Royal Flush Poker

It can sometimes be difficult for less experienced players to hide their shock or delight when they suddenly make a very big hand, and although it is exciting when you flop a flush or a full house for instance, your first thought shouldn’t be ‘wow I have really hit the jackpot here’ because this isn’t necessarily the case. The moment those cards fall as good as you could possibly have dreamed, your work as a poker player then begins. One of your first thoughts at this point should be ‘what sort of cards could my opponents be holding that would keep them interested in this hand’ because if you have (A,Q) in a holdem game and the flop comes down (A,A,Q) there really arent many cards your opponents could be holding that would keep them interested in this hand. I would strongly advise playing your hand slowly in this situation, when it comes to your turn you would do well to look casually disinterested and check, give your opponents a chance to bluff at the pot.

There has certainly been more than one occasion which I have seen where a player makes a huge hand and ends up winning just the blinds because they don’t consider the fact that their opponents may well have nothing, and so in their excitement they just raise, and everyone else folds. If you play your hand very slowly though you immediately give your opponents a chance to improve their hand, also you don’t need to raise to protect your hand if it is as strong as our previous example for instance. If by any chance your opponent does happen to have made a playable hand then rest assured they will soon let you know when you don’t show strength and they begin to feel they are in front, that’s when you start being able to build a pot. The real golden rule I would feel, is that if you have an unbeatable hand, then make sure first and foremost, that you don’t force the other players out of the hand. If you let another card or two come off to help them improve their hand, and none of your opponents bluff at the pot then you can’t really do much about that, but always give your opponents the chance to make the first bet.

In poker it is always important to know what your starting hand is likely to achieve against another, in Texas Holdem certain starting hands are said to win a set percentage of the time against others, and there are even odds calculators to be found which will give you these odds to help you along. There is one thing that has always concerned me though, I would think that there are quite a few variables and possibilities to take into consideration when trying to calulate such things and I?m not convinced that some simple mathematical calulations can cover all the possibilities. I think it very plausible that if you were to deal two hundred or so hands to test a scenario, and average them out as two separate hundred hands tests, to give you an accurate percentage of win to loss ratio, you may find it would come out slightly different to expectations.

With this in mind, I decided to do exactly that, with (7d,8d) against (Kc,Qs), and the results are as follows. As much as I would like to tell you that there was a significant difference between what the odds calculators tell me and what I found out, there wasn’t really, although there was a slight difference. Suited connectors such as (7d,8d) should lose to hands like (Kc,Qs) around 59.7% of the time, my test results showed that to be 56.5% which is interesting, although luck could of course swing the results slightly, in the same way that if you flipped a coin one hundred times, it’s unlikely to land on heads precisely fifty times and tails fifty times.

Despite no conclusive differences or anomalies being found, it’s important to know approximately what your odds are against any given hand, and I certainly find it enjoyable to put standard theories and accepted odds to the test, partly to absorb fully the information about different hands and odds into my memory, and partly I suppose, just to reassure myself that generally accepted odds are entirely correct.

Poker Pro Phil Laak was born on September 8th 1972 in Ireland and now predominantly lives in California, although he spends a lot of time in Las Vegas too.

He plays in a number of major live ladbrokes poker tournaments each year but he continues to be more of a cash game specialist despite having some success at the WPT in recent years.

His poker pro nickname is the ‘Unabomber’ and was given to him due to his habit of tightening the drawstrings of his hooded top during big hands to just leave his sunglasses showing, this is one of a few interesting traits Phil shows whilst playing poker. He is dating actress and fellow poker professional Jennifer Tilly and has had a few television appearances himself, both in televised poker events and in a show called ‘I Bet You’. www.ladbrokespoker.com

Phil Laak has always been an intrueging character at the poker tables and excels at cash games although it would be easy to imagine him picking his first WSOP bracelet and maybe another WPT title too, over the next few years.

By playing and practicing at Ladbrokes Poker (ladbrokespoker.com) you too could be the next big poker pro!

Often televised poker games can be seen with mountains of chips or money on a table and it would be easy for the non poker player to think that you have to be rich, or bring large amounts of money to a table to play the game, but this certainly isn?t the case. Many of the professionals of the world will of course be playing for lots of money, but it is entirely possible to play and enjoy the game of poker on a budget if you choose. Setting up a home game is easy and if you have friends interested in poker, you can all divide chips between you and play for whichever small amount of money you feel you can afford, if you don’t have many friends who enjoy poker, then there is always the online option, which doesn’t have to cost you lots of money either, most online sites have cash games starting at 1 and 2 cent blinds, as well as games which are for ?play money? and cost nothing.

If you wish to play poker but have no money to invest whatsoever, then there is no need to worry, poker can be played just for fun both at home, or online, and you could even enter freerolls to win a small amount of money, then build that up to bigger things later on. The important point is that poker can be enjoyed by people at no cost whatsoever if they wish and it?s playing the game and having fun that counts. If you have money that you wish to invest in poker then by all means good luck to you, but it isn’t a necessity to start off with a pocket full of money and there are many people who have built up a bankroll to play with after starting out with absolutely nothing.

Playing tight poker is something which will very often be profitable and is in itself, an acceptable way to approach the game for long periods of time, that said, there a few drawbacks too which must be looked at. I prefer to use tight play as a safe place to stand and take stock of the situation during tournament play, I may have just lost a big pot and do not wish to get involved for a couple of hands, so I play tight and fold most things preflop, this gives me time to recover my composure and judge where my chipstack stands and how I wish to proceed. I might do the same after winning a big pot for a few hands to allow myself to get back to calm collected thinking, instead of excitement causing me to go straight into the next pot guns blazing, to try and press my recently acquired advantage.

In Holdem terms I would refer to tight play as folding anything preflop that isn’t, a pair over 7′s or (A,K) or (A,Q), these hands I will mostly play, but I can still play the ones like (9,9) or (A,Q) conservatively, the advantage of this tighter play is that I won’t lose many chips and I can concentrate on observing my opponents for a little while, also if I do have to get involved with a premium hand I’m likely to win some chips with it. The disadvantage Is that you won’t be playing hardly any hands and so you are most likely to gradually decrease your chipstack through blinds. Also other players can notice you folding lots of hands and can start to pressure you, trying to pick up your blinds uncontested, so I would only advise playing tight in spells.

I prefer to be far more aggressive and generally more flexible with the hands I will play, although this is dependant on individual circumstance, but there is certainly a good case to be made for the advantages of taking a breather from getting involved in pots, to assess where you are, and what your current type of play is achieving during that stage of the tournament.

This would seem an unusual thing to discuss because in reality all a poker player needs to bring in terms of tools, is his mind. That much is true but the modern day poker player often brings other pieces of equipment with him too, a weight to put on his cards when he chooses to play them is an obvious one, this is generally done for the purpose of preventing either yourself or someone else, accidently knocking your cards towards the centre or flipping one over, which might be considered as a fold, and so it is better to be safe than sorry.

Also many poker players these days choose to wear dark glasses to hide their eyes, I personally do not as I think it shows a lack of belief in yourself to be able to either show nothing in your eyes when you have a good hand, or indeed mislead your opponent with your expressions, to me an opponent with glasses on is scared of me seeing through them when they have a hand, but that’s just my interpretation, many poker players these days consider dark glasses an important part of their poker playing.

Another thing to consider is headphones and music, some players like to listen to music as they play poker and I can see why, if it helps put you into the right frame of mind, I personally listen to music before important tournaments, but I wouldn’t have my headphones in during a game, mainly because other players might overhear the music and find it off putting, and the music may distract me from having 100% concentration whilst at the table. So as you can see, some poker players need to bring more than just their minds to a poker game to feel comfortable playing, and perhaps there will yet be more developments in this aspect of the game over time, to go with the hooded tops, glasses, lucky charms and other things that some players find essential to their game.

There are many different ways that a player can prepare for a game, some people have tried and tested rituals which help put them in a relaxed frame of mind or help improve their concentration before a big game. Personally I have always found it helpful to watch poker on television to get me thinking about poker and considering the plays and hands I had seen on television, I then listen to some very calming music, that seems to put me in the right frame of mind.

It is true that how you prepare before a game doesn’t affect what cards come out and so it would be easy to not attach too much importance to preparing for a game, however, if you sit down feeling comfortable and good about the game you are about to play it has a positive effect on the way you play and the decisions you make. I feel as a player it is important to have a system in place that you feel comfortable with and I am sure most players do, don?t let it worry if you do not as a player, have some sort of routine in place, it is all a matter of personal preference and what works well for you, so if you are playing poker to a high standard and you feel comfortable at the poker tables, then don?t change a thing.

When playing poker it is always important to consider the most profitable way to play against players around you, as a general theme to your play if someone is coming into almost every pot raising heavily, of course you can deduce that they have not got a hand every time and they are playing very loose and aggressively, but just because you don’t think they have much in hole cards doesn’t mean you should call them immediately. I feel it is best to wait until you have a strong hand and then play your hand in such a way as to always give the opponent the first chance to raise into the pot. This is the best way to cope with the bullying type of players, play tight and then carefully lure them into a hand when you are strong, by using their own aggression against them.

If at the other end of the spectrum you have lots of players who are playing carefully and waiting for the right hands to come along, then it could be profitable to open up your play and start playing a few hands, exert some pressure with raises to test the strength of your opponents hands, primarily on the flop, much of the time you will win the pot there and then, provided there aren’t more than one or two other players still in the hand with you. You can use plays like this with some confidence at tables of timid players, but try not to go overboard too much or you will begin to get called more often.

You can usually make more profit from poker when you are aware of how the other players around you are playing, once you get a feel for the table you can start to gauge your own actions with this information in mind, often to good effect.

PLAY NOW

Paddy Power was the first online site I ever joined and I have certainly had my fair share of good and bad luck playing there. The site itself is very easy to find your way around and the players and support staff have always been very friendly too. Around a year or two ago the site changed in a big way with many new things coming into effect such as avatars, the table designs, the site layout and other things, this on the whole I think was a good and necessary step forward for the site, although it did bring one problem in that the ‘lobby’ area of the site was discontinued so many of the poker playing friends who used to play and enjoy chat quizzes and some relaxation time between games, didn’t quite have the same enjoyable welcome and experience when they played poker there.

Otherwise though this site is one I have stuck by for some years now, and there are always gauranteed tournaments ongoing and cash games on all of the key games at many different levels of blinds. The graphics and gameplay are generally good and smooth onsite, and although the card designs aren’t completely to my liking, this is a rather trivial point and doesn’t affect the enjoyable game of poker you can have here. Paddy Power offers qualifiers for many major tournaments and always has a good number of eye catching promotions going on, a points system is in place too with V.I.P levels giving many advantages to the player. Alongside this offer is a first time sign up bonus of 150% up to $600 which is generous as sign up bonuses go, although it is released in $10 installments as and when you earn the required experience points. So all in all, if you are looking for a site to have an enjoyable game of poker with plenty of ongoing promotions and offers, then Paddy Power is a very good choice of site to play on, and definitely one I would recommend despite one or two small flaws.

Slow playing is a slightly dangerous proposition as poker plays go, but it can reap great rewards for you if used at the right time. The basic method of slow playing is, when you make a very strong hand, you ‘check’ it to the other player and show the maximum weakness that you can, with the idea that your opponent might try and steal the pot, and you can then win a lot more chips from them than if you had raised and they had instantly folded. it works particularly well against aggressive players, and it’s worth noting here that its important to keep a general idea of who is aggressive at your table, this helps you make a decision such as whether to slow play a big hand or not.

The big danger here is slow playing your cards and allowing your opponent to stay in the hand and catch the cards they need to make a slightly stronger hand. Making top set on the flop for instance, can be dangerous to slow play due to the flush and straight possibilities which may materialise on the turn or river, but this of course depends on the board you have to work with on the flop. So the decision of when it is right or wrong to to slow play is certainly open to interpretation and is always going to be based on a few different variables. The nature of the opponent you are up against for one, the possibilities for hands being made on the turn or river that endanger your own, and of course, the way in which you feel most comfortable playing your hand, if you read your opponent as being on a big draw remember, you want to raise to protect your hand as opposed to slow playing. If you make a hand so strong that you know it can’t be in danger, well then you have one of pokers most enjoyable conundrums to work out in how to play it, but slow playing should certainly be an idea that immediately comes to mind.