• Shaking hands or a flush face usually come from the adrenaline caused by a player’s excitement about a strong hand. Don’t assume shaking means nervousness, often the player is quite confident they will win.
• Your opponent will likely cover his cards  with his hand or look back at them more than once. This is a subconscious action in line with the desire to protect what one considers valuable. Keep in mind that you are looking for anything out of the ordinary. If he always covers his card in the same way, it means nothing.
• Disinterest and drawing attention away from the game is often an act to disguise a big hand.
• A player with a weak hand, hoping to bluff, may throw his chips into the pot aggressively and make a point for direct eye contact with the player thinking about the call. Often acting strong equals weak and acting weak equals strong.

It is also important to note that if you are up against an inexperienced (or drunk) player, the tells will be less reliable. This is because tells don’t really give you information about your opponent’s hand, only about how you opponent perceives the strength of his hand. If the hand is misread, you will be mistold.

Mistold is a new word copyright HellsColdDay 2008.

The regret is when you realize your discard has become wild, which seems to happen at a rate that far exceeds its statistical probability.

Game tip: Knowing the future holds a few wilds, regardless of what they are, consider drawing to bigger hands than usual. Three of a kind may no hold up in this showdown, draw to a flush or a full house.

Five Card Regret isn’t the most inventive came in the world, or the most fair. But as with all my blogger’s choice hands, it breaks up the monotony of constant hold’em. It may not help your bankroll, but it may improve your humor.

Before I get started I thought I would give a short introduction to the blog I run. The Poker Bankroll Blog is an online poker article database with articles on every aspect of poker. I’ve written many of the articles myself, but also get contributions from guest authors who want to share their view on poker. My blog has been online for a couple of years now which has resulted in roughly 400 poker articles. I hope to hit 1000 when I reach my 5 year anniversary.

Enough about my blog, let’s return to poker bankroll building. In my opinion there are basically two primary upsides to dedicating your time and effort to building a poker bankroll. One is the satisfaction and sense of achievement of building something from scratch. Secondly, once you have proven to yourself that you have the discipline to maintain your bankroll and the capabilities to become a winning player at specific levels there a never ending series of challenges to be found in moving up in levels.

Usually when there’s an upside, there’s also a downside and in my opinion the biggest downside to any poker bankroll building project is the grind. In order to maximize your chance of success you need to grind it out at levels which are within proper bankroll management. In his famous 0-10000 dollar challenge, Chris Ferguson took 7 months to reach a bankroll of 6.5 dollars. There’s the slim chance you’ll build a bankroll with lightning speed like November 9 finalist John Racener. His mom gave him an initial deposit of 50 dollars which he turned into 30000 dollars in 6 months. He then decided to give the Poker Stars Sunday Million a try and won it in his first attempt. Now he finds himself on the final table of the World’s largest poker tournament with the chance of winning 9 million dollars. You might as well brace yourself for the long haul at the tables whether your building a double or nothing bankroll, a No limit cash game bankroll or a tournament bankroll.

In my eyes grinding is about as exiting as counting ants on an ant hill and the sheer boredom of playing the same tables for hours on end clearly outweighs the upsides. If you ask me poker bankroll building is definitely not worth the effort. Instead I deposit a few dollars once in a while on Poker Stars or Full Tilt and take a stab at some large MTTs. Once in a while I get lucky and have some decent deep runs. If you have the motivation and discipline to get started I wish you the best of luck and have a final piece of advice for you. Do yourself the favor of learning the basics of poker mathematics as soon as possible. Some time ago I wrote an article series about poker odds, poker probabilities and EV poker which you might want to check out.

Good luck at the tables

Mark

Liar’s poker is also a popular bar game that only requires a dollar bill to play. In the place of cards, the eight-digit serial number on the dollar bill (see below is blue) represents each “hand.” The object is similar to the card version–to make the highest bid of a number that does not exceed the combined total held by all the players. The numbers are usually ranked in the following order: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0 (10) and 1 (Ace). For example, if the first player bids three 4′s, he is predicting there are at least three 4′s among all the players, including himself. The next player can bid a higher number at that level (three 5′s), any number at a higher level (four 2′s) or challenge. The end of the game is reached when a player makes a bid that is challenged all around. If the bid is successful, he wins a dollar from each of the other players, but if the bid is unsuccessful, he loses a dollar to each of the other players.

Both games are fun diversions that combine statistical reasoning with bluffing. The barrier of entry is small in that the most you can lose is a matter of dollars and cents. However, for you high rollers, currency substitutions are always an option.

If you practice any other variations on Liars Poker let me know in the comments. This is one game that can easily vary in rules.

In descending order of use, players employ caffeine, energy drinks, marijuana, alcohol, nicotine, sports drinks, and cocaine.

I think more than 80% of the people I know, poker playing or otherwise, use some combination of coffee, soft drinks, Gatorade, beer and cigarettes daily. The fact that the study is getting any press at all is a symptom of society’s desire to paint poker in a bad light. Connecting one vice, drugs, with another vice, gambling, is a win in appealing to a conservative audience.

If any of those listed drugs are “performance enhancing” it is only in that caffeine and energy drinks are helpful in keeping a player awake during long sessions. A better study would be showing the effects on how weed or alcohol affect a poker players’ results at the table. I guess that they would mellow out an overly aggressive player, but I don’t know because NSU opted not to perform an actually useful study.

To be fair to NSU, most of my rant is directed toward the echo chamber reporting the 80% headline. Their study also found that 28% of players use prescription drugs while playing poker and 46% of players use dietary supplements. I find those numbers of more interest, but when it comes down to it, the study was just an online survey of a self-selected sample size of less than 200. Big deal.

Locally, I have a few options for poker leagues: Full House Poker, Any Two Cards, the Georgia Poker Club, and the Atlanta Poker Club. If you would like a formal review post of each, let me know. As I am unsure of the international popularity of these leagues, I am holding off.

Leagues are usually well organized and have a weekly following of regulars. They are free to play and charge the venue for bringing in customers. My issue with using leagues as an avenue to improve your game comes from their alternate revenue streams.

• Players can buy more chips by purchasing food or drink from the bar. For example, a league may offer an additional 500 chip for every $10 spent.
• Players may have the option of buying premium league memberships for $100 or $200 for the year which ensures a certain chip up nightly.
• Players who volunteer to deal the table can receive a chip payment.
• Players who refer newcomers to the game can be rewarded with a chip up.

In short, if you show up to play in one of these leagues and don’t expect to spend anything, expect to be at a major chip disadvantage.

At first this bothered my sense of fair play, but it only brings the game closer to real poker. More at risk and, assuming the league uses some money to offer better prizes, more reward. I don’t blame anyone for a fair business model. However, it is important to know what you are getting into. Once you start playing “free” poker every night you may find yourself out of a lot of money. That is money you could have used playing real poker, and even if you lose, it is a better gauge of your skill level. Have fun at the bars, but when you start to get serious about your game, risk for the real rewards.

Since you are reading this blog (and thank you, Grundy, for allowing me to contribute to it), you probably aren’t too worried about playing on free sites. You’ve moved past them or never played on them from the start. However, if you are like me, you also have a lot of friends asking you for advice on how they can learn to play poker or get better at it. So, the question is, are the claims of the free poker sites true? If our friends play free poker, can they become top notch poker players? Can they even become winning poker players?

I’m afraid the answer to those questions is an emphatic “Heck, no!” In fact, these sites will probably teach your friends to become losing players if they play there long enough.

Tell your friends to avoid the free poker sites at all costs. Anything they learn from them will probably be counter-productive to being a good poker player. Worst yet, and here’s the kicker, the reasons why these sites will not teach you how to become a good player are not the reasons you may think.

Many people believe “free poker” is bad for you because players play differently if money is not involved. We’ve all seen a player comment, “I wouldn’t have done that for real money.” Don’t believe them – they would have done that for real money and they have probably done it for real money. (Similarly, I wish I had a nickel for every time somebody published a poker hand in a forum and prefaced it by saying “I don’t normally raise here, but …” Yeah, right…tell me another one.)

The truth is that you can find all kinds of players when playing free poker, and most of them are competitive enough to legitimately try to win the “play chips.” The reason to be afraid of playing for play chips isn’t that people are not trying to win; it’s that they don’t know how to win.

Not only that, but the few players on these play sites who are decent players are drowned out by the poor players who readily throw around their bad advice (and criticisms). Let’s take a look at some of the comments I’ve seen on free poker sites recently and explore why they are so dangerous.

• “Never raise pre-flop in Omaha Hi/Lo.” – Are you kidding me? Who knows where this kind of crappy logic originated, but the scary thing about it is that many players on at least one particular poker site not only believe it, but get right down angry when other players raise pre-flop. Players who do not believe in pre-flop raises (they not-so-affectionately call it “pre-flopping”) often stall when deciding to call the raise (presumably to punish the “pre-flopper” for raising), call players who raise pre-flop idiots, and often ridicule players when they raise pre-flop and don’t win the pot without ever realizing it’s not the number of pots you win, but the number of chips you gain or lose. These types of players are the worst you can encounter. Not only are they wrong, but they are so convinced they are right, they freely give out their bad advice to unsuspecting players – very dangerous, indeed.

• “You should never bet after somebody is all-in.” – This may be my favorite online tournament fallacy. Again, this is something that many, many players who play free poker believe to be a cardinal rule of poker. As we all know, there are times it is unwise to bet when another player is all-in in a tournament. There are also times when you should bet into a dry side pot. Unfortunately, players who play the free poker sites like to create hard and fast poker standards so that they can play more “formula” poker and use their judgment less. This is a bad lesson to learn since there are no hard and fast poker standards in a game in which no two situations are ever the same. (NOTE: This comment also seems to occasionally rear its ugly head in cash games, too. How anybody can believe this in a cash game is beyond me.)

• “I’d rather not get pocket aces, they are a losing hand.” – I was amazed at the number of times I saw this comment. What I noticed was that people who play free poker simply do not play pocket aces (or other strong starting hands) very well because they simply do not understand poker odds or choose to ignore the odds. A hand that is a 3:1 favorite still loses 25% of the time and will lose even more often if you misplay it. It’s amazing how players remember the one loss twice as long as any of the three wins and assume pocket aces are simply not that good.

• “This game is mostly/all luck.” – This is what losing players say to justify their losses. Their ego can’t handle their incompetence. So, they convince themselves that they play well, and they are just unlucky. The second a player buys into this theory, he/she is a losing player. Don’t subject your friends to this nonsense.

Overall, free poker sites are just not what they are cracked up to be. You’ll get bad advice, see players trying to remove judgment from their decisions, see players ignore poker odds, and fail to take responsibility for their own incompetence instead of trying to better themselves through self-analysis.

If you want to give a friend a good start in learning how to play poker, I’d suggest buying them a good poker book or two, and then taking their money in some good home games. They’ll learn more and you’ll profit (for awhile, anyway).

This has been a post by amateur poker journalist Ken Carlson. If you like the article, please let him know in the comments.

Before you start playing, most poker sites have a display of available tables. Each table often includes stats such as the number of seats available, how many seats are taken, the number of players on the waiting list, the stakes and the average pot size. Average pot size is very important and one stat that you can’t immediately gain by visiting a table in a casino.

You should, by now, know thyself. If you play your best game shorthanded, stay at the tables with a max. player limit–usually six. If you’re best heads-up, there are table for that too. On-line is great for options. Are you a tournament player who usually either goes out first or wins it all? Then you are probably aggressive enough to be suited for a “turbo” game where the blinds raise quickly. If you like to wait for the really good hands, stay as far from turbo as possible. Some sites even have games with extended blind levels, those may be more your speed.

Another factor for aggression is average pot size. For easy money, an aggressive player should steal the blinds of the table with the smallest pot sizes relative to their blinds. A tight player should sit at the table with the highest pot sizes so that when you do get your hand, you can win big. This strategy probably won’t be the most fun for either player type, but it will be the most profitable.

The time of day can also be a factor. I have found that European players are overall a different skill level as US players and through the magic of time zones they play when we sleep. I’m not saying which countries host the most skilled…but I have my theories.

Keep in mind, that just because the table stats say one thing, doesn’t mean that will hold true forever. Don’t base future play on that early information. A aggressive table can quickly turn tight in the event that the bully loses his chips and is replaced. I’m just saying…test the waters before you jump in.

The pots can get large if players pay top dollar in the bidding process. The advantage is if you start off with trash, you can pass on the bidding, fold, and only lose your ante. I don’t generally recommend bluffing in this game since hands have the potential of being very strong come the showdown. It is important to pay attention to what your opponents are bidding on and know whether to get out of their way and stop them from making their hand.

There may be a time when you should outbid an opponent for a card you don’t need just to stop them from having a monster. For example, you have a strong full house–three aces and two tens, and your opponent has already bought a king and is bidding on another king. At this point you know the last king probably made him trips or a full house, which your hand trumps, but this new king would give him four-of-a-kind. This is when the game can get nasty since both you and your opponent are willing to spend a small fortune bidding on the card. There is a lot to think about, but in a different way then most poker variations, and that’s why I like bid poker.

That said, there is one time that I do recommend pushing your table image with a little theater–after a lost pot, especially when a bad beat is involved.

There you are processing your loss. You have the strength of will to accept it and move on. That is awesome, you are a good poker player, but lets not let an opportunity pass you by. Say your next hand is strong–a pocket pair or big slick. Bet big like you are on tilt, because the table expects you to be on tilt. Act like you are throwing caution to the wind with a touch of “poor me.” You will likely get a call from a sub-par hand and be in position to take them for a ride to the river if in fact you are confident that you still hold the winning hand.

For me, this act means even more. After a bad beat, I am on tilt. It’s only natural. I’m not full tilt, but I am still stewing. After all, the poker gods have forsaken me. When I act as though I am further along the road to tiltsville than I am, I usually right my course. I focus on the role that I’m playing rather than focusing on the last hand. By acting on tilt, I am no longer on tilt.

Give this strategy a try. In fact, make it a point to play the next hand after a bad beat as long as the position advantage is on your side. The state of your image may well earn you better implied odds when the betting starts.

Warning: If you are the type to easily go full tilt, do not try this. The acting will only be fooling yourself.