Congratulations on your win. Always fun to humiliate your family.

In regards to your hand selection, please take a look at this chart of expected value for every hand played on the PokerRoom network, by position.

Think of Expected Value like Return on Investment. The numbers in the chart represent the amount returned per dollar invested on each particular hand.

BTW, I represent the "pathological" group of poker players here.

Would anyone be interested in playing a sit-n-go tournament on pokeroom this evening? just for fun, maybe 5 or 10 bucks?

Twice now a tournament with friends has seen me come second to my little brother. Who has played poker precisely 3 times (he sits there with the rules, checking every hand). Everyone thinks he's betting because he doesn't understand the game but he just keeps getting fantastic hands. Little fucker.

I only play the $2.50+50 tournaments on Pacific Poker. Just by sitting out most hands you can get in the top 5. One guy continuously went all-in before the flop just to buy the blinds. As soon as someone called him he went out. That kind of thing both infuriates and amuses me.

I just played and won with three sixes. On the next hand I got three sixes again and lost. My friend said no way could I win with that twice in a row. I don't know if he was being superstitious (for want of a better word) or commenting on the way the computer deals.

Do people here prefer tournaments or regular tables (is there a name for those tables?)? With tournaments at least you know what you're going to lose when you go in. I play worse when I'm playing with actual money ("fuck it, what's 40 cents?").

Tanx,

The name for non-tournament games is a "cash game" or "ring-game" (though, usually a ring-game denotes a cash-game of 7 or more people.) This is because the chips in a cash game represent an actual value. A $1 chip in a cash game is always worth exactly $1. In a tournament, the chips are constantly changing value depending on the size of your stack, the size of your opponent's stacks, the state of the tournament, the payout structure, and the size of the prize pool.

I play much better in cash games because the afore-mentioned considerations often escape me, and I find my self making mistakes far too often to have much success. Usually forget that I should usually bail on marginally profitable situations in favor of conserving chips and decreasing the possibility of going broke.

Having said that, I love tournaments and play them whenever I get a chance.

Good luck.


Also, you are not the only one here who has trouble helping a set hold up. My advice: play it fast. Lots of pot-sized bets, raises. Someone will let you know when they've caught up with you. A set is terrific, well concealed hand. Conventional wisdom states that you will either win a lot of money with them or lose a lot of money with them.

I hesitate to even ask these questions, as it way late to do much now, but I just realized that our company picnic No-Limit Hold'Em tournament (not for money) is tomorrow.

My girlfriend and I both signed up for this, and we've never played even one game of Texas Hold'Em in our lives. We don't really care that much about doing well - but I just want to get some practice on the routine of the hands, just to avoid some embarrassment.

I'm trying to read up on basics - trying to get through my head the importance of position, especially. found this "beginner's guide" which I am reading through: http://www.tightpoker.com/texasholdem/poker_guide.html

So one of my real questions is - on such short notice - would it be worth our time to mess around with something like partypoker.net for one night just to practice? (if I can believe their claim that it is a free type of site - I am not out to spend money or make money - really just want to practice going through the routine - knowing how/when to bet, call, raise, etc.) If that is a bogus site - what would you recommend for someone in my situation? (I know - you might recommend dropping out of the event altogether!)

Please be kind - I am almost completely ignorant on this subject, but I am thinking about changing that.

Any help and/or encouragement is fully appreciated.

any of the sites are fine, and you can learn the mechanics of the game at all of them.

since you'll be playing in a tournament, i recommend signing up for what is called a "Sit & Go" tournament on one of the sites. What this is is a 10 person tournament where you get a starting stack of chips. The blinds start at a low amount and increase at a certain timed interval. Eventually, people get widdled down and only one person remains and at that point they have won all the chips at the table. This is similar to the final table of a larger, multi-table tournament.

You can play a sit & go from start to first place in about an hour on the internet. Sometimes faster, although it can be difficult to win.

One warning about palying against people who are playing for play money such as yourself. Since it is just fake money, there's no consequence for being an idiot and playing like a fool, so you'll see a lot of crazy stuff that people who are playing for money don't typically do.

But for just learning and getting an idea of the flow of the game, that's a great place to start.

Good luck tomorrow and remember to have fun too.

Thanks, Russ - I spent a few hours just in a 'training room' on-line - I especially liked having a setup like that where I could go ahead and do opposite of what the recommendation was - just to see it play out and see why it was a bad choice (usually).

It was a lot of fun at our tournament yesterday to see some upper-management dudes farting around with their cigars and other 'man-accessories' and talking trash like they really knew the game, but playing like utter nincompoops. (Again, maybe sometimes just playing crazy, since it wasn't for money, but also just being stupid - more than once I hear the phrase "yeah I dunno, but I just want to see the flop" - why would anyone say this out loud, let alone do it in the first place? I wouldn't even want to start a bad habit like that, even during a "play game"...)

So I learned just enough the night before to be not-dangerous... out of ~40 people playing I ended up at the final table of 8, but by then my conservative playing had not won very many big hands - so as the blinds kept getting raised, I just got bled dry and was the first person out from that table.

There was no cost to enter, and for my trouble I received:

2 autographed copies of 'Improve Your Poker' by Bob Ciaffone
(one for me, one for my girlfriend - a giveaway to anyone who participated)

A $10 gift card from Imo's Pizza (just about enough to cover 2/3 cost of a lage pizza, I think) given to all who made the final table

And my specific 8th place 'prize pack':
- a FullContactPoker.com T-shirt & ballcap 'ensemble', autographed by Daniel Negreanu
- an autographed, 8x10 color glossy (alas, with no cirlces or arrows or paragraphs on the back) of Mr. Negreanu
(no, that is not my auction - but it is the exact same picture - but good to know that it might be worth a few bucks to somebody somewhere, I guess?)

This seems like a good place to ask this question: Are pokerbots like WinHoldEm
(and the like) a problem for the online poker community? I've seen some
insane reports where cats are driving around LA with dual laptops going from
hotel room to motel room running the pokerbot scam. Can you fill me in on
this (`cause this is the one thing that really prevents me from trying online
poker)?

TIA.

It is a dork fantasy to set a swarm of these "bots" loose on the internet poker universe and just have them harvest money. While some programs can play a credible A-B-C beginners' grade of poker, none of them can beat even modestly-successful amateurs, and there is no evidence that they are being used on anything but a spoof level.

What has been revolutionary are the software aides that internet poker made possible. These are database programs that sort results of thousands of hands against your opponents, so the player can tell what the tendencies of his opponents are. They are ubiquitous and almost a necessity for online poker playing.

One thing that distinguishes good poker players form bad ones is the ability to remember what each opponent does in different circumstances. These data management programs do the remembering for us, and they can display statistics about opponents' aggressiveness, the quality of his usual starting cards, and whether or not he is a winning player.

These programs are also useful training tools, because they help find patterns in the player's own game.

Internet poker geeks even speak in the coded phraseology of the statistics: EV, VPIP, PFR, BB/100 and such, even more impenetrable than baseball's statystical acronymia.

So, don't worry about the bots.

russ wrote:

ogami itto wrote:me and my girlfriend play the same tables usually just because we like to plan ahead what we're doing, once we cleaned out a table for like a good 2000 bucks just because of raising and betting

Uh, if I'm reading you right, what you and your girlfriend were doing is called collusion, and it is one of the worst things you can do in poker. You were cheating, and therefore both of your accounts should be banned and your money forfeited.

Please don't do this, and please don't brag about it.

Replying to an old post...

This is one of the reasons I've never looked into this much.

For all I know the other people at the table are on the phone or IM'ing each other. Or are really just one person.

How can you protect yourself from this?