Poker Blog

As you may recall my last blog entry covered the preparation for Sit&Go tournaments – so now let’s get down to business. Let’s deal the cards for our hypothetical SNG!

Our SNG starts and every player receives a starting stack of 1,500 chips. The blinds are being raised every 10 minutes and the first blind level is at 10/20 (that means a small blind of 10 and a big blind of 20 chips). This and the next blind level will mainly consist of us focusing on our opponents’ playing style. Who hardly plays any hand if any at all? Who only plays from late position? Who likes to raise? Who hardly raises? Who keeps calling? Do we have a maniac (wild player who plays a lot of hands, raises a lot and possibly attempts many bluffs)? If we come to see a showdown who has played which hand and how? That is already a lot of information to be gathered and remembered and if it is too much at the beginning of your young poker career at least try filtering the players willing to play risky!

We will play a TAG style (as explained in my last blog entry Sit&Go Preparation). In order to effectively do so it is important to realise what position we are in. Position refers to where we are seated in regard to the Dealer Button (BU). With 10 players at a table you divide the position up as follows:

1. Small Blind (SB)
2. Big Blind (BB)
3. Under The Gun (UTG)
4. Under The Gun +1 (UTG+1)
5. Under The Gun +2 (UTG+2)
6. Middle Position 1 (MP1)
7. Middle Position 2 (MP2)
8. Middle Position 3 (MP3)
9. Cut Off (CO)
10. Button (BU)

The 2 player left of the dealer (SB, BB) are referred to as the Blinds. The 3 following players (UTG, UTG+1, UTG+2) are also called Early Positions. Seated after them are the players in Middle Position (MP1, MP2, MP3) while the final two players (CO, BU) are referred to as being in Late Position.

Why is the position so interesting? Well, the more players acting after you the bigger the chance that one of them has strong cards that we don’t know about yet. The position defines the order of betting in all betting rounds which makes the Button the best position because – with the exception of the first betting round, the pre-flop – this player will always be able to make his decision after everyone else. If a player is seated further to the right of the button than you, you “have position” over that player in the poker lingo. This is a great advantage because whenever you get to decide what to do you can adjust to what he did and act accordingly. Doyle “Texas Dolly” Brunson (a poker icon if there ever was one) noted in his famous book Super System: “In No Limit Hold’em position is… well, it’s the name of the game. It’s everything. If I had position all night, I could beat the game… and I’d never have to look at my hole cards.” We however will take a look at our cards and will make sure only to play the following hands in this early phase of the SNG:

Position and Early Hole Cards No Limit Texas Hold’Em

		Raises before you
Hole Cards	Position	None	One	Two or more
AA,KK	1-10	Raise	Reraise	All-In
QQ	1-10	Raise	Reraise	Fold
AK	1-10	Raise	Call	Fold
JJ,TT	3-5	Call	Fold	Fold
JJ,TT	1,2,6-10	Raise	Fold	Fold
99-22	1-10	Call	Fold	Fold
AQ,AJ,KQ	3-7	Fold	Fold	Fold
AQ,AJ,KQ	1,2,8-10	Raise	Fold	Fold

You will fold all other pocket cards during the first three blind levels! While this may seem overly conservative or even cowardly I strongly recommend that you stick to the table strictly in your early SNG career. To quote myself: “Wanting to be a winning SNG player in the long term we will have to make it our primary goal to be among the remaining last 3 players on the table.” We haven’t gained anything finding ourselves in an all-in situation with AQ and 8 remaining players on the table when an opposing player shows us his AK and takes us off the table. In a tournament your goal is to survive. Don’t let the fact that someone at the table already doubled his stack change your playing style. In the very next tournament this player might exit very early thanks to his playing style.

In my next blog entry Sit&Go – Flop or Dropwe will take a look at which flops we would like to see with our carefully chosen pocket cards. Until then I hope you will find a lot of aces under your pillow!

In my last blog entry I shortly introduced a special form of tournament poker, namely Sit&Go tournaments (SNG). Today and in the following blog entries I want to talk about things you should consider when trying to win money in SNGs. My main goal is to help the typical poker rookie being successful as quickly as possible. Therefore my guide will be aimed at low limit SNGs.

Taking a look at the payment structure of a typical SNG with 9 participants we will see that only the first 3 places will be paid (1st place 50%, 2nd 30% and 3rd 20% of the total prize pool) while the remaining players will end up with nothing at all. Wanting to be a winning SNG player in the long term we will have to make it our primary goal to be among the remaining last 3 players on the table. While this sounds like a very obvious thing to do, my experience taught me that a lot of players in the micro limits do not heed that and very few players actually approach their SNG game accordingly. As a thoughtful poker player you will thus be able to gather experience without risking a lot of money at the micro limit SNGs and you will more than likely have success very soon and quite easily. The key to success lies in the choice of playing styles. Here is a quick listing of the 4 main categories of playing styles:

1. Loose-Passive (lots of hands played – more calls than raises)
2. Loose-Aggressive (lots of hands played – more raises than calls)
3. Tight-Passive (hands played are well considered – more calls than raises)
4. Tight-Aggressive (hands played are well considered – more raises than calls)

We will play the tight-aggressive style (TAG). This playing style is the safest for inexperienced players and also most likely to end up in the money.

The next decision we will have to make is whether we want to play a Turbo/Speed SNG which is a very popular variation in all online poker rooms. Turbo or Speed refers to the blinds being raised quicker in this SNG than in a regular SNG which means that it will come to an end sooner. A tight-aggressive player will have an additional advantage here as Turbo SNGs with a low buy-in tend to be infested by poker players who display a lack of skill paired with very low patience which equals money for others. Seeing as how the TAG playing style demands good pocket cards I would nonetheless skip the Turbo SNGs for the time being and focus on SNGs with blind levels of 10 minutes or more. The reason is simple: I don’t want you to become one of the impatient players simply because you didn’t get any decent hand for the whole last blind level. At normal SNGs you will have more time to wait for good pocket cards and nonetheless find enough players at the table who are willing to commit with mediocre hands. The advantage of micro limits is obvious – you will find weaker players and they will not bother to assess other players’ behaviour on the table or simply don’t know how to do so. We will try and take the opposite approach and make it a habit of watching other players closely right from the start regardless of whether we are involved in a hand or not.

This leads us to the final step of the preparation for SNGs. The playing style I suggested and that I will focus on more in the following blog entries demands patience and a certain amount of concentration to be able to observe your fellow players. If you are new to the game of poker I strongly recommend that you play at one table only instead of various at the same time. Turn off the TV even if it may be nice at times to have some additional source of entertainment at times. If you want to listen to music while playing, fine – but make sure you manage your playlist before the game so you don’t have to rummage through your mp3 directories looking for ‘that song’ during your poker game. You can see where I am getting at. If you play poker, you play poker. Your whole focus and attention should be directed at your game. Otherwise you give away a big advantage over your opponents on this table, an advantage that you didn’t even have to work for – and it is not often you will come across those so make the most of it when you can.

Now that we know what and how we want to play and managed to focus all our attention on the table we will jump right into the action in my next Sit&Go blog entry that will be all about the early phase of SNGs and the choice of pocket cards that we will play according to our tight-aggressive playing style. Until then I wish you a lot of fun on the Max Poker Bonus website and lots of pocket rockets!

I have been playing poker for several years now and all the TV advertisements caused me to switch to Texas Hold’em and also play online. Before that I primarily used to play the classic poker (5 card draw) in cash games. I also played some other variants but not on a regular basis. Generally not a good idea as you should concentrate on one version instead of trying to master 3 or 4 of them at the same time.

There are 2 main reasons for me succeeding despite that. On the one hand the amount of quality players was quite low when I started playing compared to now and you could be sure to find some easy prey on any given table. On the other hand I have always been a mathematics freak in school and poker invites you to put your mathematics knowledge to good use. I probably don’t need to point out that back then I have calculated all the chances for each hand with enthusiasm (and pen and paper and lots of spare time).

I remember at one point simulating poker games for nearly a month (and I am not talking about a computer simulation – I simply dealt the cards for several non-existing players and tried to roughly evaluate my hand). Of course that method was somewhat painstaking and tedious and by no means perfect but nonetheless I managed to find basic values of various pocket card combinations (I had no specific literature on this topic nor access to the internet – even if I had I doubt at that early stage I would have found any useful information on poker odds).

This exercise brought a certain confidence to my game because my little “experiments” made me aware of the simple fact that a winning chance of 60% meant nothing else than statistically losing 40% of the time. Not the perfect condition to bet all my money unless I am forced to since according to the laws of mathematics I would lose it all 2 times out of 5. You will have to decide for yourself where the magic number lies for going all-in, I personally usually draw the line very clearly above the mentioned 60%.

So how can you determine the odds of you winning? Well, of course it helps tremendously to know the hand of your opponent. There are various ways to draw some conclusions if you have paid attention to your opponent and his actions (for 5 card draw the amount of drawn cards is of course a huge factor, but in general you should pay attention to a lot more – and I am not talking about blinking, humming, clearing one’s throat and such). But even apart from my opponents’ betting behaviour it is important to know my chance on getting a certain hand. What good is it that someone else only has a small pair if I don’t even have that?

At the same time you should be aware that solely concentrating on your own hand can end badly. A good poker player “knows” the hand of his opponent. Take a close look at TV poker events. A lot of the time the remaining two players of a hand can guess pretty much what cards the other one holds. The poker pros usually guess correctly and that has to do with a lot of experience, instinct and intuition and of course the fact that they are experts in studying people before and during a tournament. While I am still an amateur in that area I already profit from that in most of the tournaments and cash games that I participate in.

Try this little exercise: whenever you have only one or two opponents remaining in any given hand that you play try to conclude what cards they hold and play accordingly. Whenever it comes to a showdown check whether you were right with your educated guess. Making yourself aware is the first and very important step. Even if you may have been wrong the first few times you will notice that you will be able to assess your opponents’ hands better and better with time and eventually you will be able to avoid stupid losses – at least if you have the strength to fold a hand and accept the loss of the money that you have bet so far.

In order for you to practice assessing pocket cards I urge you to try the Poker Odds Calculator – use any pocket cards that you like and try to evaluate the odds for each in your head or from your guts and then look at the calculated odds. Once you manage to get a rough grip on that you will realise that your game improves dramatically. I promise!

Over the time I have infected a lot of my friends with my passion for poker. For that reason I have felt responsible for them and wanted to make sure they will be able to enjoy the game as much as possible which includes having success as soon as possible. More important than that however was to help them avoid losing a big amount of money with a bad hand due to inexperience and thus losing interest. After taking a close look at some new players’ first steps I have soon come to a conclusion as to what I want to teach people who are new to the game of poker.

Texas Hold’em, Omaha, Seven Card Stud, Five Card Stud, Razz, Five Card Draw – these are variants of poker. If a professional player is successful in just one of them he will be commonly referred to as One Trick Pony by his colleagues. However you aren’t born a successful poker player and therefore should concentrate on one variant to begin with. We will decide to focus on the one that is most popular at the moment in order to find tables to play at any given time. That obviously makes Texas Hold’em the game to play. Texas Hold’em itself is played in several varieties, Fixed Limit, Split Limit, Pot Limit and No Limit. Based on the previous principle of going with the most popular game we will focus on No Limit Hold’em (NLHE). The final decision will be whether we want to play Cash Games (also called Ring Games) or Tournaments. I found out that for most new poker players Tournaments are more fun than Cash Games (additionally they are safer as you can only lose your Buy-In and the Tournament fee). And since fun is our main objective – even more so while still learning the game – we will play No Limit Hold’em Tournaments.

In my previous blog entry about bankroll management I mentioned a special form of Tournaments, the Sit&Gos (SNG). Buy-Ins for SNG Tournaments can range from a few cents up to several thousands of dollars. They don’t have a time schedule but will commence once a certain amount of players have registered for the Tournament. This amount can vary from 2 up to a few hundred players. A very common variant are the Single-Table SNGs. You simply register at a Single-Table SNG which usually will consist of 9 or 10 players. The Buy-In is for example $5+0.50 and ten players are seated at the table. That means $5 will go to the prize pool per player which makes it a total of $50. 50 cents per player will stay with the poker room as the so called Tournament fee (the equivalent to the rake in Cash Games). Each player now receives a set amount of chips – once you lose all your chips (stack) you are out of the game. The SNG is over when one player has won all the chops at the table. The pay-out structure will usually be 50%, 30%, 20% for the top three positions which in our example would amount to $25 for the winner, $15 for the second and $10 for the third place.

Let’s now look at a Multi-Table SNG in our next example. You are playing in a SNG with 45 participants. In this case this would mean 9 players per table on 5 tables. The Buy-In is set at $3+0.25, so the prize pool will be at $135. Again each player will receive the same amount of chips at the start of the Tournament and play commences. Once the first people start dropping out the remaining players will be re-seated every now and then in order to make sure the amount of players at each table will be approximately the same. At one point there will be 9 players left in the Tournament who will be seated at one table, the Final Table. Just like in the Single-Table SNG the Tournament will be over once one player has won all the available chips. Typically the pay-out structure for a Tournament like this would be $6 for the 7th position, $9 for the 6th, $12 for the 5th, $15 for the 4th, $21 for the third, $30 for the second and a nice $42 for the winner.

As beginner it can be a comfortable feeling to know that you will not lose more than a pre-determined amount of money instead of getting caught in a losing spiral in a Cash Game. This alone can (and probably should) be a reason to concentrate on SNG Tournaments early on. In the upcoming blog entries I will shed some light on what to keep in mind in order to successfully play this kind of Tournament Poker. I still enjoy playing SNGs very much and my results there have been very satisfying for a long time now despite my early mistakes due to a lack of knowledge. It took me quite some time to manage to get back to break even after a bumpy start into my poker life but now SNG Tournaments are part of a winning and fun poker experience.

And even though I run the risk of repeating myself: Poker shall be fun right from the start!

In my first blog entry I promised to give you some tips to help you prevent having the same bad start as a new poker player as I had experienced myself. If I had made a plan how to manage the money I put aside for poker (my bankroll) in a sensible way I could have avoided a lot of anger and frustration later on. Looking back I can say that the careless and sometimes even reckless handling of my bankroll was the biggest mistake that I made in my young poker career. For that reason I would like to write something about Bankroll Management today.

Chris Ferguson who in the year 2000 was the winner of the main event of the WSOP decided to take an interesting challenge in the year 2006. He wanted to earn $10,000 in the course of a year without depositing even a single cent. First things first: he successfully completed his own challenge. The hardest part for him proved to be the many freerolls he had to compete in in order to get a handful of dollars to enable him to build a bankroll in the first place. In the course of this experiment Mr. Ferguson set up the following rules for himself:

• I will never buy into a cash game or a Sit&Go with more than 5% of my total bankroll (exception for the lowest limits: I am allowed to buy into any game with a buy-in of $2.50 or less).
• I will not buy into a multi-table tournament for more than 2% of my total bankroll and I am allowed to buy into any multi-table tournament that costs $1.
• If at any time during a NL (No Limit) or PL (Pot Limit) cash game session my money on the table represents more than 10% of my total bankroll I must leave the game when the blinds reach me.

Please note that I used Dollars as a currency for these rules because I took them straight from Chris Ferguson and didn’t want to pretend he used Euros for his calculations. I will use Euros for the remainder of the article though.

Only 3 rules but very well thought through and in my eyes very user friendly for beginning players.

Let’s look at an example to make it clearer: let’s assume your first deposit in a poker room is €100 and you are planning on mainly playing Sit&Go. That means your bankroll is exactly €100 (unless you receive an instant bonus on depositing), 5% of the total bankroll are €5. Therefore you will play Sit&Go games with a maximum buy-in of €5. You are not able to find a Sit&Go for €5 or less, but one with a buy-in of €5.50 – are you still allowed to play?

Well, it is your bankroll and of course you can decide to play. If you want to know my answer however it is a clear and loud “NO!”. Despite you needing only €10 more (so you have a €110 bankroll) so you don’t breach the 5% rule with that buy-in of €5.50 I would still advise you not to compete in the game.

We have put these rules up in order to successfully manage our bankroll and we do not circumvent or overrule them when we feel like it. To be a winning poker player in the long term means that you have to have a lot of discipline. Even and especially when dealing with your bankroll. In our example you are exactly €10 short of being allowed to play in the €5.50 Sit&Go according to our rules. Play in €3.40 Sit&Go tournaments and compete there until your bankroll reaches €110 or more and then change your limit and try your luck in the €5.50 tournaments.

Let’s assume you haven’t played your best poker or were simply unlucky and lost ten of the mentioned €3.40 tournaments in a row. Your bankroll has been diminished to €66 and 5% of it would now be €3.30. You know what that means, right? 🙂 Exactly! Your bankroll doesn’t allow for €3.40 Sit&Gos anymore so you have to switch to €2.50 Sit&Gos until your bankroll is at least at €68 again (5% of €68 equals €3.40).

One of the main side effects of consequent bankroll management is that you will be able to find the limit that suits your current ability. You will change limits several times, I guarantee you that. The rewards for your discipline and consequence will be manifold:

• You will soon be playing at a limit that allows you to enjoy success and a sense of achievement.
• You don’t play for money you can’t afford to lose without even noticing.
• In the long term you will always play limits according to your skills.
• You do not risk losing your bankroll at once and the risk of losing it at all is reduced to a minimum.
• It is a fun and a great sense of achievement to realise you can beat a limit and are approaching a higher limit cent by cent and Euro by Euro.

The main advantage is that you can enjoy the game of poker much more relaxed with those rules. Poker shall be fun right from the start!

When talking about poker a lot of people will refer to it as a game of skill, a game of chances, a game of odds and probabilities and sometimes even a game of pure luck – and while they are all right in their assumptions I personally believe that the most common mistake is to overlook the importance of experience in poker. This surely comes as no shocker but it is nonetheless widely overlooked. If you look at the number of people starting at medium to high limit games you cannot help but wonder whether you should feel sorry for them for losing so much money in such a short time or whether you should envy them for being able to afford to do so. If you are like me you are not able to afford to lose hundreds or thousands of Euros per night on a regular basis – if at all. Therefore I assume that you will take the same road as I once did and play for minimum limits.

While this may sound boring let’s just consider this: do you honestly think that all the successful and professional players started playing for high limits? A new player is a losing player, simple as that. There may be the occasional exception where a spectacularly gifted person really starts winning straight away but I very much doubt that you or I know anyone who fits that description – even remotely. So I think it is safe to assume that none of us will be that Wunderkind Of Poker that the world has been waiting for. So do play on low limit tables and the smaller poker tournaments when new to the game – I can’t emphasize this enough. Know your limits!

I know, I know… if you play at a 5c/10c table your poker life can seem pretty boring. What does it matter if I win or lose 50 cents? Maybe in a whole evening I will win or lose up to €10 or €15? So what? Well, keep these numbers in relation to the limits in mind and let’s now have that example with a €5/€10 game. That would mean you would lose or win €1,000 or €1,500 in an evening of poker. And believe me – when you are new to the game you will lose more than you win at those medium limits. Why? Because at these limits you will meet much more experienced players than at the lower tables. There are quite a number of players actually counting on people to overplay their limits and they will have a great time helping you lift all the burden that money puts on you… I have been there on both sides of the table and I can tell you it is an experience you can really live without when you are on the losing end.

Once you are ready for higher limits you should of course seize the opportunity and elevate your game. Be prepared however to go down to lower levels again if your bankroll forces you to unless you want to lose all your money. The switch from low limits to medium and high limits can be a tough one. You will notice that the flow of the game is very different simply because a bet, raise or re-raise will weigh much more. In a low limits game with a pot of 40 cents a bet of 30 cents followed by a raise of €1 still is a low amount of money and a lot of opponents will call that raise as they don’t really care about losing a few Euros that night. However a game with €400 in the pot and a €300 bet followed by a €1,000 raise looks very different all of a sudden. Bluffing suddenly becomes an art in the higher levels as you will pay a dear prize if caught on the losing end of it. I have noticed that at really low levels you will always find players who simply call just about anything as it doesn’t matter anyway. So you will not be able to bluff as effectively as in higher levels. But there are many more differences.

You will notice at higher limit games that often there will be an aggressive player who pushes a lot and makes it very expensive to see the flop. If you haven’t learned to assess and fold your hand accordingly you will hand over your money very quickly. Same goes for your style of play. While at lower limits you will usually not have to worry about changing your personal style you will find out that at higher limits people will start to read your game quickly – so unless you are prepared to change gears every now and then and do something unexpected (and no, going all-in with 27 pre-flop is not unexpected, it is stupid) you will be an open book in no time.

That’s why it is vital to play at low limits first and learn about the game, learn to evaluate your hand, try to make an educated guess about your opponents’ hands based on their behaviour, assess the situation in combination with the community cards and the probabilities of various hands, learn about your own strengths and weaknesses, be able to adjust your game styles, learn to avoid playing on tilt,… If you still want to start playing at €10/€20 tables from the very beginning of your poker career be my guest. Just make sure to drop me a note telling me which table you will be playing at, I really want to meet you.