Poker Blog and Poker Gossip

A bankroll is money that has been put aside for the sole purpose of playing poker.  And maybe you shouldn’t know or care what it is.  There are players out there pay for each game as it comes, and take their poker money out of the “fun money” they have put aside in their weekly budget.  But if you’re interested in becoming more than a recreational player, you should take bankroll management fairly seriously. 

There are many different types of games you can get into when playing poker, and with the rise and consistent growth of online poker rooms they are all available to anyone who wants to play them.  I will go through general rules of thumb from major pros about how they manage their bankrolls specific to what type of game.  Because of the swings that even a great player can and will experience during their poker career, you need to take losses into account when planning how much you need to play specific games.  A person who is willing to replace their bankrolls often, or a gambler, will need fewer buy ins to start, and someone who is looking to become more of a pro will need a lot more to ensure that s/he will not go bust.

Sit and Go 
A sit and go tournament is structured where you have 6-9 players around a table, and a prize pool that is distributed to the top 3 players (usually) at the end of the game.  Chris Ferguson recommends using only 5% of your bankroll on a sit and go.  That translates to roughly 20 buy ins.  For a pro player, it is recommended 65 buy ins (or 20%), but to me this seems excessive.  (In this example, if you wanted to play 5.50 sit an go you would need 357.5)

Limit Holdem
The general thought on limit holdem is that you need at least 300 big bets in your bankroll to protect against going broke.  So, if you fire up your Full Tilt account and sit down at the .25/.50 limit table (where the turn and river bet are $1) you should have $300 in front of you.  How often do you see that on most of the sites? In my opinion it’s very rare to see anyone at that level with that kind of money in front of them, but that could be a testament to the caliber of player (most are gamblers, and willing to reload often).  If you take advantage of this, and stake your bankroll appropriately, you’ll see an upswing to your game, and be able to minimize your losses.

No Limit Holdem
Since you can go broke in one hand at no limit, you will need a larger bankroll to sit at these tables.  No limit bankrolls are measured in buy-ins as opposed to big bets (As there are no big bets). A buy in is the maximum amount allowed on the table (and you should always buy in at the max to make sure to make the most of a big hand if/when you get it).  A recreational player will use a smaller amount of buy ins, 15 or so, while a poker pro would want 20-30 buy ins before sitting down at a table.  That means if you’re playing $25 dollar tables, even as a recreational player, you’re going to want at least 375 to make sure you’re not putting too much of your stack at risk.

I think a lot of players online these days do not play by these rules, and as i said under the Limit Holdem heading, if you are aware of this, take advantage.  If you are playing within your means, and at an appropriate level, you are much more likely to felt a recreational player even if he takes your first buy-in. 

Tomorrow i will talk about when to move up and down in limits based on what i have discussed today!

One of the worst feelings in poker is making it to the river with no hand at all.  Maybe you had a royal flush draw.  Maybe you had a double belly buster straight draw.  But the fact is, the river card came down, and you’re stuck with no hand and not much of an option.  So what do you do?? If you’ve set yourself up right, a big bluff might be the trick to turn your train wreck of a hand around and take down a reasonable pot. 

But here is where the hand only gets worse.  That player that continued putting money into the pot only had middle pair, and either didn’t see, or didn’t know enough to fold his crappy mid-pair.  So, he will call your huge river bet, and walk away with your hard earned pot.

How do you Avoid a bad Bluff?

So, should you have known better?  Should you have dropped your hand much earlier, or made your bets a lot bigger on the flop and turn betting rounds?  The answer is probably not.  When you come up against an unpredictable or loose player, try not to get steaming or lose your patience and start trying to outplay that player.  Wait for a strong hand, and pray for them to hit their mid pair and let them lose their money to you!

In online poker I’ve seen calling stations tilt really great players.  The good players lose a medium sized hand, start going nuts in the chat, telling the calling station “I’m gonna put you out of this tournament!”  and typically end up really trying to target these bad players. But the reality in this situation is this: you can’t blame a player for not knowing when they should fold.  A calling station is a calling station.  It’s what they do.  You’re more of a donkey if you try to pull of a huge bluff knowing that you’re likely going to get called. 

So, let these players do what they do, and bet into them with a huge hand.  And if your hand doesn’t materialize, make sure you know your opponent and maybe..just fold.

If you haven’t logged into your Party Poker account lately, you’ll
be happy to see that they have caught up to Full Tilt and most other
major on-line poker rooms and adopted a synchronized break system. 
Other changes include Late Registration, and a new Stacked Console.

Synchronized Breaks

Like
the other majors, Party has gone with a five minute break at five
minutes to every hour.  Not all tournaments will go on breaks at that
time; the few exceptions include Turbo tourneys that are still in the
first two levels of play, and any tournament still in the first level
of play and any tournament that is still open for late registration. 

Late Registration

Party
has introduced tournaments that will allow players to register within
the first six levels of play.  No details are available regarding the
criteria of such tournaments (deep stack, etc?), but honestly, I’m not
sure how wise allowing registration after 4 levels of play is, as
you’ll be short stacked, and will have to get lucky to make a real go
at it.  I guess at that point it’s buyer beware. 

They will
also have a deadline for when a player can unregistered from a
tournament and receive a full refund.  This will be posted in the
tournament lobby. 
The final change to tournament registration is
an additional sign up on the party poker website, allowing you to
browse tournaments from your browser and sign up without having to open
your party poker client.  This could be useful if you are at work and
(they haven’t blocked party poker) you want to set up your tourneys for
the evening?  Yeah, I’m not really sure either, but it’s something they
thought of that the other guys didn’t….

Stacked Console

This
is by far the most interesting addition.  The stacked console is
another display option, put along side tiling and cascading, but it has
potential for a much more useful interface.  The stacked view allows
players to list their tables with notations for what position they are
in during a hand and timer alerts for when it is their turn to act. 
There is a lot of information put at your fingertips; without having to
switch to a specific table you can see how many chips their opponents
have at a given
table, access previous hand histories and view information about what
is happening in live hands. Players can also act on their hands all
from the one stacked console.  The Stacked console is highly
customizable and players can adjust what they
do and don’t see on their screen. Users can choose what boxes they see,
whether they need to single or double click to toggle or select a given
action and can also change the size and color of the deck. The stacked
console can handle between 4-14 tables worth of information and Party
Poker’s official website outlines the best way to take advantage of the
new features depending on how many tables a player is sitting at during
a given session.

Note: this is not all rolled out
yet, as with the other major online poker rooms, it will take some time
until all of the features are fully available.  The Stacked Console,
while pretty cool in it’s conceptual designs, is still in Beta (early
testing stage), and will be available to everyone when it’s fully
tested.

For the last little bit, i’ve been taking a break from online poker, and trying to tighten up my live cash game skills.  There are so many things i like about live games, and i feel like there are huge differences in play between live poker and online poker (but that’s an entierly different post!).  When I sat down at the table, and got deeper into the action, i found myself slipping back to when i first started in the game.  Getting really excited when i got an off-suit KJ, or raising a nine handed table with AJ in early position.

But my biggest mis-step was over valuing a weak ace.  For some reason, every time i got a shitty ace in my hand; even an ace i would easily throw away online, i couldn’t let it go.  I felt like i would KNOW if another player had a bigger kicker (note: i’m much better at “reading” players online than i am live..i dont know why i forgot that), and that my losses would be minimal if i “just saw a flop.”  Typically what happened to me was putting that small blind in, with 2 or 3 players would get me invested.  Even more so if i hit a piece of it.  If an ace hit on the flop, i would start rattling of statistics (30% chance no one else has an ace bla bla).  Point is, my thinking was very flawed.  I fell in love with the hand, and would talk myself into hitting just enough of the hand to lose money. 

Disadvantages to playing a weak ace?

• With a weak ace, you are much more likely to lose to a better kicker.  Even hands like A-10 and A-J are not “Strong” aces strictly speaking.  The amount of times people have been very excited to get all their money in the middle thinking they’re getting the best of it, only to find out they’re dominated by AK /AQ.  Pay attention to the betting, and if your opponent looks as excited as you feel, you may be beat.
• A weak ace becomes a winner if you flop 2 pair or better.  This only happens 4% of the time.  The other 24 out of 25 time you’ll flop a draw, a weak pair or nothing at all
• If you do play an ace like a-3, and happen to flop a draw, you are likely drawing to a gut-shot.  This is a money pit like no other, and you can quickly get pot committed and pray for that 4 outer. 

All in All, and ace is great, but be smart when playing and look at the cues the players around the table are giving you.  Don’t make my mistake of falling in love with a hand and talking yourself into giving money away, and most of all don’t ever find yourself with the 2nd best hand and all your money in the middle..that’s a huge buzz kill!

RealDealPoker.com, which is set to launch in February 2010 is looking to emulate how a “Brick and Mortar” casino deals it’s cards, and put that system online.  They are proposing to use a fully automated real card dealing system.  Thesystem would shuffle a real deck of cards, similar to how brick and mortars use a card shuffling machine,  and then digitise the results and translate them to their online poker table. 

Currently in online gaming, shuffling “Cards” has been left to an algorithm.  Most online sites provide descriptions of their shuffling algorithms and the sources of randomness use to drive them, and some poker sites also provide auditors reports of the performance of their systems.  These algorithms are completely legit (except when they aren’t), and have been widely adopted and are in use in all online poker rooms / casinos. 

But I’ve heard a lot of new players get frustrated when they first start with online poker, feeling like there are much “bigger” hands being dealt to encourage action, or that in house “bots” are favoured over live players by the algorithm.  These ideas have largely been dismissed, and very little evidence exists to support these claims. However, if there was an online room out there that dealt exclusively with real decks of cards and digitised the results, it would put any question out of the minds of skeptics. 

Of course, having a whole bunch of shuffling machines and some people who’s job it is to monitor the transference to digital and then to the online table adds a whole new aspect to security and how fair the shuffling is.  It may be a “Real” deal, but if the human being paid to transfer those cards has been paid, it may prove much easier to cheat this system than it ever was to reprogram an algorithm.