From the Felt
Monday, January 26, 2009 - John Greene
Sometimes, I get asked for help by my friends who are just getting into poker, whether it’s online at UltimateBet or the live games that are taking place in rec rooms, dens, and even in actual casinos across America. I had an interesting experience with one of them the other day. Doug (I’ll call him that, anyway) wanted me to watch him play in some low-staked online games and help him analyze his game after. He’s got a beer fridge that’s usually stocked pretty nicely, so of course I agreed to help out.
Doug is actually pretty sharp and picks up on patterns in betting and the like quickly. He’s really good at knowing when to slowplay and when to just go bezerk. He’s got a real knack for bluffing. I complimented him as I watched him play and learned that he really didn’t have a lot to hear from me, or so I thought. He was on this fourth table of the night when I saw him betting heavily when he had what I’d consider nothing: three-six off-suit. The flop was 7 9 K.
If you’ve never had to watch a friend chase a straight without saying a word until it’s all said and done, I can’t recommend the experience at all. After he lost way, way too many chips, I made him log out and demand to know what the hell he was thinking.
“Well, I was already in because I was the Small Blind and when the Flop hit, I thought I had a chance,” he says sort of meekly.
“You didn’t have a five or a ten in that weak hand, so why didn’t you just take the lumps on the blind and wait until the next hand?”
“Wait, why a five or a ten?”
“Well, those are two cards where at least one of them is in every straight. If you’re going to pin your hopes on a chasing a straight like that, you might as well have your ducks in a row first.”
“I never knew that!”
This guy, who had shown a natural knack for the finer points in the game, never had thought about one of the most basic elements, and this sort of thing happens to all of us at one time or another. When was the last time you looked at the rules or watched a friend play? Even seasoned players like myself learn something new when we review and observe.
Tags: chasing a straight, Poker Strategy, Poker Tips
Comments (0)
Monday, January 19, 2009 - John Greene
Instead of the UBOC (congratulations to the winners, whose names I’ve not seen yet as I am writing this on a plane,) this past weekend was spent at a private single-table tournament a friend of mine arranges every time we’re in Vegas together. It’s a pretty big game among friends, giving the winner a nice chunk of change, bragging rights for the next few months and a fantastically awful trophy that used to belong to a little league team. Sadly, I was knocked out early thanks to a beat so bad that Bruce Lee would have walked away dazed, but I got to be a bit of a railbird, sipping my drink and hanging out with my friends, and I got to watch some really great poker.
My pal Ryan is a model player, which is sort of disturbing to those who have spent more than one game around him. He’s meticulous, has no tell that anyone can find, and comes out winning more often than not. After he got knocked out by a bad beat handed down by the same person that got me into the whiskey early, we chatted a bit about how he plays and if he had any advice that I could use for my regular slot here. This is what he jotted down on a napkin.
1. “Play tight for the first two or three rounds.” While blind structures may vary, limping in with small and medium pairs has always worked better for him than making a splash, and he’s only bet heavy when being given a really great set. There’s a lot of players who want to make an impression early on by betting heavily on horrible starting hands, so take their money and play it close.
2. “Open up a bit after that.” Obviously, if you’re rocking a big stack after the first few rounds, you can be more aggressive, but you may find out you don’t need one. Players that are a rock for the first few hands at a tournament table tend to be given more leeway once they’ve established themselves. Pressure the smaller stacks, especially if you’re holding gold. Too many players aim at the larger stacks too early, but if you can pick out those below you, well, their chips are just as shiny.
3. “Relax and enjoy once you’re in the top three.” In general, single-table tournamets pay out if you’re in the top three, so really, play the game for the reason you first started: for fun. Sure, you shouldn’t play stupidly, but try to relax a bit and look at the game for what it is: a great way to pick up extra cash while having fun.
Where did rules like this get Ryan? He bought a new car out of his poker winnings last year and showed a net profit in his gaming after that, so, you know. He’s doing something right.
Tags: poker tournament tips, single-table tournament, tournament
Comments (0)
Monday, January 12, 2009 - John Greene
The other day, a friend of mine popped Rounders into my DVD player for me. I’d actually never seen the movie, instead choosing to watch things that have nothing to do with what I consider “work,” and I knew that there’d be a few things in there that would drive me up the wall. I was right, of course.
John Malkovich plays Tony KGB, a supposedly amazing poker player who had a fatal tell. Now, I get that Hollywood has to play things up a bit, but really, would anybody who dramatically split open and ate an Oreo every time he had a strong hand versus just playing with it when he was bluffing even make it past Round Two of the local VFW’s Wednesday Night Poker Tournament? It’s so obvious, it’s laughable. If you actually ever see someone doing something that melodramatic at the tables, I guarantee they’re just messing with you.
Look to the (excellent) Casino Royale and how Le Chiffre plays Bond’s knowledge of his tells against him. While not everyone will have a Felix Leiter handy to feed bad information to the person playing opposite them, a player can set up their opponents for failure by creating a smokescreen of false tells. The mercurial table behavior of our own Phil Hellmuth is a fantastic example of how to do this: you literally never know what he’s thinking and while his flamboyance plays against my own table philosophy, I can see why it works so well for him.
Tags: james bond, john malkovich, Phil Hellmuth, poker tells, rounders
Comments (0)
Monday, January 5, 2009 - John Greene
It’s a simple fact: in poker, it’s the player who raises who controls the table at any given time. Other players have to react to this decision and it’s something you can use to your advantage whether playing poker online with us or when trying to take your friends’ money in that Tuesday night basement game. You’ll see it most often in limit poker games among neophytes, where it’s “Raise, Call, Call, Call” all night, but it happens more often than you’d think at “real” games, particularly if they’ve lasted a good while.
As most experienced poker players know, someone who calls consistently rarely has the cards they should be playing with in the first place. Whether it’s simple laziness (which is more common than you’d think) or an urge to be involved in the game at any cost, it’s a behavior that will allow you to plunder their bankroll. If there’s a short-stacked player in a Limit game, you may be able to bluff him out of some pots after you raise.
Another hazard of being a player who calls when they should raise is that you’ll lose your money to good players that will bet you out of pots that you should have won because you called and kept calling without paying attention. If you decide to raise pre-flow, you make a decision to show that you’re confident in your hand and the weaker players will either hand you their money later or fold.
Obviously, In no-limit games, the strategy of raising people out of pots can work better than in limit games, where the big bet is small and constant. Players have less to lose and the play tends to be a lot more free-wheeling in limit games, for good reason. Next time you’re sitting down to a no-limit table and you see this “duck, duck, duck” action, be the goose and raise, especially on the pre-flop. Shake them up a bit and get a little more money at the same time.
Tags: call, limit poker, no limit poker, pre-flop hands, raise
Comments (1)
Monday, December 29, 2008 - John Greene
As I’ve previously established here on the UltimateBet Blog, I’m a bit of a old-school Star Trek nerd and there’s one person on the show that I try to emulate as much as possible while playing poker.
Contrary to a lot of people’s perception of the character and the Vulcan people in general, Spock is not emotionless. Half-human, he follows the precepts of his father’s race and their emulation of Surak, who taught them to bury their feelings and project a cool, calm exterior while using logic to analyze any given situation. I won’t claim to be exactly like our favorite Vulcan at all times, but I do my best to be keep my emotions aside from the events at the table whenever possible.
I can’t lie: there are moments when I nearly went blind keeping my tongue under control and reaching for the winner’s hand instead of their throat. I’ve been knocked out of a $5,000 buy-in tournament thanks to a rank amateur with too much money catching a lucky break and beating an absolutely beautiful full house that I’d carefully nurtured with four 4s, but I feel that you can’t let people know how deeply they’ve dug into you, whether you’re at the tabes or online. I’m not saying I’m cold – after all, Spock was known to throw the occasional slight smile at McCoy or Kirk – but I work to project cool even if I’m whiffing seriously.
There’s two main reasons for this with the first being the most obvious: being calm and gracious about losing is frequently a lot more disturbing to other players than one of Phil Hellmuth’s world-famous meltdowns and the same applies to winning. If you lose, they wonder if you’re hiding something, if you know something that they don’t, or maybe you meant for that to happen for some psychotic reason and if you’ve won and are calm and quiet about it, they think you’ve got some kind of spooky poker magic on your side.
The second is more important: by controlling yourself, you center yourself and think about something other than the chips you’ve just flushed away, helping you avoid while playing in tilt and losing even more money. I think we can all agree that keeping your cash close is much more important than any reputation you may be building at the tables.
Tags: etiquette, in tilt, spock, star trek
Comments (0)
Monday, December 22, 2008 - John Greene
When you begin to play poker for real money, one critical element to consider is the limit. First: what can you afford? This question is pretty basic. If you can’t afford to lose $100 in the blink of an eye, then you probably shouldn’t be playing at tables where a hand can cost you that much. The anonymity of online poker has shed the stigma that playing at lower-limit tables puts upon you when you’re playing with friends in a casino. After all, who are you trying to impress by playing at higher limits (and losing money) in online poker, anyway?
Lower-limit games are where very, very few professional players sit in. Frankly, it’s not worth their time. This means that you’re paying against other players who are likely at the same skill level (or even a bit lower) than yourself and, just like in every fighting video game, you can learn more about yourself by battling players at the same level as you at first and once you dominate them, you can move your way up. If you want to lose money quickly, play in a table with Hollywood Dave right off the bat. If you want to stand a chance to take him toe-to-toe, then train yourself at lower limit tables and work your way up.
Outside of the affordability of lower-limit games, there’s a lot to be said about avoiding playing while nervous, and if you’re not ready, a higher-limit game can be absolutely nerve-wracking. While situational awareness is a good thing, becoming paranoid with each hand or second-guessing yourself because you’re out of your depths early on is a sure way to lose money without even trying.
I recommend playing well at a limit level for at least six to eight sessions in a row prior to moving upwards. If you do get whacked when you move up, don’t get scared and fall back down to the beginning all over again. Move down one level and work the heavy bag a while longer, considering the mistakes you made and how to avoid them in the future. It’s how the pros became pros: by thinking about the risks in their games and treating each level of their way up as a learning experience.
Tags: poker levels, poker limits
Comments (0)
Monday, December 15, 2008 - John Greene
We’ve all been in a tournament and felt we needed a little boost. Long hours on the floor in a environment that’s designed by its very nature to make you lose your sense of time, food that’s not good for you, and the stressful nature of winning and losing money from your peers can leave you a bit ramshackle. And that’s when you reach for the Red Bull or Monster or the Phil Hellmuth-endorsed Pro Player Endurance Formula energy drinks. The first time you have it, you feel like a champ, like you can take on anything. Maybe your reflexes are sharper, your mind works a little more quickly, and you win a little more money than you would have before, but there’s a limit.
Research has shown the Red Bull, with its combination of caffeine, taurine, ginsing, gingko biloba, , Vitamin B, and whatever else the company has determined gives you wings, does indeed improve your reaction time and give you the wings they advertise so well. Other energy drinks follow suit, naturally, but here’s the thing that’s ignored by many of us, myself included until recently: they are not a substitute for rest and eating well, and if you take them in sequence, you can find yourself jittery, irritable, and worst of all: prone to making bad decisions when it comes to cards.
I understand the poker lifestyle; we play late into the night, drink more than we should frequently, and are often sluggish when we get back to the tables later. There are things you can do, though to alleviate this without getting jacked up and losing money because nobody is moving fast enough and you want to play now now now.
First of all, eat better. Breakfast should be more than a cup of coffee and a danish. Grab a couple of pieces of fruit and a bottle of water and, yes, the coffee because a lot of us need it. Lunch? A sandwich and soup. Dinner? Salad. Yes, Salad. You don’t need to follow this every day, but you should be conscious of the fact that you’re not running marathons when you’re playing poker: you’re sitting and thinking. You want foods that give your body the least trouble possible to digest, especially if you, like me, get heartburn more often than you’d like. And yeah, people may make fun of you for eating like a bird, but when you’re burning clean fuel and they’re moaning about the way those nachos sat in their gut, you’ll have the last laugh.
Second of all, call it quits after a couple of drinks and get to bed before 1AM and work to get at least seven hours of sleep. Yes, we all like to party, particularly if we had a good night at the tables, but think about how athletes and the like take care of themselves in the middle of the race and you’ve got a good idea of what you should do. (Yes, this can include a nice walk or a bit of stretching. I’d do it privately: guys like Hollywood Dave can be vicious if they catch you in the middle of “Two Dogs Barking At The Moon” or another yoga position.)
Finally: hydrate, but not to excess. If it’s not coffee in the morning or a bit of juice with a meal, drink water. Don’t drink so much that you end up getting up to go to the bathroom, but do make sure that you’re not distracted by thirst.
I know it seems a bit hippy dippy and a lot like someone is wanting to cut down on your fun, but I started making this changes after talking to a friend of mine who traveled a lot on business and was looking to make sure he waked into his clients’ place in the morning as crisply as he would his own, and they’ve me out immensely. I went from running in the top twenty-five or so to consistently placing in the top 10 in live tournaments. It’s amazing how much more money a little clean living earned me.
Tags: healthy eating, tournament
Comments (0)
Monday, December 8, 2008 - John Greene
Last week, I talked about looking for online poker tells in other players and while it’s easy to reverse-engineer most of that advice to work to help your own games out, but I wanted to talk about a couple of things that could really help out just about every player who plays online poker at UltimateBet or another online poker room.
Timing, Timing, Timing
We’ve all experienced it in a live poker game, where we actually get in a strange zone where we don’t know if we’re actually thinking or if we’re trying to make them think we’re thinking. With online poker, you’ve got a countdown clock (generally less than 30 seconds) and the autoplay buttons, which means people expect faster play and view anything that might be an attempt to slow down the game with suspicion. I actually sat down with a stopwatch and trained myself to consistently make decisions in 15 seconds. Yes, I am that nerdy.
Don’t Give Away The Game
Hey, you, Mr or Miss Chat Box? Shut up.
Yeah, I said it. You can give away way, way more information than you’d think every time you get chatty at the tables. In a live game, where there’s other people physically there, a bit of chatter is a good thing, but calling out “Finally!” when you win a hand or bragging about someone else’s bad beat (and your bit of pure luck) gives others insights into the way you play, something you don’t necessarily want in online poker.
Be Unfailingly Polite
This kind of falls into the previous category, but if you ever lose a hand to someone and you must feel the need to say something, turn your “Go f*** yourself” into “Great hand! Good play!” or something like that. You can be raging away at the computer, breaking your keyboard and telling people in IM that this doofus took your money while hold a pair of fives, but at the table itself, people should get the impression that you’re cool as a ten Fonzies.
Plus, you know, they might not mind losing to you so much if you’re nice about the whole thing.
Tags: online poker tells, poker tells
Comments (1)
Monday, December 1, 2008 - John Greene
One of the reasons a lot of players are attracted to online poker is the fact that their normal “tells” are removed from the game entirely. Gone is that habit of tapping your temple like Le Chiffre in Casino Royale (and look at how he turned that to his advantage for a real poker lesson) or swallowing heavily when finding out you’ve got pocket rockets! This means you can bluff all you want and win, right?
Wrong. More people than you’d think can pick up on the fact that you ‘re bluffing because online poker tells stick out like a sore thumb to regulars at the tables, especially if they’ve played with you before. Here are three of the most common online poker tells and what can you do to take advantage of them or eliminate them from your online poker game?
Online Poker Tells: Autoplay
You may well be able to find out how strong a player’s cards are from their use of the software’s “Fold” “Raise Any” and “Call Any” check boxes. If a player consistently raises while playing, it’s not rocket science to determine that he’s holding a strong hand. The same goes for “Check,” where the player may have a week hand. If a player fells strongly enough about a hand to make their decision before seeing the players around them play, that’s a red flag and worth paying attention to. I recommend changing things up a bit and avoiding using these checkboxes, instead timing each play whenever possible to create a consistent, thoughtful profile that will leave other players guessing.
Online Poker Tells: Folding Cards
With online poker, it’s easy to just fold cards that you won’t want to play. These “trash hands” are the bane of the serious player and you can find out if someone is one by seeing how often they fold. You may not get a good picture in a single game, but over the course of three or four games, you’re going to get a good picture of them as a player. While I’d never recommend playing 3-5 off-suit, I have seen others do exactly that sort of thing to throw others off their scent. In one case,4-5 suited ended up with a straight flush and a won tournament!
Online Poker Tells: Beginner’s Mistakes
When people that aren’t experienced at the game begin to play poker online, they frequently chase cards and their gameplay can be an indication of how weak or strong their hand is. They’ve read a poker book that tells them to bet with a weak hand and act weak when they’ve got a strong one to lure people in and that’s all they will do at the table. Pay attention to players that don’t maximize their cards; if you see they’ve not taken advantage of Triple Aces while losing money when holding 6-9 offsuit, well…that’s somebody that should have money taken from them.
There’s lots of ways that you can make sure that your online poker tells are eliminated and I’ll cover some more next week.b
Tags: online poker tells, poker tells
Comments (1)
Monday, November 24, 2008 - John Greene
A lot of people listen to music at their computer while playing poker online, and it’s easy to understand why. It can get lonely, especially when you’re playing in a big late-night tournament and everyone else in your house has gone to bed for the night and Van Halen always helps pass the time. However, I don’t think it’s a good idea to listen to your iPod when playing live in any sort of environment.
When you play online poker, every cue you get from the other players is on the screen. How long it takes them to bet, the way they bluff on hands, etc: it’s all right there. When playing poker live, though, information can come from anywhere. An edge in someone’s voice can let you know that they’re stressed and desperate to play. The guy next to you tapping his chips against the table’s edge in a certain way can tell you that he’s bluffing without you needing to look over. Heck, you might even overhear someone talking about a hand that can give you a lot of information about their play style.
Even with the clues that your ears can bring you, it’s important to point out another reason that you shouldn’t play with your headphones on: poker is a social game. Not everybody at the table is as chatty as Phil Hellmuth can be, but you should be at least cordial with those you’re trying to take money from. I’d hate to see what a table with nine people all wearing headphones would be like.
Tags: headphones, music
Comments (2)
