Poker games

The French people is a truly unique people. They beheaded their King and a few years later coronated an Emperor. Cheese, wine and social privileges are more important to them than sweating at work. So it is not really surprising that they have just enacted new online gambling laws that are stupid and unfair, is it?

Stupid is a strong word. Yes it is, indeed. Look at what is happening with online poker in France. Because of this new law, licensed online poker operators in France can only allow French players to play their games. And French players can only play at these sites. So instead of what used to be an international game where players from all countries in the world (almost all) could sit and battle in card games, we now have websites only for the French players. French online poker players will only play against other Gaulois.

This creates a segmented market, the world without France and France. There is no benefit to that, on the contrary. As this only French traffic will be small in comparison to a global traffic (at any poker room), this will make the games less active and the players weaker. This is a move reminiscent of their latest World Cup prowess, making sure to take the actions to become less competitive.

Also this law is unfair because the friends of the establishment are the first to get these licenses even though some of them have nearly no experience in online poker.

If you want to play online casino games like video poker, this should not be as much of a concern as you play versus the house so it does not really matter what the other players are doing. Consult specialized gambling websites like onlinevideopoker.com to find out more about video poker for example.

But for online poker this new law is certain to make French online poker players worse than the rest of the world as they will be used to play in their small enclosure. The good news is the French do not really care, they have much bigger issues such as cleaning up their budget and managing the regular strikes there.

At least online poker is allowed in France, unlike Turkey. Freedom has prevailed.

You look at your hole cards and see a big pair, like JJ+. Joy is your first reaction, but playing big pairs in NL is not as simple as it sounds.

Of course it depends at what stakes you are playing. If you play the micro or low limits at one of some low stakes poker sites, most players do not know how to play big pairs correctly. It is a different story at high stakes.

The thing is high pairs is, if the flop does not help, you have a pair. This pair could be higher than any card on the flop, but this does not necessarily make it the best hand.

When you have a monster pocket pairs in NL (QQ+), you should do everything you can to win the most money in the pot before the flop. You should raise from any position. If someone raises before you, you should almost reraise, except if your opponent is very aggressive.

You want to get as much money as possible into the pot before the flop because top pairs are almost certain to be the best hand pre flop. In some rare cases it can benefit you to slow play these pairs before the flop. For instance if you think you’re going to play the hand heads-up; if the table is very aggressive; or if aggressive players are sitting at your left.

Many players limp with pocket aces and this is a favorite move from early position by ten WSOP bracelets winner Johnny Chan. If someone raises, they you can reraise. If you see a player play that way, it is likely he has a big pair. If you slow play preflop, it is crucial to not feel committed if the flop is not favorable. If the flop comes and there is plenty of action there is a good chance that you do not have the best hand. If you are a king or a queen and an ace on the flop, do not waste any more of your chips.

On the river your game will depend on your position. If you are the first to play with a weak hand, but you still think it is the best hand, think about betting a third of the pot. If raised, you can throw your hand. If you are the last to play and your opponent checks, you should also check. Besides if you think you can call a worse hand, a pair is not usually strong enough to bet after the river is checked.

Playing big pairs in NL requires a lot of trial. As Doyle Brunson said: “With big pairs you win a small pot or lose a big one.” For if a player is willing to risk his entire stack in front of you, he probably has a hand that can beat your pair. Play them carefully, but aggressively to win more or lose less.

The Poker Legend – Tony G

As far as Australian Poker League superstars go, Tony G is known the world over.

This legend of the game is loved and revered by many of Poker’s finest performers. Most folks wouldn’t give a moment’s attention to the name Antanas Guoga, but Tony G they certainly know well.

That’s because Tony was born in Lithuania and he moved to Melbourne, Australia when he was but a young pup at the tender age of 11.

A measure of his success can be gleamed from his superb performances in multiple high-stakes Poker tournaments in recent years. From the age of 18 Tony G has been racking, stacking, cracking and packing in the millions in Poker tournaments.

According to several estimates, Tony G has won over $2.1 million over the years. But that excludes promotional payments, commissions, commentating and other network deals he has negotiated.

Tony G is often a top contender and places well in big-name tournaments. Among his many career highlights are 1st place in the World Series of Poker (WSOP) and the World Poker Tournament (WPT). But Tony is always hovering about in the upper-echelons of Poker’s Grandmaster circles.

He was crowned the winner of the European Poker Championships (EPC) in 2005 where he played the $5,000 No-Limit Hold’em main event. But it was the $450,000 payday he netted that made world headlines. He has won many tournaments since, including the World Poker Tour Bad Boys of Poker 2 event, the Betfair Asian Poker Tour and more.

Five years have already passed since Nick’s WPT victory, and he is still the youngest winner of a WPT event.

There are certain rites of passage commonly associated with turning 21. A lot of them involve waking up hung over somewhere unfamiliar with more questions than brain cells. Born and bred Manhattanite Nick Schulman hasn’t necessarily been there, but that’s not the only reason his entrance into legal adulthood strays from the norm. As far as we can tell, very few 21-year-olds mark the occasion by going out and winning the World Poker Tour’s 2005 World Poker Final at Foxwoods. In fact, no 21-year-old has ever done anything like that, which is why the native New Yorker has become the youngest WPT champ in history.

“It’s not really what I planned for. I’m not complaining, it just seems so strange,” said Schulman, when he became $2.1 million richer with the victory. “I just like the game. You can’t force yourself to get good at poker. You can’t want to live the lifestyle and play without loving the game.”

While it might not necessarily have groomed him to become a World Poker Tour champion, the underground poker clubs and pool halls of New York definitely had a hand in shaping Schulman as a player and a person. Starting out in area pool halls at 15, young Schulman managed to make friends shooting stick with characters nicknamed “Snake” when most of his peers were playing tag at recess. “I just went for fun and fell in love with the game. By the time I was 15 or 16, I was really competing,” says Schulman. “For whatever reason, I’m just wired to gamble. With the transition to poker, I just never really had a choice.”.

By 18, Schulman and his friends had graduated to New York’s poker clubs. As clubs were closed down by the New York Police Department, his crew was constantly forced to find other venues for that next game. “Some of them were a little seedy, but for the most part they were just poker rooms,” says Schulman, who cut his teeth tapping the felt across from an interesting mix of New York rounders and degenerate gamblers. “I guess it’s a rougher crowd in the clubs. Management didn’t really take as good care of their players and the money wasn’t well protected. But for the most part most of the clubs I played at were cool.”

Nick grew up frequenting New York poker clubs with his friends, but things changed when he turned 21; Schulman was free to enter himself in tournaments and finally challenge the big boys on a considerably larger stage. He kept playing cash games, but always figured there was more money to be made in tournaments.

He had no idea where they would take him, especially after busting out early in his first tournament at the Borgata. A $2.1 million payday seemed pretty far away by the time he descended on Foxwoods two weeks before the World Poker Finals. Enjoying the action at the tables, he still wasn’t convinced that entering a tournament was the right move. The debacle at the Borgata certainly didn’t help to squash those fears. But a satellite tournament victory won him an entry in the $10,000 buy-in tournament. That’s where things got interesting.

“I was just looking to have fun with it. I was obviously going to try to play my best and things started going really well,” says Schulman. “After two days, I realized I might have a shot, so I started to take it seriously.”

After amassing a serious stack early on, Schulman only needed four hands to dispense of tournament runner-up Tony Lincastro. On the final hand, Schulman was dealt 6-9 of spades and turned a flush. With that, history was made.

Crowned the WPT’s youngest champion ever, Schulman returned to a hero’s welcome in New York. Local television and newspapers jumped on the story of the $2-million poker product barely old enough to drink. But Schulman knows that his place as the WPT’s youngest champ could be tenuous. At the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure, a WPT event held in the Bahamas in January, the winner was 22-year-old Canadian Steve-Paul Ambrose, who beat a final table that included two 18-year-olds.

So after five years, Nick is still a poker pro and he has added a WSOP bracelet to his list of winnings. His total live tournaments winnings are about $3,800,000.

Steve Schirripa, the broad-shouldered, burly actor best known for playing mob soldier Bobby “Bacala” Baccalieri on HBO’s The Sopranos, is teasing a congenial older gentleman about his massive Stetson, which sticks out at this event in Las Vegas’ pure nightclub. That the older gentleman is poker godfather Doyle Brunson doesn’t seem to fluster the actor.

After all, Schirripa lived in Vegas for over twenty years, holding down jobs ranging from bouncer to maitre ‘d. He even worked simultaneously as entertainment director at the Riviera while he played Bacala during his first season on HBO’s cult phenomenon. He does not play at any of the online poker rooms, but he knows the Sin City like his pocket.

It was while making the rounds at the Stardust and the Horseshoe in those early years that he became familiar with some of the local poker pros like Chip Reese and Brunson. Back then he simply knew them as “diehard poker guys.” Today, the world knows them as legends. It’s among the thousand or so reasons why Vegas looks very different to Schirripa on this fun November night. “I just knew guys who lived there that made a living playing poker. Those days are over, I guess. It’s a whole different ballgame now,” he reminisces. “Vegas is a good city if you’re in your 20s or you’re retired. It’s not for me. I moved there when I was 21. It was great.”

You can tell by the way he teases Brunson that he still feels a little comfortable in Sin City. Of course, it helps that his friends from TV’s most notorious crime family have also descended on PURE for the first annual Comedy Cares Celebrity Poker Tournament, hosted by Sopranos creator David Chase and the show’s star James Gandolfini.

They’re all here, the names reading like the box score at a typical Italian family dinner: Christopher Moltisanti, Uncle Junior, Paulie Walnuts, Silvio Dante, Johnny Sack. Practically the entire cast has got Schirripa’s back. And for anyone who knows the group, that’s not so unusual. It might not outlast the considerable shadow cast on pop culture by HBO’s signature powerhouse, but the friendships these men have made on and off the set are practically inconceivable by Hollywood standards. So what better way for the gang to come together over a few hands of Hold ‘em in Las Vegas?

“I love them like family,” says Steve Van Zandt, the E Street Band guitarist whose role as Soprano consigliere Dante is one of television’s least likely reinventions. “I don’t like them very much but I love them like family.” It’s a typical backhanded compliment among the cast, who has arrived at the $15,000-buy-in tournament to help raise money for a 460-000-square-foot addition to the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.

It’s not the only time you’ll see this group together after hours. Series stars Schirripa, Michael Imperioli, John Ventimiglia, and Vince Curatola host a live variety show, Comedy You Can’t Refuse. Imperioli and Schirripa tell jokes while Ventimiglia and Curatola sing their favorite Sinatra standards in a show that has headlined at the Vegas Hilton, Harrah’s in Atlantic City, and Foxwood’s.

Curatola, the razor-sharp actor known for playing imprisoned underboss Sack, even teaches scene study at Studio Dante, the Manhattan theater founded by Imperioli, whose role as the thuggish Moltisanto eventually helped him graduate to the show’s writing staff. Like the event at PURE, you’ll occasionally see the Sopranos cast come together to help the helpless.

When Schirripa began organizing charity events benefiting the New York Fire Department (two of his childhood friends from Brooklyn were FDNY firefighters who died on 9/11), the rest of the cast was there to help. Same with Curatola’s work with the Hackensack University Medical Center, and Tony Sirico (who plays Walnuts) and his efforts for St. Jude’s Hospital in Brookville, New York.

When Schirripa beats Doyle Brunson at the Comedy Cares poker tournament, you know he’s going to savor the moment. He stands and makes allusions to striking out Babe Ruth, to knocking out a legend. Brunson can only sit back and laugh. “I made a fool of myself,” Schirripa admits about the victory celebration.

Van Zandt, a poker novice among the cast members, makes the tournament’s final table alongside comedian Ray Romano and Sopranos actress Aida Turturro, herself a beginner at the game. It’s around this time that the party kicks into high gear. Van Zandt credits his accomplishment to the tutelage of “my personal poker gurus, Johnny Marinacci and Mike Scelza,” themselves members of the extended Sopranos family who have appeared on the show.

The rest of the cast is simply dumbfounded. “Steve Van Zandt has hardly played poker in his life. That’s why I question, is it luck or is it skill?” Schirripa says. “I think it’s a combination. Jim Gandolfini, he knows how to play. Some of the other guys, so so.”

“To the people I love,” fictional mob boss Tony Soprano toasted towards the end of the show’s fifth season. “Nothing else matters.” The Sopranos gang uses the break to come together. “Over the last seven or eight years, we have become very much like an off-camera family,” says Imperioli. “We had mostly known one another from past TV and movies and just being part of the New York acting community. I think it’s part of the chemistry that also makes the show so successful.”

It’s not unusual for a lot of that camaraderie to come out in a poker game. Certain cast members even enjoy the odd game in their trailer during filming. Per the show’s dramatic license, the most intense hands tend to be interrupted by a rap on the door and a request to get back on the set. “We play sometimes in our trailers. We scream, we curse,” says Curatola. “If we filmed it, you would think it was part of the episode. We get cantankerous and we throw things.”

Why do we play online poker?

Hi you all and welcome to my online website introducting the wonderful world of Backgammon & Poker, the two games i love. If you are already a Poker and a Backagammon player, you dont need to be told the fascinations about two of these games. I know that for me and many others, it was love at first sight. In regards to Backgammon I wondered what those funny diagrams were on the back of the folding chess board and in regards to Poker, the movie I love was Tombstone that made me really want to know what Doc Holliday’s Poker is an honest trade all about.

One day, or in fact, one evening at an all night party, I was introduced to the game on the reverse side of that chess board. I remembered it quite well. After watching and asking questions for an hour or so, I decided I could play. Well, I did sort of, by the time the sun came stealing in to remind us of the hour, I had managed to lose most of the games, a few dollars, and not a little pride.

This ofcourse would never do, and it became clear that the game would have to be learned properly. Unfortunately, as with most games, it must be learned by doing rather than by reading and playing online games. We can read about a game but until we actually play, we cant really become involved. So far, however, reader’s participation has been missing from backgammon publications, and I hope to correct this situation.

Now, just some bits and pieces about what the website has to offer. This first website I made is focused on poker, I have made other sites that are more focused in Backgammon.

This website lays the foundation by discussing an unusual topic, why you play poker. Most poker websites have ignored this subject, because the entire poker culture is uninterested or actively opposed to looking at ourselves.

If you doubt me, just listen to cardroom conversations. You will almost never hear anyone talk about why they play poker (except for macho nonsense such as “I play only for the money”), nor do people discuss how their own drives and attitudes help or hurt them. It just isn’t done.

Instead of looking at ourselves, we talk about specific hands, luck, or strategy. If we discuss psychology, the focus is on other people and the ways to beat them, not on ourselves. However, as Pogo once said, “We have met the enemy, and it is us.” Or, as Roy Cooke put it: “Only in love do I see more self-denial, lack of honesty with oneself, and bad decisions based on emotion than at poker.”

We beat ourselves because we do not know ourselves. We repeat our mistakes because we do not perceive why we made them. We do not objectively assess our own strengths and weaknesses, nor do we understand how our own drives – including irrational ones – affect our entire approach to the game.

The next posts will begin the self-examination process that continues throughout the entire website. First, we will look at the attitudes and skills that separate the winners and losers. Then we will analyze why you play poker and why you have chosen your playing style.

Some players are able to successfully use this strategy at the right time to maximize their profit. This is more of an art than a science.

Deception is the most well know concept in poker, but not used as often as most of us think. Anyway, excluding bluffing from your poker strategy is a very bad idea that will make a poker game uninteresting. If we never make a bluff, we become too predictable and the chances of profit are greatly reduced.

In a game of Texas Holdem, it is a good idea to attempt bluffs when you are sure you cannot win the pot or when trying to take the pot before all cards are dealt. In a poker game with money involved, it is possible to calculate whether a “bluff” has positive expected value or not. In this regard, we must compare the possibility of success of the bluff with the size of the bet and the pot. Therefore, a critical success factor is the ability to predict whether the opponents will fold.

To decide whether it is the right time to bluff, we must consider a few things:

The types of opponents. Do not bluff less experienced opponents, as they may call with anything. This is the most common error. We must ensure that the opponent is a player experienced enough that he knows to fold his hand.

The number of opponents. The general rule is not to bluff three or more players, especially in fixed limit holdem. The bluff is more likely to succeed against just one opponent. Not just because he is one and there is only one player to make fold, but also because the pot is smaller and not large enough to become too desired.

Your table image. A bluff will have more chance of success if we give our opponents the impression that we are a straightforward ABC type player. If they know that you successfully bluffed once, the next time they will not fold their hand. However, the reverse psychology can sometimes work, because in the case of strong players, they might think that you will play deceptively and not bluff again.

Your ability to read your opponents. If you understand the game well and can prevent your opponents to have a good game, the chances of bluffing successfully increase. This ability is probably the most difficult to master, but certainly the most important.

The pot. Your opponents are likely to call you when the pot is large, because it increases the size of their potential profit. Instead, if your deception succeeds in a big pot game, the reward might be greater.

Position. If you are in late position, you’ll have more information about the hand strength of your opponents and thus more likely to make a good bluff.

In conclusion, it is imperative to consider all these factors in your decision to bluff or not. Start practicing these bluffing tips the next time you log at your favorite online poker room.