The expertise involved with calculating odds, surmising hand strength with incomplete information, negotiating with bluffers, and staying within a bankroll all offer lessons that my daughters will eventually learn to apply to other aspects of their life journeys. In this world, I think those are especially valuable lessons and applications for women to have learned.
“Your upswing was obviously pure luck (variance) and the downswing was obviously mostly caused by terrible play... at least that's the opinion I've been reading in other threads around here.
Poker on the internet is in very many ways similar to live poker. It’s still poker after all and the rules, probabilities and everything else that really matters is the same.
Most people know that all of the great Hold'em players play their opponents and not their own hands. Most players believe this is just a matter of sensing weakness in their opponent and then exploiting this weakness by stealing a pot.
My last column looked at a couple of bluffs that I made during the World Series of Poker main event. One of them was successful and one of them cost me some chips.
I am a big advocate of reviewing hands in order to improve your poker game. In fact, as internet players, it is one of the most powerful tools we have.
At college I played on the football team. Now this isn’t exactly a bragging right in England where football is not nearly as big as it is over in the US, but nevertheless I loved the game and was fairly good at it.
Every player at some point has the experience of playing with a maniac. Nothing changes a poker game quite as much as a loose aggressive player sitting down and taking charge of the game.
If you want to really excel at the poker tables, then the "need for action" that a lot of us have must be contained while you patiently look for a group that appears to have as many loose/poor players as possible. This reminds me of something that I read in a Doyle Brunson book (the man is such a great poker player....
Improving your game - People write to me all the time, telling me their poker history, which inevitably ends up with the same question: “What can I do to improve my game?
I have spent a lot of time in these columns talking about bad beats, downswings and tilt, which are all related to luck, but sometimes it pays to take a step back and look at the more fundamental question. What exactly constitutes luck in poker?
Table chat is a long-standing and accepted part of poker, both online and in live card rooms. When playing online, the amount of chatter varies greatly from table to table.
One of the great things I love about the World Series of Poker main event is the big stacks you get to play in relation to the blinds. When starting out with $10,000 in chips, you can find spots to make plays that would be difficult to make in other types of events in which you start out with a small amount of chips.