July 2012
Juicy Game?Live tournament poker constantly evolves and Vegas during the World Series is a good place to assess the current mood. Whatever trend catches on there usually echoes across the poker world. If that’s so, then this summer’s vogue won’t be so popular with players. After the evolution to deep structured tournaments, it seems a few major casinos are beginning to count the costs.
June 2012
Crazy Rules, Tight Frenchies and the “Float-donate” move By Paul Jackson
Ben and I, along with Barny and Ross Boatman, were representing Genting Poker at the Dublin UKIPT. The Citywest Hotel is a bit out of the way but, situated on a golf course, it’s a pleasant location, and in any event where you get a lot of Irish poker players together, there will always be plenty of action and drinking and fun.
How to Make Tricky Flops Profitable If you’ve been following the series of articles you should now know how to play a balanced range and be able to read opponents’ ranges from each position pre-flop. Now it’s time to maximise profits on certain flops and to see how our opponents react. The difference in skill between regular online players is very small pre-flop but some have major weaknesses post-flop. Detailed below are some areas in which you can exploit this.
Punching myself repeatedly in the head It’s no secret that these days online games are much tougher than they used to be. The phrase “a hard way to make an easy living” was once an maxim delivered with a wry smile, as if we all knew it wasn’t so bad.
The Thin Red LineThis isn’t a history lesson about the Crimean War or Sean Penn films. It’s all about the Non Showdown Winnings/Losses, often called the “Red Line” on most tracking software. In simple terms, a downward-sloping red line is caused by a player putting money into the pot and folding. For the reverse to happen, you need to make your opponent fold.
Playing Draws OOPPlaying draws out of position can be very tricky and different players play them differently. Ben Jackson explains how to make the best of it.
Would You Believe it? By Paul Jackson
Poker analysts go on about the importance of having a plan when you’re playing a hand (normally in a less than routine spot) and that is a very sound and sensible piece of advice. The biggest leak of many players is not to think logically and to make random decisions whenever it happens to be their turn to act; decisions which have little or no relation to the one they acted on eight seconds earlier.
May 2012
A Free Man in ParisBy Alex Rousso
Travelling abroad to play poker always has a double edge to it. On the one hand, you’re on holiday and you should enjoy yourself. When you bust out of the tournament you’ve got a vibrant new city to explore, rather than the standard bus ride home haunted by thoughts of whether you should have played the hand differently. The flipside is that, given you are on holiday, how much a grind should the poker be?
Genting Poker Series, LondonAfter the very successful leg 1 of the new Genting Poker Series at Star City, Birmingham, which had a guaranteed prize pool of £100,000 and actually made £146,000, it was down to London’s Fox Poker Club for leg two, which promised to be even bigger and better.
Return on investmentThe most important statistic for tournament poker results is return on investment. It’s a simple figure for how much you are expected to make on average per tournament, expressed as a percentage of the average buy in. So imagine you had played 100 tournaments with a £100 + £10 buy in and your total winnings was £15,000; your return on investment, or ROI would be: