How To Win At Online Poker

• Author: Barbara Walter
• Filed under: Poker
• Date: Dec 31,2009

It is said that the more the luck while playing poker, the greater is the loss. While everyone wishes to have luck while playing poker, luck is what proves to be the enemy for good poker players. In poker, luck by professional players is considered to be a result of hard work and deliberate planning. People experience luck because they try to get lucky.

Notice how bad players are always trying hard to get lucky and they do, because of that. There are millions of ways through which bad players can get lucky and yet they think that good players have got all the luck on their side. This is so not true. What bad players think is a good players luck is actually correct mathematical actions applied in any given situation. Good players only wish hard for luck in a flop because they want an AJ9.

During a game of poker, opponents who throw away their hand think that they are actually doing the good player a favour and turn around to say: ‘Your lucky I threw away my hand.’ What they fail to understand is that it was all a part of the deliberate plotting of the good player that led to this eventuality. The good player had deliberately raised so that his opponent would throw away his hand. Good players always manufacture such sort of luck all the time. While bad players engross themselves in making luck happen to them the good players make the bad players give them their luck.

In a pot, bad players make the mistake of overbetting drastically giving the good player opportunities to gain up to four or five bets that are extra. After making this mistake, the bad players accuse good players of having luck favour them always. Well, it was definitely not luck but the good player’s hard work of the play of his hand that resulted in the extraction of those extra bets. Good players, in this manner keep extracting extra bets all day and sometime all year through carefully thought of strategies.

You might think that when you had started playing poker initially, luck was smiling down on you all the time and now when you have actually made efforts to improve your playing technique, luck does not favour you so much. Well, you must have been in the bad players category earlier and now you have moved on in to the good players section. Be glad that your technique has improved and start designing a luck that works in your favour.

If you feel like luck is not favouring you anymore despite the improvement in your game, learn the art of making players give their luck to you. Don’t just sit around complaining, plot to make opponents give you extra bets, plot to make them throw away their hand. Make them work for you.

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Poker Minds Or The Science Of Intuition

• Author: Thomas Kearns
• Filed under: Poker
• Date: Dec 30,2009

To be good at poker “psychology” – to effectively predict your opponent’s likely thought processes – there is no need to take a seminar on Card Games and their Relation to the Unconscious. Your opponent is not your patient, and even if he/she is, no matter how well you apply Jacques Lacan to their neurosis, you are still not guaranteed to win.

While strategy is a real and important element of poker, and is certainly more basic than psychoanalysis, it is still only one important tactic. Mindreading would certainly be an asset to wise play, but is this possible? It is in a way.

Once thing for sure about great artists and great players is they did not reach this status by reading an instruction book. They got there by trusting their intuition, an intuition borne out of a natively keen talent of observation which they rehearsed and developed individually over a long period of time.

This is not merely the reason why so few good technical manuals on poker psychology exist. This is also possibly the most key point about the issue: whatever tips you may find on the net or in books, you will never be able to put them to much good use unless you have that touch of intuition which puts your thought processes beyond the reach of your opponents.

Most players will lose more than they win because they depend on strict models of play, much like computer programs, or simulations that present themselves as predictions to be used robotically by the savvy player. This could be quite simple depending on the number of variables involved in the prediction.

The talented player, on the other hand, disdains crude cribs. Instead, they make their own observations about their own play and about that of others. Guided by their own intuition, they then combine those observations into principles according to their own whim and fancy. The resulting strategy is known only to them. The more talented the player is, the more complex (or ingeniously simple, which is basically the same thing) and idiosyncratic his secret strategy, making him less vulnerable.

You will never find a great artist or a great player divulging his secrets. They may write books, give lectures, advice and tips, but not on the really good stuff. It seems like a great service they perform by letting us mere mortals in on such tidbits. But don’t be fooled. They did not rise to the top of their professions by reading and heeding someone else’s great tips.

It is then most vital to commit yourself to the intense study of personal observation from your own practice to develop your observational skills as well as your imagination. Do this and you will independently create ways of acquiring a manner of play that is unique to you in its every detail.

Use this individually developed strategy to get under the skin of bluffers. You can only do this by letting loose of your robust intuition to which only you have access.

While hard work and persistence are involved here, they are of little benefit unless you have the courage and independence to use your imagination in some cases that make you seem less than sane but are innovative and demand a curious nature and the soul of an explorer which puts you way out in front.

At this point, a look into the processes that make up intuition might be in order. In fact we all have intuition. Few have the initiative and guts to tune it up and make use of it. To get results, you must develop and work on your own unique intuition. It doesn’t fall from the sky and it cannot be taught.

Which brings to mind the old vaudeville routine: “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” Practice, practice, practice.

The author is a successful limit cash game player. He plays poker online and receives Poker Nordica Rakeback and Red Star Poker Rakeback.

categories: poker psychology,poker,gambling,psychology,games,recreation,intuition,card games,casino

Poker Brought Out Of Smoky Dens By Canines

• Author: Thomas Kearns
• Filed under: Poker
• Date: Dec 29,2009

Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, an instantly recognizable commercial painter who has given the world the series of Dogs Playing Poker, was born in 1844, into a family of abolitionist Quaker farmers and was named after one of the most eloquent orators against slavery, nicknamed (with provisional anthropomorphism) “The Lion of White Hall.” Nicknamed “Cash” by friends and kin, he had no official training whatsoever, but was very active, publishing drawings in papers before he was 20.

Cash’s favorite theme was, oddly, those big dogs Mastiffs and Saint Bernards, engaging in very human activities. In 1903, he was commissioned to do a series of paintings on this very theme. In nine of the sixteen paintings commissioned, very respectable, genteel dogs were gathered together to drink beer and whiskey and indulge in a cigar or pipe as they played five-card draw poker. These furry gamers dressed in fur coats or wool suits would fill up a cozy den-like space whose only source of light was a shaded lamp over the table.

The players are established bourgeois, and seem to be reasonably well-behaved gentlemen, perhaps not altogether tame, but proper enough. The paintings reflect approximately the same period as that depicted in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America. But Coolidge does not focus on the greed and violence of illegal underground clubs; rather, he shows poker finally emerge from the criminal murk into a more homely reality where decent members of society probably never bet more than a few symbolic cents and allowed themselves a few drops of bourbon when their wives weren’t looking. Poker was becoming common entertainment for most American men, not a means to make quick and dangerous money.

Respected members of society as early as 1875 gathered at large nocturnal poker sessions. Poker Chips was one of the publications dedicated to the game and most periodicals of the time included articles on poker in their content. Standard rules for playing draw-poker were unified and distributed among all the poker clubs beginning at the turn of the century. This was a first. It was even reported that baseball had lost its status as the national game.

Little by little, the skills at poker and skills at using a weapon were becoming the premier attributes of many a manly man. If a man had the ability to play a good game of poker, he was considered also to be a fine soldier, sheriff, law man of any persuasion and a solid, honest political leader as well. As a matter of fact, in World War I in Europe in 1918, poker was the most enjoyed form of entertainment among the troops and of one Harry Truman. Truman actually greatly enhanced his own skill at draw and stud poker as an artillery officer. Upon the signing of the peace treaty, while the troops were awaiting their transport home orders, Harry T. and his troops whiled away the time playing endless hands of poker. A habit they continued well after arriving at their homeland.

At that time, the prevailing view was to equate the ability to take risks at the table, to bet big, play smart, and bluff, (profitably, of course!) to the ability to survive in battle, in dangerous occupations like law enforcement, or do any job requiring a good brain and strong muscles.

Cash Coolidge was around at a time that gave him every opportunity to observe the sort of person, the clothes, the card games and the milieu in which all of these elements came together in basement clubs that gave rise to the essence of his art. Through his art, which consisted of a vivid imagination and anthropomorphic humor, he created a representation of the life of the bourgeoisie at the time enjoying a game that had been around for more than 200 years.

The author is a successful limit cash game player. He plays poker online and receives Victory Poker Rakeback as well as Rakeback at True Poker.

categories: poker,gambling,games,card games,dogs,art,entertainment