heads up at $50-$100 No Limit Texas hold’em as you figured that you know this game well enough to beat it and that you could get the money back that you lost playing $20-$40 limit in a fraction of the time.

Less than three hours later and the screen prompt is informing you if you would like to buy back in as you are out of funds. How have you lost this money on this table? The answer is academic and you know it because you should not have been on this table anyway.

But why were you on this table in the first place? You may say that you tilted at the thought of being $6000 in the hole at $20-$40 limit, you may also say that you tilted at the brutal outdraws time after time and that many players played as if they had taken leave of their senses….either that or they knew what the cards were, a subject you have seen discussed on several forums and there is no smoke without fire….right!

I have heard tales like this countless times although not always for these amounts of money. But the subject of adequate bankroll sizes is a very complex and difficult subject because depending on individual ability then what constitutes an adequate bankroll for one player may be totally inadequate for someone else.

Even two players of identical ability may need different size bankrolls to avoid going broke depending on what types of games they were playing in and against whom. Look out for part two of this series coming soon.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

So they check and then I bet $130 and the pot is mine as they cannot call with no pair. Here I am using the leverage of our entire stacks to frighten my opponent away. I am using my opponent’s aggression as a weapon against him rather than let their aggression bully me into submission. Sure they will have big pairs sometime and sure they will flop monsters but that is poker. If you do not take risks then you do not win big.

Sometime ago I bought into a $5-$10 no-limit texas hold’ em cash game for $500 and had built it up to $4000 within two hours. I had taken advantage of aggressive players and built my stack up to $800. I re-raised all in with a powerful draw expecting my opponent to fold which he didn’t. I made my draw and doubled up, this made me the second biggest stack on the table and I busted the next biggest stack beneath me when I flopped a concealed straight. This made me the big stack and the rest was easy.

Top players just do not back off that easy

Whenever you see a top poker player in action you will notice that it sometimes takes an awful lot to get them out of a hand when they and their opponent have deep money. They know that their opponents know that they need to be aggressive and they counter this like a martial artist using his opponent’s weight and momentum against them.

Top poker players will call your flop bet with nothing just to see what you do on the turn. If you meekly submit every time an opponent shows aggression then you are going to miss out on an awful lot of opportunities. Obviously this also means that you need to be careful as well. I made the play with the 5-3 because I had a good read on my opponent and it was heads up play, a multi-way pot would have been a different story.

So here we have what is the beginnings of a poker food chain, at the bottom we have all of the passive players and the solid predictable players. The solid ones can make a bit of money because they understand good hands from bad ones etc. But both types tend to only be aggressive with good hands and to only call raises with good hands.

Then we move onto level two and come to the player who has figured out that he can win more pots by being aggressive and all of the pots that they have won playing this way reinforces that belief. They take money from the solid poker players and the passives through their aggression.

But they are like a young boy racer that has just been given the keys to their dad’s high powered Porsche 911. Going fast is easy, all you have to do is put your foot down but you need to know when to back off.

This is where I come in; I take the money from the aggressive boy racers. I hope that this lesson has been very instructive because it highlights something that is very important in poker. That responding to aggression and taking advantage of aggression is the hallmark of a solid poker player.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Sure you can have a great time playing live and it is a far better all round poker experience than playing online that’s for sure. But there are hidden dangers when playing live that may not be overly apparent to our online hero. Depending on where you are playing of course and against whom then the level of danger can differ substantially but rest assured that there is danger there all the same.

You may be up against players who are very experienced and streetwise who will stop at nothing when attempting to try and get your money. In this article we will be taking a look at some of the underhanded tricks and gamesmanship that the online player could potentially face.

Overbetting the Pot

Online poker players do tend to get soft in certain key areas of the game simply because they get used to the online poker sites software doing everything for them. The software deals the cards, shuffles the cards better than any human could, keeps track of the pot and any spilt pots and a whole host of other things. If you are playing pot limit poker online then you really cannot go wrong. Most sites have a “Pot” button that will automatically bet the pot for you and it will also not allow anyone to overbet the pot in pot limit as well.

But this kind of luxury is not afforded to live players in many games, most of who have to keep track of the pot size themselves. Most poker players tend to police the games that they are in very well and in many cases better than even the very best dealers can do simply because they tend to know best when it comes to knowing what to look for.

But in cash games where cash is being used instead of chips or a combination of cash and chips then keeping track of the pot is not always easy and the other players may not be so quick to point out any “deliberate” error when another savvy player “accidentally” bets £740 when the pot is only £620. Imagine the scenario where they have the nuts to your second nut. This tactic of overbetting the pot has escalated the next betting round substantially.

Imagine if this was done on the turn and your opponent bet and you called him. Instead of there only being £1860 in the pot there would now be £2100. Then on the river they bet the pot and you called with your second nut (or even raised), instead of the pot being £5580 it is now £6300. A difference of £720 all because you failed to notice that the pot was being overbet.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson
Come and see all the latest news on the bwin poker blog and its all for FREE!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Whenever I wanted to study a certain form of poker, I would only ever read material on that poker form. This is OK to a degree but there is an awful lot to be learned from reading about other poker forms. It took me an awful long time to realise that I needed to use different strategies depending on what game I was playing in because the opponents were different.

What I am about to divulge to you is the culmination of what I have learned about NL hold’em over the years.

NL hold’em is not a game for big confrontations and especially cash games where the blinds never increase. Yet this is precisely the opposite of what many players do. They end up calling someone in an all in pot with AQ against their KK and think that they played well just because they happened to spike an ace. There is a book out there at this moment in time called “Kill Phil”.

It is a book that is designed for levelling the playing field for novice tournament players when they come up against big players. The title of the book is based around the four famous poker “Phils”. Namely Hellmuth, Ivey, Gordon and Laak and is their catchy name for a top tournament player. In a word, the book tells you how to eliminate a good tournament player’s advantage over you.

The way that the book goes about doing this is to teach the novice what is basically a very aggressive “all in” type strategy at various stages of the poker tournament. What it does is to effectively take most if not all of the post flop skill out of the game. It is after the flop where the great players excel over the novices.

Good players know that they have a big advantage over novices so why would they want to be dragged down to their level by getting involved in coin flips? They will gladly fold hands like AK, QQ and even KK pre-flop if the action gets too heavy. I look for situations in poker and NOT hands. I don’t need a certain hand to win a pot and I don’t get excited when I get dealt any particular hand either.

When I play NL cash games, I am continually looking to be aggressive because that is really how you get the money. But I am never foolishly aggressive, there is always a method to my madness.

I am constantly betting and probing when I am in pots but I am never risking my entire stack. This is called leverage and is something that is very important in poker. Many players play poker by the book and with fear, it is this that I set out to exploit and my aggression exploits this and is the secret as to how I win.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

You are playing on the first day of a big WPT event where 1st place pays $1.5 million dollars and your starting stack was $10,000. This is one of the most eagerly awaited poker tournaments in the poker calender. The blinds have increased to $100-$200 and you have increased your stack to $14,500 but that is still behind the table leader who has $21,000. The table breaks down as follows.

Seat 1: John Juanda (Top pro) $17,000
Seat 2: Online Qualifier $21,000
Seat 3: Online Qualifier $8,200
Seat 4: Empty
Seat 5: Unknown $6,000
Seat 6: You $14,500 (Button)
Seat 7: Tom Dwan (Top pro) $7,500 (Small Blind)
Seat 8: Gus Hansen (Top pro) $11,000 (Big Blind)
Seat 9: Online Qualifier $4,800

You are seated on the button with two top professional players to your immediate left. You peek at your cards and you see the As-Ad. The first two players to speak after the blinds both elect to fold their respective hands.

The inexperienced but very solid online poker qualifier in seat 2 raises to $800 and the other online qualifier in seat 3 calls the $800. During the course of the play so far today, these two qualifiers have been playing tight solid poker and have not been taking any chances. It is folded around to you on the button and you’re in the hot seat now, what is your play?

Answer:
Raise to about $3000 10 pts
Raise to more than $3000 8 pts
Raise all in 5 pts
Raise to $1600 2 pts
Call 1 pts
Fold 0 pts

You must re-raise here as two aces can be easily overtaken especially in a multi-way pot. You cannot afford to let the two top pro’s to your left in cheaply because they are likely to outplay you from the flop onwards. Raising to $1600 is a limit hold’em raise and is abysmal in no-limit. Re-raising all in is OK but your opponents are likely to fold and you are then left with only a very small pot.

Many players raise all-in in these situations because they either cannot stand the tension or do not want to play the hand from the flop onwards. Going all-in is showing your strength too soon and you are unlikely to run into a hand that is strong enough to call you. Raising an amount over $3000 although not as bad, may have the same effect but that is a better option than going all in.

Raising to about $3000 shows the ability to be able to play big tournament poker and this means not pushing the panic button prematurely. If your analysis went along these lines then award yourself 5 bonus points.

It is folded around to the two online qualifiers who both call the raise. There are three players in the pot and the pot stands at $9300. The respective stack sizes are as follows,

Seat 2: $18,000
Seat 3: $ 5,200
You: $11,500

The flop comes Qs-Qd-3c and both of the online qualifiers check, over to you…..answer, analysis and rest of the hand along with the scoring chart is in part two on Pokerdoom.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Game selection and even opponent selection is getting critical in the higher stakes poker games, gone are the days when you can just sit down and play poker and win if you are a good player. If I set out to play high-stakes poker this time around at say the $25-$50 level like I did before then I would target specific opponents. These may even be world class players but I wouldn’t play these people unless I had spotted specific weaknesses that I could exploit.

Chances are of course that this level would be too high now in order to try and find real value unless you can immerse yourself in the game 24/7. I could do this in theory but the problem is that I would then be having to make a huge financial sacrifice and these kinds of things never sit easy with me and never have.

All players have weaknesses, some players tilt at certain points. If there was a six max game at $300-$600 and a certain player could be tilted by a certain other player on that table and had lost a few pots to him then there could be value in that game for anyone with the right game plan. If I had to play higher stakes now then I would definitely target individual players and not games as multi-tabling poker games at NL600 and NL1000 is very tough.

The problem with going back and playing the poker betting limits that I used to play last year which is $25-$50 is that these levels are populated by some of the best players in the world. These levels have the players who either do not have the bankroll or the desire to play at the really high nosebleed levels. You also have to remember that people like Brian Townsend dropped down to this level last year.

But if you can make a nice cool 10-20 buy-ins a month at this level then you are making $50,000-$100,000 a month. I am sure that the professionals at these levels mop up most of the shot takers as it is the shot takers who are the ones who are moving up and in all likelihood are under bankrolled. It would take a combination of extensive experience and a huge bankroll of at least $200,000 to survive at this level.

It also takes an awful lot of time as well as watching and learning about your opponents probably needs to be a constant and ongoing process. These are not levels to be messed around with these days or played in a half hearted way. They demand attention and intense motivational levels and if you are the least bit idle in your overall behaviour then there is probably nothing at these levels for you.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

In other areas like the stock market for instance then real time feeds and programs from companies like Indexia have provided traders with the vital tools needed in order to get that vital edge. But I do feel that too many players rely on poker software too much and this applies to the other fields as well.

The best software packages in the world will not turn someone into a Wall Street Wizard. In the same way that Shuffle Trak and Count Analyzers cannot turn anyone into a hugely successful blackjack player. I have used Poker Office and a whole host of other different types of software. Poker Office is fabulous and really expanded my game but I cannot forget others as well like Statking for example and Poker Edge which also helped me tremendously and also SNGWIZ for single table tournaments.

But these items must be married with expertise and a good sound and solid game. I even know people personally who get seduced by fancy gimmicks in the belief that these are the be all and end all of success. In fact I even knew someone who was seriously contemplating re-mortgaging their home to trade options. They had no prior experience of trading options whatsoever but yet felt that the use of a fancy software package would be the Holy Grail for them.

In my experience, there really is only one Holy Grail and that is to work very hard. If you can do that then the software will greatly assist that hard work and make a fantastic addition to your method of operation. There has been a tremendous increase in computer programs being using in the world of Chess over the past few years. But once again, the best players in the world use Chess programs as an aid to their own analysis and not as a substitute for it.

There are only so many things that a human player can do and playing multiple tables and keeping track of so many different players on so many different tables at the same time is very difficult without using poker tracker software.

However though, playing too many tables with tracker software also has an adverse effect for the simple reason being that your HUD readouts will be seriously minimised and to a point where reading the data may become difficult.

What you have to remember is that online poker is played electronically so this means that electronic aids to human play are not only useful….they are essential. This is an area where the new technologically aware young guns have the edge because they are coming straight into poker with the correct and proper grounding for poker when it is played electronically.

So they often are able to improve into being very sophisticated and successful online poker players in a mere fraction of the time.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Tom “Durrrr” Dwan is regarded as one of the best Texas Hold ‘em players in the world and he makes a good living from the highest stakes cash games, winning around $5 million dollars in 2008 from his online poker activity. Dwan is the personification of playing poker without a fear of losing money. If Dwan loses $3 million in one session, which he has done on numerous occasions, you can bet that this hurts him but you would not notice if you only analysed his play. He comes back and continues to play his best poker game, something most players would struggle with having lost such a massive amount of money in such a short time.

I use Tom Dwan as the benchmark where I assess how players react to poker losses. The players I think react best to losses are Patrik Antonius, Daniel Negreanu and Illari Sahamies (better known by his online name, Ziigmund). These players play their A game at all times when playing high stakes poker whether live or online. If you believe you are not playing with scared money, then assess how close your attitude is to the players listed above. They also play the same in the face of big wins, another form of scared money at the poker table.

A polarised version of scared money is often found at the final table of the World Series of Poker. Players are very close to a payoff in one tournament that for many of them would see a permanently positive change in their standard of living. They would buy a massive home, with beautiful furniture and invest the money so they never need to do anything but sit by a swimming pool again. Would you play recklessly given the opportunity to genuinely achieve these things? Would you play your normal game?

Every poker player says that they would play their normal game but in a spot where a marginal re-raise all in could give you a chip lead or see you eliminated, or you could just fold and maintain a good chip stack many players would make the fold. At the very least, that big raise would be more difficult to make under the circumstances when in an ideal world the best play should be made at all times. It is easy to say forget about the money and think of things in terms of chips rather than cash. Some players just cannot do this.

Gamblers are normally pretty bad with money. We advocate using bankroll management when playing poker but many players ignore proper bankroll management and just want action. This can lead to disaster for them, but it happens all of the time. This type of approach can be harnessed into a sensible approach to poker because successful players have a positive disregard for the value of money. In many walks of life this is a negative thing, but for a winning poker player it becomes something that allows them to make big risks and earn big rewards.

Depending on your life experience money might have come very easily to you and you know ways where you can always obtain it. For others, the value of money is gained from their appreciation that it can be hard to earn. I am excellent in terms of bankroll management, but I also hoard money rather than spend it which makes gambling investment more difficult for me than a gung-ho gambler.

Look out for other players who may be playing with scared money as this hugely tightens their range at the big moments. Many will even tell you this is their intention to ladder up in poker tournaments. When there is big prizes on offer, you will see the scared money concept emerge as a key factor in the development of the poker game you are playing, particularly in Texas Hold ‘em poker tournaments where the massive fields lead to really big prizes.

By Malcolm Clarke

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.