Poker Tournament Strategy Tips and Advice For Online Poker

In Texas Holdem, making good decisions is vital to getting deep in poker tournaments. This article covers the poker basics of when it is a good time to go all-in throughout the different stages of a poker tournament.

Understanding basic poker tournament strategy helps you arrive at executing correct tournament decisions.
Timing, in poker tournaments, is practically half the game. Possessing the mindset of when to make moves and when to fold is a crucial part of tourney success. That being said, let's examine scenarios where it is a good idea to go all in, and then some situations in a poker tournament where you should wait it out. Before we do that, the first poker tournament strategy you want to erase from your mind is the concept that when you are down to 10 big blinds (BB) or less, you need to shove with certain strong hands. This poker basics theory is a poor poker tournament strategy and essentially nothing more than an excuse players use to try to double up. Living on hope is not the way to win a poker tournament.

The 10 Big blind theory in poker has inherent strategic flaws, mostly because a majority of tournament poker players embrace the concept that if they get an opportunity to knock out a player they will take the chance. Therefore, you are essentially involving yourself in an unnecessary race with the hope of gathering much-needed chips. In other words, an all-in induces action! Therefore unless you have a really strong hand, than you should NOT go all-in regardless of how many big blinds you have left. Believe it or not, the real poker basics strategy is; 'it is better to blind out than to take an unnecessary shot in the dark.' (Remember, a chip and a chair is a real story!)

Now with 10 BB remaining, typically you have a minimum 30 hands left before you are blinded out. Therefore, with 10 BBs, you should never become anxious. The poker basics formula to calculate how many hands you have remaining before being blinded out at a 9 person table is typically three to three and one half times the number of big blinds remaining. So, if you have 30 BBs, you will be able to see about 100 hands before you blind out assuming you fold every hand. The hands remaining formula is a basic poker tournament lesson taught in my poker tournament strategies newsletter, (see link below).

Now that we have covered how many poker hands you have remaining, let's find out which hands in your tournament are critically a good time to go all in. In the case where you hold a top ten hand in late position, and there are more than two limpers, and you have 10 BB left, this is strategically, a good time to shove all in. The limpers likely will not call you preflop. On the other hand, if you are willing to take the risk and limp, you could get more value by waiting to see the flop. Especially if your opponents are loose, and tend to limp with warm hands. However, my strategy is to take down a limped pot preflop, as this will give you more chips to make a play later.

If you have a warm hand such as KQ suited or less, and you are in late position with no action before you, this is a good tournament strategy to shove and get rid of the button and blinds. You must remember that in addition to the number of hands you have remaining, your position is very important as well. In a poker tournament, players will tend to tighten up as they get deeper, and you can take advantage of this as a short stack, to get your chips in. However, you should only do it in position, with no players in the pot before you. This eliminates the possibility that some players like to limp in a tournament with monster hands, hoping to catch (or, trap) the shortstacks making a move.

Late stage tournament poker strategy; you want to play a tighter variety of hands and use position to make an all in move. In the middle stages of a tourney, when players are holding onto their stacks, your strategy should change. For example, limping with a monster hand to see a flop before you make a move. In the case where the flop is a really dry flop (no draws, no high cards, no connectors, etc.), there is never a need to go all in, make a strategic bet and you are likely to take down the pot uncontested. On the other hand, if you limp and the flop is a really draw heavy flop, you want to proceed cautiously before going all in. Maybe put out a big enough bet to see if someone is drawing. Usually, two-thirds to three-quarters bet is sufficient. If you get called and the draw does not come on the turn, exercise your poker strategy and consider this may be the time to go all in.

Typically, players are less likely to make an all in call on the turn, in middle and late stages of a tourney. Therefore, your strategy to get rid of drawing poker hands is best on the turn and not on the flop. In almost every case possible, it is rarely a good idea to get all your chips in the pot on the flop or even pre-flop. This again is a poor strategy and usually induces action by drawing hands that figure they have 2 cards to come and their odds are better to hit their draw.

Now for a look at early stage poker tournament strategy. There is almost never a reason you should have all your chips in the pot in the first 4 or 5 levels of any poker tournament. It is mathematically impossible to get blinded out in any poker tournament in the first 5 levels. In other words, you can not get blinded out, so why get all your chips in? The early stage of a poker tournament is best to slowly build up your stack with the intention of doubling your stack by the first break. However, the first 4 or 5 levels of any poker tournament is where most of the loose aggressive donkeys play! So, make it your strategy that unless you have the top 4 nuts on the flop, turn or river, you should avoid going all in.

We covered early stage poker tournament strategy, where you should build slowly and avoid the donkey play, middle stage strategy where you should target your plays for the flop or turn and late tournament stage strategy where you want to patiently wait for top hands to make your move. We also covered the false 10 BB theory and how to calculate your approximate poker hands remaining. The final word in this poker tournament strategy is that you want to reserve your all in for only when you have a lock on the pot! Do not get it all in weak or preflop, work your poker strategy on the flop, turn or river. After all, that is where the real power chip building is! Good luck and for more poker tournament strategy tips, make sure to sign up for my tournament newsletter sent free right to your email.

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The Cash Out Curse Is it Real In Online Texas Holdem?

Lately, a lot of people have begun to question the honesty of several online pokersites, due in part to recent scandals involving players on particular sites. Many have gone so far as to claim that online poker is rigged and that a winning player is penalized for making withdrawals. This is known in the poker community as the ‘cash out curse’

Typically, a player that has won a large sum of money or has consistently played well and won several big cashes, goes to withdraw a portion of their winnings. Suddenly they are attacked by a seemingly inevitable curse that causes them to constantly lose game after game, forcing them to reload their account with more money.

Many claim that the poker sites, to keep people from cashing out their winnings, perpetrate this cash out curse. No matter how hard one would try to convince someone that this is just a fable, the losing player can not be convinced, as they continue to complain that online poker is rigged and that when they cash out they go on a losing streak because the poker site wants them to keep their money online.

Although the notion of a ‘cash out curse’ may seem ridiculous, it is entirely possible that a pokersite can (and often does) control the cards of a particular player. This is accomplished by the fact that everything in an online poker site is regulated by computer-generated codes and programs under the direct control of the owners of the site.

Read more at EzineArticles The Texas Hold em Cash Out Curse. . .

Daniel Negreanu Blasts Shortstackers

While sitting at a $100-$200 cash game on Pokerstars, Poker Pro Daniel Negreanu (KidPoker) went slightly on tilt and began blasting the shortstacks at the table. The max buyin was $20,000 with a minimum buy in of $4,000. Daniel had come to the table with $20,000 and shortly built it up to nearly $38,000 when his pocket Aces got cracked by pocket Kings.

Daniel was in early position and raised to $1200 while middle position player re-raised to $3600, Daniel was holding $38,000 while his opponent had just under $20,000. Daniel's response to the reraise was to move all-in. His opponent called and showed KK vs. KidPoker’s AA. The flop hit the K and rivered a full house for Daniel’s opponent.

Left with about $9,000 in chips, Daniel made another move when a shortstack pushed all in with a little less than $4000, Daniel made the call and showed JJ vs. shortstacks Ace rag. Daniel won the hand and a few hands later he held A9 of hearts and again tangled with another shortstack having less than $4000.

Daniel managed to river a flush against the shortstack, increasing his chipstack to almost $19,000. Again Daniel found himself involved in another hand against a shortstack at the table holding JJ; he flopped a set and took the shorty’s chips.

The frustration of having to call an all-in so many times against so many shortstacks at this cash table seemed to wear on Negreanu as he began to berate the shortstacks. Daniel said “I don’t know why I sit down at a table where they allow a minimum buy-in like that” and later he said, “This is just bad for the game”.

Another player remarked that Daniel should not blast the shortstacks that are feeding him chips. To which Daniel responded, I will never sit at a table like this again. A point was made by another player that Daniel could easily move to a table that has a 50BB minimum buy in.

At one point the heated debate brought in a moderator, who apparently saw nothing wrong with Daniel’s tirade. Apparently, a player at the table called in a moderator, the moderator stated he did not see a problem and quickly left.

Although Daniel Negreanu is considered the ambassador of poker and he is always willing to take a few minutes time to sign autographs or shake hands, I think he should not complain so much at the players who just wanted a shot at sitting at a table with him and playing poker.

Hey, Daniel, we all go on tilt, it happens and I agree the shortstacks do sometimes cause undue frustration. However, I think you should not complain, since it is just as easy for you to get up and move to another table. A table that does not allow someone to buy in for a mere $4,000.

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Full Tilt Crash! Fulltiltpoker crashes

Today at 3:15pm EST Fulltilt crashed and has been down for more than 30 nminutes now.

I was playing in a $10+1 tourney and had a substantial chip lead 4th with 320 people left)

Just my luck!
I wonder if this has anything to do with the lawsuit filed this morning by Lary Kennedy and Greg Omotoy, who claim owners of Fulltilt poker Chris "Jesus" Ferguson, Howard Lederer, Phil Ivey and Mike Matusow, (among others) refused to pay out more than $80,000 in their accounts after Fulltilt accused them of using Robots (poker bots) to win. The pair said they are skilled as well as fortunate in their massive wins.

The pair claim Fulltilt is the one using poker bots and intend to provide proof at the upcoming lawsuit.

As a side note, it has always been my contention that online poker sites use bots, algorithms and subroutines to skew the real statistics. Kennedy and Omotoy also allege that the bots used by Fulltilt are designed to make the game a game of chance and luck and purposely ignore the statistical odds of the game.

Is it possibly true what they are saying? hmmm! are online poker sites using software to keep your winning hands from winning online poker?

If you have received constant bad beats and horrible suckouts, that may well explain the problem.

Nevertheless, one has to wonder, why did Fulltilt just suddenly decide to investigate kennedy and omotoy's withdrawal?
Is it because they KNOW nobody should be able to severly beat their software like they did?

again... hmmm!

Methinks every online poker player should invest in a way to beat the software and then maybe they would remove the unfair algorithms they use!

read more at Online Poker Code

Online Poker The Random Number Generator

As many people are aware, online poker rooms (as well as any online gambling site) uses what is called a random number generator to produce what would appear to be a random outcome in each hand.

This article will explain the Random Number Generator (also called Pseudo-Random Number Generator, PRNG or RNG). The purpose of this article is to familiarize players with the 'inner workings' of the software used in the Online Poker rooms and the way cards are produced in a deal.

The use of a RNG is nothing new, as it actually dates back hundreds of years before the computer was even conceived. Mathematicians as early as the 1700's used a random number process to try and determine outcomes of specific problems.

The advent of the computer presented a challenge for scientists and programmers wanting to produce a seemingly random action from the computer, and therefore an assembly code language function was implemented called RAND also known as randomize and RND. This function would be attached to a program and assigned a variable to select a random number.

However, the program required a 'seed' number to begin its process of selecting what would appear to be a random number, otherwise it would produce the same series of numbers each time the program ran. Therefore, early programmers used the timer function on the CPU in order to produce a different series of seemingly random numbers each time the program ran.

This was somewhat acceptable and appeared to produce a different random result each time. However, after several thousand runs of the program, it became easier to 'predict' what series of numbers would come out. This gave a challenge to programmers to find a way to actually produce what would seem to be a truly random result, one that could not be predicted or repeated in any short course of time.

Ultimately, a mathematical method was derived that gave the RNG's a better way to produce a more realistic way of generating random numbers. In addition, experiments using white noise generators to produce the seed were also successful. Both of these among other secondary methods to produce a seemingly random result are used today in all major Online Poker rooms.

Now for the DEAL!

How does that affect the deal of cards, you may ask. Well, actually, the modern RNG programs are more beneficial then the software used several years ago. The sophistication of the randomness is better for the player, because the predictability of a card is much harder, and the RNG is designed to curtail cheating. However, it is not the best method and has many failures.

The Major Fail

A standard 52 card deck has a total number of possible combinations of 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,404,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Thats a BIG number, in fact, there is no name for a number that large except to say it is 8 times 10 to the 67th power.

What this means is that if you lay out all 52 cards in order, that is one possible combination of the deck, you shuffle the cards and lay them out again, they obviously are in a different order, and that would be a second combination, repeat this process and each time you would get a different sequence or combination of cards laid out on the table. It would require a minimum 8 times 10 to the 67th power 'deals' to repeat the exact same sequence of cards.

In essence, a deck of cards is ideally suited to an RNG because of the endless variety of combinations of a deck. However, there is no possible way any computer in existence has the ability to store every combination (it would require at the bare minimum a 256 bit processor and a whole lot of speed!) and since most servers use only a 32 or 64 bit architecture they are only able to process a small fraction of all possible combinations.

Two Pigeons; One Hole

This is known as the Pigeonhole Principle, wherein the theorem states that there does not exist an injective function on finite sets whose co-domain is smaller than its domain. In other words, you can not put two objects into a container that is physically only able to hold one object.

So what happens to the billions of possible deck combinations? Simple, they are never used, processed or even appear in the online poker RNG. They do not exist as far as the program is concerned.

In reality, out of the 8x10^67 possible combinations only about 4 billion deck combinations are used in a 32bit architecture. This greatly reduces the number of possible hands you can make, and also is a basic explanation as to why there are so many bad beats and made hands in online poker.

For this reason, you will notice more straights, more flushes and more often full houses appear at showdown. The program, by reducing all the possible combinations down to less than 1/20^58, now forces a lot of action and produces a lot of big hands, because it strips away all the outer-dimensional deck combinations. (How often do you see high card, one pair or two pair win?)

In conclusion, the RNG used in online poker is never able to truly produce a random deck or outcome, simply because the program does not use all possible combinations of decks. There are other reasons the deck may be stacked against you and we will explore those in upcoming articles.

I hope this article is helpful to you in understanding how the RNG produces a 'random' deck of cards and invite you to subscribe or bookmark this blog to learn more about online poker.

This post is intended to give a brief oversight of some of the inner workings of the online poker RNG, in the next post, I will explore how the RNG can actually be manipulated to your advantage.

Online Poker Cheaters Caught In The Act!

Recent scandals from other online poker sites may have caused many people to limit their play or stop playing, however, Pokerstars.com has renewed my faith in the game and made me confident that they are keeping an eye on my money!

I have played online poker for a few years now, and on a few of the mor popular online poker sites. On occasion, as with any online poker player, I would get a notion that there may be some collusion or cheating at the table. Since there was never any proof, or anything I could do about it, I would usually just leave the table and go elsewhere.

Imagine my surprise this morning when I opened my email and received the following from Pokerstars.com:

----- Original Message -----
From:
To: XXXXXXXXXXXXX
Sent: Tuesday, XXXXXXXX, 2009 12:29 PM
Subject: Account Credit

> Hello,
>
> PokerStars has become aware of two players who were working together in our Sit & Go tournaments to the detriment of other players. You were involved in at least one tournament with these players and as a result you may have been adversely affected.
>
> The players' accounts were closed and their funds frozen pending a thorough investigation, which is now complete. Fortunately the problem was identified quickly and they had only played in a few tournaments before the accounts were closed.
>
> In a case such as this it is our policy to confiscate the colluders' winnings or balances and to distribute them to the players affected by their actions in as fair a way as possible. To confirm your credit, log onto your PokerStars account, go to the 'Cashier' screen and click the 'History' button. Your share will be shown "Credit Purchase", followed by the amount of the credit.
>
> I regret that we will be unable to answer questions as to how your specific credit amount was calculated. Likewise, we are not at liberty to identify the specific games or players in question. Suffice to say that they have been barred from the site and you will not encounter them again.
>
> The integrity of the games at PokerStars is of paramount importance to us and we will not abide cheating or collusion in our games. We work hard to police our games and prevent such instances. In the rare cases where collusion has actually occurred, we make sure that any players affected are compensated appropriately.
>
> Thank you for your continued play here on PokerStars. Please do not hesitate to let us know any time we can be of help.
>
> Best Regards,
>
>
> MarkW
> PokerStars Collusion Investigation Team


You read it right, Pokerstars caught two players who were involved in cheating and colluding on several Sit ‘n Go tourneys I was involved in. You will notice that Pokerstars gave me money back, and I must note, it is MORE money than I know I had played in that period!

As I understand it, Pokerstars will seize the accounts of the offending cheaters, and then split their money up between all the affected persons involved. From the amount I received, I would have to say that these guys were making quite a bit of money at their little scam!

The good news, of course, is that Pokerstars.com is diligent in catching poker cheaters at their tables, and is upfront and honest enough to inform players that they have caught the online scammers and returned a fair amount of money to honest players affected by this.

Any doubts that Pokerstars.com is not keeping an eye out for cheaters is now resolved, and I will continue to hold this site as one of the best and safest online poker sites to play on.

Is Online Poker Rigged?

No Limit Texas Hold’em, It is one of the most popular online poker games.

It seems everyone from amateurs; professionals and celebrities are playing online poker. This phenomena has inspired many people to move onto some of the biggest live tournaments like the WSOP (World Series of Poker) and the WPT (World Poker Tour)

Many champions in the last 5 years got their start at online poker sites. Chris Moneymaker and Joe Hachem (from Pokerstars) started playing online poker years before they won the World Series of Poker Championship. Professionals like Daniel Negreanu, Chris Ferguson, Phil Ivey and Phil Hellmuth all endorse different online poker sites.

Inspired by the shows you see on TV, you decide to give it a shot and download your favorite online poker site. After making your first deposit, you find a suitable tournament, register and sit down at your virtual table, anxiously waiting to scoop big pots and take it down just like the pro’s!

The first hand, you look down at a half-decent starting hand and call the blind, after all, the blinds are cheap, and you want to build a stack. The flop comes out in your favor; you win with top pair and move on to the next hand. The next two hands, you fold. The fourth hand you get pocket Aces, you raise, get a few callers, and when the flop comes down all low cards you bet substantial, everyone folds and you take down another pot. The fifth hand you get AK suited, you just call. Flop comes A K 9 rainbow, your opponent bets, you raise, he pushes all in and you call. His pocket cards are revealed 5 7, a sigh of relief as you see he has a very slim chance of winning. The turn is a 6, and you know the river even before you read it. That’s right the only card that can beat you –(the dreaded snowman) - 8! You are stunned and mortified.

How does this happen? Moreover, why does it happen so often in online poker? You question your ability to play, and wonder if you should have gone all in pre-flop or raised pre-flop. Then you curse the idiot who called with 5 7 off suit and make a note on him stating “DONKEY!”

This scenario is not that far off from real life happenings at online poker sites all over the Internet everyday. Any online poker player is familiar with this type of ridiculous bad beat scenario. It makes us want to play the same bad hands in the hopes of sucking out on someone.

So, why does it happen? Is it because the Internet is full of bad players or, is it because the online poker sites are rigged? Surprisingly, It is not because of bad players, It is because the online poker sites ARE rigged! However, not the way you think.

Read that again very carefully: Online poker sites are rigged, and a careful study of what is happening behind the scenes will reveal not only, how they are rigged, but how you can beat the online poker program. If you stay tuned to my posts over the next few weeks, I will continue to reveal what is going on behind the scenes at the online poker sites!