Poker Image at the Table

• Author: Tom Kearns
• Filed under: Poker
• Date: Feb 28,2010

Poker which is based on establishing an image is an aspect of the game which lies on the other side of technique and tactics. It concerns the impression you and other players make while being at the table. It is the sum of everything you know about the other players and the sum of everything they know about you. It is not just perceptiveness or bluffing. It involves occasional decisions which seem strange or wrong.

Whatever it is you do or don\’t do at the table produces an image for your opponents to observe and analyze. There are players who attempt to project nothing. Everyone at the table must play the cards dealt him. An alternative playing style is to make a big show of activity to disorient and confuse opponents thereby obscuring your method of play.

If you want to increase your profits with a few bets and then back off, bluffing is the solution. But if you want to sacrifice the now for long term profitability, you will need to create and project an image. You might make a couple of lame moves in a particular circumstance. You will lose here, but in similar circumstances in the future, when your hand is strong and you are a good player, some expert opponents will have noted your previous play with the lame hands, and still others will just be confused you by your lack of predictability. This sort of strategy can get you long term results and substantially increase the worth of your strong hands.

Image-based tactics are common in chess. Often a player whose strength you don\’t yet know and players whose strength is well known will make believable wrong moves or strange seemingly useless moves. They will sacrifice figures, neglect to fortify or take positions. Disorienting the player buy deliberate \”bad\” strategy, they then perform a sudden and subtle swoop into a long breach or attack a soft spot which hitherto did not appear to be the object of attention.

The strategies for both games are similar at their core. Current advantage is sacrificed for greater advantage down the road. Rather than playing every hand to its fullest potential, you foresee less tangible but greater future benefits. While your current move seems pretty dumb and puts you at a disadvantage, you will recover later in the game and do so with ferocity. This is image-based play at its best..

As you learn to create an array of effective images, you will learn to choose which \”bad\” moves to fake in order to best achieve which goal. You may want your opponents to be disoriented only in relation to a specific set of your skills. You may want them to believe that you are weak, or to be uncertain about whether you are or aren\’t, or to think that you are always bluffing before a bet.

It is undoubtedly wiser to project whatever image you are choosing at the beginning of the game when the bank is low. If you try this when the bank has grown to a tidy sum, a few \”bad\” moves in a row can cost you more than you can win back at the end.

The author takes advantage of the highest Poker Heaven Rakeback. Please visit Rakeback Solution to also sign up for Poker Heaven Rakeback.

Good Poker: Talent or Discipline?

• Author: Thomas Kearns
• Filed under: Poker
• Date: Feb 13,2010

Talent is an ambiguous word. The extent to which a person\’s potential is revealed depends on the goals that person sets. Nobody ever relied on pure talent, unless their output was entirely spontaneous or simplistically minimalist. What distinguished the greatest players in any discipline has always been their willingness to be talented, their willingness to train themselves. Most people have potential and know what talent is, but they either romanticize it or knowingly avoid it, preferring an easy life.

Great players do not romanticize their abilities and do not avoid exertion. They are critical towards themselves and constantly work to improve themselves. That is, like everybody, they begin by having a general sense of what talented play would be in relation to the present poker tradition, but they go beyond occasional slight talent by impose a rigid discipline on themselves.

To become a successful player you will have to practice incessantly and constantly learn from your practice. This learning you will in turn convert into an efficient method by trial and error.

So, talent is disciplined, and undisciplined talent is luck. Your basic amateur is heavily dependent on luck. Taking a chance is the thrill that keeps them at the table. The pro with disciplined talent is hell-bent on reducing chance to the lowest point possible. He is not interested in adrenaline rushes or surprises with the odd win. The pro\’s objective is to empty his opponents\’ wallets on a consistent basis, no matter how weak or strong the opponents may be. He is doing battle against chance and against the proven methods of good players.

A pro\’s methodology starts with a study in self-awareness. Those who undergo self-criticism, find weak spots and ignore them will never seek out another activity that they just might be good at. They may even deny that poker is not for them and create a wonderful fantasy poker life for themselves – every professional\’s dream opponent.

The decision as to which poker to play is the first step for the expert player. The challenges in limit poker are quite different than those found in no-limit. To play limit poker well demands patience and a certain risk-avoidance type of personality. It also requires time to learn its advantages and the methods to play it well. To play no-limit well, an antithetical list of qualities are engaged. No-limit thrives on what is seemingly acts of random aggression performed by a cool calculating personality.

Cockiness is a common flaw among amateurs allowing them to play without restraint. The concentration is on the knowledge that they are \”good\” players and do not ever run into a losing situation where they should fold up their tent. On the other hand if you are the kind of player who is not impressed with yourself, but your goal is to win lots of hands consistently, you know well when to beat a hasty retreat and cut your losses.

Everyone will find themselves in hot water on occasion, the pro clearly identifies the situation and will get out before the water becomes even hotter. The last of his worries is losing face.

The author takes advantage of the highest Red Star Rakeback. Please visit Rakeback Solution to also sign up for Red Star Rakeback.

Which of Your Poker Images Should You Hang on to?

• Author: Tom Kearns
• Filed under: Poker
• Date: Feb 8,2010

It may be entirely beyond the average poker player that at any moment of the game he or she projects a specific image. Players are either unaware of the fact that an image had better be consciously maintained or trying to avoid projecting any image by assuming a sort of somberly inexpressive expression. Shielded behind shades and baseball cap, unsmiling, moodily silent, they believe that they thus \”minimize\” communication with the rest of the table.

These players are not invisible and they will give out sufficient information for the experts to pounce on. Their very image of non-imageness will draw more highly skilled players towards them because the pros sense an amateur here. Not only that, but they may be frightening off the less skilled players, the very ones they want to profit from.

A neutral expression does not make you difficult to observe. Well-managed communication with opponents, if properly done, will give a much better result than holding on to that blank, wordless image. Blankness is undoubtedly a sign of frailty rather than robustness.

The blank attitude is a retreat from any active involvement and retreat is always a sign of weakness. In addition, these blank types are not aware that their more highly skilled counterparts can inevitably read their tells at some point during a hand because old stone face is still a human being after all.

Amateurs will for the most part prefer tables where they can have a good time. The successful businessman and the brilliant engineer, cruising around the room, are looking for a table where players are relaxed and friendly. They will look and listen for good times before they at all try to appraise potential partners\’ actual poker skills, and are most likely to opt for those tables where people seem to enjoy themselves most.

For a player intending to earn a regular income it is important to be able to cater to these basic desires of the fun-loving amateur. A constant stream of amateurs is the wise professional\’s regular income. A happy amateur is likely to stay longer at your table, dare more, bet higher, and loose more, more willingly. But the amateur is likely to leave a table full of Egyptian mummies.

Sparkling conversation and a sense of fun in combination with compliments on others play will keep an amateur in a trusting frame of mind and keep him returning to that table again and again. They don\’t play for an income or for the thrill of risk so they will not be upset by losing to an amusing opponent.

By keeping weaker opponents in a fun frame of mind, you encourage their high hopes of lady luck finding her way to them. Lady luck will visit occasionally and turn them into frequent players and attract still more fun-loving amateurs to the table. If you display a cold attitude, they will leave.

Top professionals know that they always project an image and are always careful about what they project. They design the image according to the best of their interests, not to avoid contact. Their key to success lies not only in superior technique but often in the ability to create, through persona and ability to manipulate the game cleverly, situations which project a positive experience for their unsuspecting prey.

The author is a full time online poker player and makes the majority of his income from his online play and rakeback at Betfair. To sign up for a Rakeback account of your own visit Rakeback Solution.

Determining the Poker Game Most Profitable For You

• Author: Tom Kearns
• Filed under: Poker
• Date: Feb 6,2010

Not everyone knows that poker is comprised of a variety of labyrinthine interrelated games. It is not just a game with different names and a few different rules. Even though there is a kinship between the games, the knowledge of the strategies and the experience required to perform well vary significantly.

If you stick to the more familiar versions of the poker game and do pretty well and step out of your comfort zone occasionally, you will discover that the rules have suddenly changed on you and you have no idea how to proceed. The novice soon understands that to play with any consistent chance of coming out ahead, he will have to target one game to specialize in and grow with. How can such a decision be made?

One thing is certain, all poker players want to be winners. All the games are similar in their nature of complexity, making the decision more difficult. Add to this the fact that there is no game that is more profitable than another.

Profitability comes from you, how you combine your goals, strategies, and take advantage of the possibilities that are unique to a particular game. So, decide which one you excel at, at least as far as profitability is concerned, and strive to better yourself in that game. You can stray and play some of the other games on occasion, but only as a sometime thing. You will see your best earnings by adhering to the one or two versions at which you excel, and have done so for some time. Experience is a very valuable component of poker.

The new player will undoubtedly disregard this advice and continue to play only those games whose earning potential seems above average and in the end, they will probably win more due to dumb luck. Go ahead, enjoy the familiarity of the game and you will probably fall into some lucky streaks. You will not, however, gain in strategy and income.

No-limit appears to some players as the one to learn instead of learning limit poker well. The thought behind this is if you bet big, even though occasionally you lose, the higher earnings will offset the losses.

Now if you are after consistent profitability, you must delve more deeply into the question. Gain is a result of managing your cards well in the face of a constantly increasing bank. The size of the bank, though is not determinant of how you manage your cards. Good card management is determined by the rules of the game. Each hand needs particular skills to make that bank grow to its highest profitability before you collect it. As you are now aware, successful strategies differ greatly between the game versions.

This means that if you choose a game only by how profitable it looks to you, you are likely to end up a mediocre player at best, without the potential to improve beyond your opponents, and thus without the potential to win much more than them.

The author is a successful limit cash game player. He plays poker online and receives Rakeback at Power Poker and Rakeback at Paradise Poker.

Poker Lingo for the Newbie

• Author: Tom Kearns
• Filed under: Poker
• Date: Feb 3,2010

It is only natural for a novice poker player to enter an online poker room, begin a game and find the players communicating in an almost alien language. After a while you begin to suspect that these are neither typos nor a plot against the newcomer, but terms and abbreviations which are obvious to any decent poker amateur. The game is full of poker-specific words and concepts. This article might be of some help to those of you who occasionally have trouble understanding some of the chat messages in online poker rooms or forums.

Let\’s begin with some of the more obvious things. Probably the most popular game is Texas Holdem. It can be a limit, pot-limit, and no-limit game. From 2 to 10 players can participate in a Texas Holdem session. The person dealing the cards is called the dealer; his position at the table is marked by a special \”button\” and may be referred to as \”the button.\” Do not confuse the dealer with the casino representative who deals the cards to the players but never participates in the game.

In back of the dealer are two players who make bets blindly. Only the table limit keeps the lid on their bets. They cannot bet over the particular table\’s limit. The first blind bet is for half of the table limit and is termed the small blind, the second player places a bet for the full table limit, the big blind. So, if the table limit $2/$4, the small blind will be for $2 and the big blind for $4. You often see abbreviations which designate the player\’s position. SB stands for small blind and BB denotes the big blind. Of course this seems too easy and it is. SB can also mean small bet and BB big bet, having nothing to do with blind. Be aware of this and distinguish between them while engaged in play.

The small blind player is always the first to make the move. His position is therefore counted as the first position, while the button (the dealer\’s) position is the last. The third player, the one immediately after the big blind, is in the early position and is said to be \”under the gun\” or UTG. The next two positions are likewise \”early positions\” and are abbreviated as UTG + 1 and UTG + 2.

Okay, lets continue. The next three players are in the middle positions: MP1, MP2, and MP3. Following these is the \”late\” position which is the player directly before the button. His position is known as the cutoff or CO. Lastly, the button himself plays.

The above names are for the positions in a Texas hold\’em game of ten players. If a game has fewer players, some of the position names are simply dropped.

With that out of the way, lets begin the play. The first step is the preflop, where each player is dealt two pocket cards. The next steps in the game are referred to as streets and are the flop, the turn (fourth street) and the river (fifth street). While this is going on, cards are laid on the table (AKA, the board). These cards are known as the relevant streets, first three flop cards, then one turn and one river card. The flop cards in different suits are referred to as a rainbow.

This is a bare beginning in the argot of online poker, but it should whet your appetite to learn more terms and gain more understanding of the games in the online poker rooms. So, good luck and enjoy the game and the education you are giving yourself.

The author takes advantage of the highest Aced Rakeback. Please visit Rakeback Solution to also sign up for Aced Rakeback.