Free US Poker

My first time playing poker online did not go as easily as I thought it would. I saw the World Series of Poker on TV and I decided to Download poker software and give it a try. You’d think that part of joining the online poker world would be easy. After all, it’s just a click right? Within minutes I’d be conquering Internet poker, or so I thought.
Turns out there used to be a lot of barriers to actually playing poker online. The first is your computer has to have enough memory for the poker game. Meaning you can’t just move the mouse over the download poker software button and expect it to load for you–if your computer was built sometime in the late 90s.
Mine wasn’t quite that old but it was old enough. Oh. So, while I waited for my new computer, an upgrade I had needed for more reasons than just being able to download poker software, I had a couple of friends I played with in a home game. The computer was being shipped to me and we got deep in the home game.
I had rattled off a few buy-ins and was out of cash. I held up the receipt for my new computer and used that as a marker. Not only did I lose the new computer I hadn’t yet received, my friends would not leave my house, all giddy from winning my money, and started getting rowdy. When the police showed up complaining about the problem, the responsibility fell on me—of course.
So, when my computer did arrive instead of finally being able to log into my favorite poker site, instead I get to watch my buddy do just that. The new computer had enough memory, processing speed, and all the extras I threw in there to have the site on screen mere seconds after he clicked download poker software.
As you’ve noticed, I went a couple of months without playing poker. I got to the point where I could afford another computer, after failing to get my friend to allow me to try and win my second computer back. He said he’d never be that stupid. Twist the knife a little bit friend.
Well, at this point I was getting into some graphics programs and I was tired of all my artsy friends bragging about their Macs. I went with Apple, and when that bright beautiful computer arrived all was good in the world. I got online, went to my future online poker home, and clicked on download poker software.
You know that scene in movies where the music is real loud and everybody’s talking and then something real embarrassing happens or is said, and you hear the record scratch, turning everybody’s attention to the embarrassing action? Well, I was alone when I found out at that time the software didn’t work on a Mac and I swear I heard a record scratch and people start to giggle at my plight.
I was now on my third computer and still couldn’t get poker on it. I was ready to run through the walls of my apartment. My friend, who I lost my second computer to, came over that week and saw my Mac, and he says, “Oh yeah, why’d you get a Mac you know that you can’t play poker on mac don’t you? Been meaning to ask you about that…”
Been meaning to ask me about that? What a friend.
I discovered I can’t return my Mac, and as many times as I keep clicking on Download Poker Software nothing happen, but I don’t stop clicking. Eventually… years later, they have poker for a Mac. You know when I found out? The day my new PC arrived. Yes, I had finally ordered a new PC… just so I could download poker software.

In the United States, in some places, depositing money on a poker site has become as difficult as trying to learn quantum physics. There are Poker Deposit Options, if you call begging or borrowing an option. In other locales in the U.S., it’s not quite that difficult: if you were smart enough to learn calculus you might figure out how to get money online. Most of the rest of the world isn’t under the same tyranny of limitations when it comes to the personal freedom of gambling online. In many countries, players legitimately have poker deposit options. They have the choice of a variety of ways to make a deposit and even better a variety of ways to get paid.

You would think the hard part of poker would be winning money against good players. That’s very hard obviously, but surprisingly it’s even harder to have poker deposit options if you are an United States citizen. At one point in time you could use a credit card, an ewallet like Neteller, your debit card, a check, a money order, and like a democracy should work you had the freedom of choice from every possible poker deposit option.

Well, the federal government has put a stop to most of that. Perhaps, the worst was when they cracked down on ewallets like Neteller and suddenly the most convenient of poker deposit options was no longer an option at all. At lot of players learned firsthand how painful this sudden change was when their money was frozen or disappeared. One famous player won a tournament in the Bahamas and opted to have the payment put into his ewallet. The next day the funds were frozen, as the U.S. decided to freeze all ewallets that accept gambling funds. Imagine the high of winning over a million dollars one day, and the next day discovering you may not being able to touch those funds for months or even worse perhaps never being able to access them at all.

Also, put yourself in that kid’s shoes, say you are youngster who just won a million dollars or more in the Bahamas, you might end up down a lot. You are suddenly rich, you are in the Bahamas, and all your friends are there. You might just throw a party for yourself. Why not buy everybody drinks, why not rent out a villa, why not max out your credit cards and checking account to pay for it because… you now have a million dollars waiting for you.

You deserve to throw a party for yourself, and why wouldn’t you listen to your friends who are looking for a free ride for a night from a newly minted millionaire. Why wouldn’t you gamble some of that newfound money in the casino. Who cares if you lose you can afford to, and then you wake up with a hangover, a hundred new friends, and no way to access your new wealth.

Some would say, that’s no problem most banks, would probably extend you a line of credit in anticipation of those funds. Don’t forget you are talking about a person who makes his living playing poker. Banks generally don’t like professional gamblers as borrowers because they consider them risks. Yes, it’s shocking they consider people that make risky bets for a living a risky bet but they do. On top of that, while that money was in limbo, there was some concern those funds would never be freed up and just confiscated. So, the bank doesn’t even know if those funds will ever be accessed by the player.

Tough spot for a kid, though the story did have a happy ending. He did get his funds, eventually. The rest of the world should be glad they don’t have these hassles when they are looking at poker deposit options. It’s ironic that only in the country that prides itself on freedom of choice is there no choice at all.

So make your to play poker at a safe and high traffic poker site such as: https://www.bwin.com/texas-holdem-poker. See you there!

As Poker Stars and Full Tilt poker got busted by the feds it might seem hard to find places to play. True Poker still offers poker to US citizens and have been doing so for a long time. Longer than any of the other mentioned here.

True Poker might very well be the next Poker Stars as it seems hard for anyone else to accept US Poker Players. True have managed to do this for years and they’re not stopping now. They are the main brand in the Yatahay Network that is the fastest growing network in the poker industry. Check True Poker Out.

When you first sit down to play in a large field Texas Hold em poker tournament and by large then I am referring to events where the average field is more than a thousand players then there are certain ways to maximise your chances of cashing or going very deep without having an awful lot of skill. Firstly I am going to make an analogy here with casino betting to highlight what I mean. Putting card counting to one side for a minute then you cannot go into any casino anywhere in the world and play on any game without the situation being –EV.

So essentially you cannot overcome the house edge. However there is a huge difference between overcoming the house edge in the long term and doing so in the short term. If you go into any casino in the world for only one or two hours then your chances of coming away with more than what you went in with are extremely good. This is purely because there isn’t the necessary time available to the casino for the house edge to guarantee that they will get all your money or even part of it for that matter.

This principle is similar to poker tournaments where the biggest factor which decides on the outcome of any one event is luck over skill. In tournament poker as in cash game poker then skill really only makes a difference long term. You could take two players at the opposite ends of the skill spectrum with one player making $100k/year while the other breaks even but yet the break even player could totally dominate during any one session of play.

The exact same applies in tournament poker where the skilled players really only show themselves over a long period of time. This is why I simply do not buy into all of the hype surrounding many players who win big events. Unless they have a long proven history then there is nothing to prevent them from simply having overcome variance. Any half decent player with enough aggression has the game to win an event. But if you have limited experience of playing tournament poker in large field events then you could do worse than follow the piece of advice that I am about to give.

This is to play the event like a super expanded SNG where you are playing very tightly during the first few levels. This at least takes you away from the manic early levels and takes you into the middle stages of the event. However you then need to become very aggressive at this stage before you get short stacked. If you get lucky then you may have already amassed chips. But playing tightly during the early stages not only gets you deeper into the event but it also allows you more time to get dealt good hands that can double you up.

The definitions of mass tabling differ from one person to the next and what may seem like multi-tabling playing eight tables would be mass tabling to another. My own personal record of tables is twelve and so this feels like mass tabling to me but I also know that it isn’t as some players play far more than that. So this article is designed for players who want to make their money playing as many tables as possible with the best rake deal and bonuses that they can get. The fact of the matter is though that you need to get your head around the fact that you will play poorer poker when you play more tables.

The concept of playing as many tables as possible is one that has great potential when you are playing for bonuses and for rakeback but playing Texas Hold em poker on a lot of tables is really a skill in itself. It took me a long time to realise this because I spent too long trying to play my normal game on ten tables at once and you simply get yourself into too much trouble because of your own style. Let us look at an example here to show you what I mean. It has been folded to the cut-off who opens to $3 in a NL100 game and you hold the A-J. Now you three bet to $9 and the blinds both fold and your opponent calls.

The flop comes 9c-8d-5s and with $19.50 in the pot your opponent bets $14. Now if you were single tabling and had a good sample size on this player then you may start delving into your PokerTracker stats and using your time bank to see if this player likes to donk bet into pre-flop three bettors. If you find a reliable pattern over a decent sample size then you can exploit that by either calling and then looking to take the pot away on the turn or to raise the flop straight away. But when you are playing so many tables at once then you simply do not have the time to do this. So you have to revert back to a default line and that is to simply fold the hand.

This line loses EV if you had spotted a more productive line that could have made you money. Once we start to look at the usual metric of ptbb/100 then it is clear that you are going to be making less bb/100 as a result of playing worse poker. However this should be offset or at least you should be trying to offset that by a large amount of volume. You simply have to try and get used to playing in an automatic style of you want to successfully multi-table.

Many people miss the boat here because they try to master playing one table first before they try two or more. There is nothing wrong in this but you really do need to explore other areas of poker. The ability to multi and even mass table and acquire rakeback and sign up bonuses has given birth to a whole new breed of professional poker players in the online environment and that is the “rakeback pro”.

One of the key factors in good strong no-limit Texas Hold’em play is in marrying the flop and pre-flop action with the flop texture. Let’s say that it has been raised by a middle position player and you decide to call on the button with the Jc-10c. The blinds fold and the flop comes 9d-8d-5c and your opponent bets two thirds of the pot and now you have a decision. Here you are facing a situation where you have good equity with your straight draw and overcards.

The flop is unlikely to have hit an opponent or is less likely if they have high cards. This combined with your equity makes raising the flop the best play here if your opponent bets. If your opponent has AK,AQ,AJ,KQ or hands like 77 then they are going to fold their hand and you will not have to see the turn or river. This mixed the flop texture with your own hand and also the probable likeliness of your opponent’s hand.

Let us look at another situation and here you open raise with 8c-8d and the button and blinds call and the flop comes Js-10c-6d and the blinds check to you. Here the flop texture and the weakness of your hand combined with the number of opponents makes a check pretty automatic here and you are hoping that the button also checks and gives you a free card to hit a set.

Once again we will look at another example and here you open raise from the cut-off with A-J and the big blind calls you so there are only two players in the pot. The flop comes 6-4-3 rainbow and the action is on you. Here the low cards on the flop indicate a flop that has hit callers rather than raisers and so I would be looking to make a continuation bet here because I do not think that the flop has hit them either. But let us say that the flop bet gets called then we have somewhat of a problem. Pocket pairs would call that flop as would draws and so these hands may hang around on the turn depending on what arrived.

So let us say that the turn card is the Kd then that would be a perfect card for me as that is going to look scary to pocket pairs. But if another low card came then I may check the turn and maybe give up if my opponent bets. I wouldn’t try to take my opponent down in that situation. So you can often feel in Holdem poker what your opponent is doing and what type of range he has given the flop texture and the betting lines taken. This allows you to make continuation bets at the right time and to back off at the right time as well. So remember that the flop texture combined with the number of opponents and the likely hands given the action dictate your actions post flop.

In the modern Texas Hold’em game then there is a large number of articles that have been written on the subject of bankrolls. This is where I feel that a large number of people are lacking understanding. One such measure comes from the increasing use of PokerTracker which is the number one online poker tracker program at this time. This measures your earn rate in ptbb/100 which stands for PokerTracker big bets per 100 hands.

This causes a lot of confusion because a big bet is a limit hold’em term relating to the bets on the larger betting rounds on the turn and the river. But yet this term is till used in PokerTracker. So we cannot confuse big bets with big blinds as a big bet is double the big blind. So if a player had an earn rate of 10ptbb/100 at $1-$2 no-limit Texas hold’em then this would not be $20/100 but actually $40/100.

This then equates to $/hour based on how many hands per hour that you are seeing. So a player who was playing more tables but maintaining the ptbb/100 would make more money per hour because they would be playing more hands per hour and so the yield would be greater. But yet as you start to move up through the levels then it is clear that game selection will become a far more critical factor.

So you may not be able to play the same number of hours at your higher level and you may also not be able to maintain your ptbb/100 figure at the stage that it was at lower levels of play. The plan of course is that the higher stakes games should produce more $/hour but this is not always the case. Often a lack of playing time and decent games to play and weaker opposition can leave players at levels like NL400 and NL600 sitting out as their optimum money management move.

I have met numerous lower stakes players who were making as much money if not more than many of their middle stakes rivals. What is a factor here is in how the ability to earn more money at higher levels becomes a geometrically escalating problem. More time, knowledge and effort is required to beat NL600 than it is NL100 but this time, knowledge and effort may not be possible for many people. What I meant by “geometrically escalating problem” was that the size of the task in beating any level is consummate to the size of that level.

This is why for me personally then I much prefer to multi-table limits that I know that I can either beat well or can crush. Even though this prevents me from ever making life changing amounts of money, it does always provide me with stable income and that is basically what I need. So it pays to remember that ptbb/100 is not the same as bb/100 or bb/hour and certainly not $/hour. It is the $/hour metric that is the number one metric for me in poker and nothing else.

A few years ago I heard from a friend of mine about a team of players on Caribbean Stud Poker who made an estimated £50,000 ($75,000) before they got caught. But even the gaming industry was unaware of their real winnings. The problem with casino security is that it basically stems in the main from their very own staff. Now this can be in the form of croupiers and Inspectors and these people represent the first line of defence closely followed by the Pit Boss and any CCTV that may happen to be in operation.

The fact that these games are supervised by humans makes potential weak spots a problem. Staff get tired, lethargic and bored and many are disgruntled with their profession and pay. So this is a clear problem for any casino management as if there is a problem with their first line of defence then they have a problem full stop.

Caribbean Stud Poker presents such a problem because of the high potential pay-offs which stretch to 50-1 for a straight flush. In the instance that I am just about to describe, several casinos in England were hit for sizeable sums over about six months in 2005 with a three man team. They were situated on Caribbean Stud Poker with the first two team members sitting on the first two boxes and the third team member sitting on the third base box.

The first and last team members played minimums and the second player was the big bettor. Now the house advantage on CSP (depending on rules and pay offs) is in the region of 5% which is far higher than blackjack or roulette. But that can be offset massively in this instance where the two small betting team players can assist the big player. Firstly both of these players communicate to the big player if they are holding a card that matches the dealers up card.

If this is the case then the big player will know if the dealer has a less than average chance of making their hand or not! But this is only part of the scam, the third base players also acts as a decoy so that the player on first base has the option to place his superior hand down onto the box of the big player and not his own while the big player discards their hand. If you think that this move sounds too fantastic for words then I can sympathise.

But I have seen this in practice and when done with the process of misdirection and disguise is actually very difficult to spot. The key as always is not to alert suspicion so if the big player has a big hand like a flush and the dealer does not get a qualifying ace king hand then the big player simply keeps quiet so as not to bring attention to himself. When you see this move in action then it is not hard to see how several hundred pounds a night can be obtained by this cheating move without any undue suspicion falling.

Wherever you go in the sporting and gaming world, there seem to be pivotal characters that spark the public imagination. In Chess it was Bobby Fischer who basically single handed ended the Russian domination of the World Chess Championships. In boxing in the 1980’s then it was Mike Tyson who become World Champion at such a young age. Poker as well has its ground making characters and Chris Moneymaker winning the 2003 main event at the World Series of Poker really sparked a huge online boom.

In Australia though they kind of had two booms because in 2005, Australian poker player and pro Joe Hachem won the main event at the World Series of Poker becoming an instant millionaire in the process and also a household name amongst poker players! This led to a huge surge in popularity in poker in Australia and the knock on effect from this was an increase in poker tournaments.

The Australian Poker Championships are actually older than many people thinks and started as long ago as 1998 and were called The Crown Australian Poker Championships. This became known as the “Aussie Millions” in later years when prize money escalated. The Aussie Millions also hosts the largest buy-in of any poker tournament in the world with the $100,000 buy-in high roller event.

The main event at The Aussie Millions though is the $10,000 No Limit Texas Hold’em event. In 2007, Gus Hansen really brought fame to this event when he won it and picked up $1.5 million for doing so. But what made this event so ground breaking was that Hansen was carrying a tape recorder with him and recording every single hand. He went on to write one of the most entertaining poker books that I have ever read when he wrote “Every Hand Revealed”.

When you consider that he won the tournament at the same time then it was a ground breaking moment for poker in Australia and the popularity of the Aussie Millions. This year’s event paid even more for first place and Australian Tyron Krost picked up a cool $2 million for his success this year with Sorrel Mizzi and Annette Obrestad also making the final table. When Gus Hansen won in 2007 then it was surprising to see only one Australian player make the final but that has changed over the last few years.

In 2008, no fewer than five home players made the final seven with three in 2009 and two this year. The event has grown so significantly recently that the Aussie Millions is now the sixth largest poker tournament in the world in terms of prize money and coming from an event that only had $74,000 in prize money as recently as 1998 then that is some achievement. So of all the places to go for a poker vacation then I cannot think of anywhere better than Australia and it is such a beautiful country that even if you don’t manage to show a profit, the trip will still have been more than worth it!

As you begin the process of playing more and more tables in online poker then you will at some stage need to play tighter with regards to how many hands you will be playing. In games like low-stakes no limit Texas Holdem ring games then playing very tight will be profitable for numerous reasons. Firstly the proportion of the pot that you will need to pay with regards to the rake will be higher. If rakes are capped at say $3 then the higher limit games will have a very high percentage of the average pot size go in as rake free money.

What this means is that you could take two different players who each play in a game where the average amount of rake played is $2.50 per pot. But if both players play in games where the $3 maximum is reached at pots of $60 and Player A has an average pot size of $70 while Player B plays in games with an average pot size of $600 then Player B is getting an extra $540 of money into the pot that is not raked while Player A is only getting a mere $10.

What this means of course is that micro-stakes and low-stakes players are penalised the most when it comes to poker sites and casinos raking games. What this also means is that a player needs to do two things and the fist one is to avail themselves of the best rakeback and bonus deals that are out there and the second tactic is to play tighter in lower stakes games than higher stakes games.

It may seem counter intuitive to play tighter against weaker players as you want to see more pots against them. However in the online low-stakes no-limit Holdem poker environment then the average stack size is smaller than it is in a live game and you may even have several minimum stackers who are active on your table at the same time. This hugely offsets your advantage of skill (taking for granted that you have it to begin with) when buying in for the full stack is useless against nearly half of the field.

So tight play when you are multi-tabling is important for numerous reasons! Many players only play about 10-13% of their total hands when they multi-table because they don’t want to end up paying huge amounts of rake and also because seeing too many flops at the same time can get you into an awful lot of trouble if you are playing quite a few tables.

If you happen to be playing on tables where the action is quite loose and the minimum stackers are constantly shoving on you when you try to steal then you may find that your profit potential in these games is very low and trying to play “poker” in these games can often be a big mistake. It took me a long time to work this out when I tried my Vulture system last year but it was a lesson that I learned well.