Using a poker calculator can be a great help to understanding poker odds as you go and helping you with your poker play. Online poker calculators can help you with:

• understanding the strength of your hole cards
• learning how hands rank to win in poker (i.e. what beats what)
• understanding outs odds
• learning pot odds
• playing multiple tables at the same time

The first thing most online poker calculator can help you with is understanding the relative strength of your hole cards before the flop. Many seasoned players will eventually learn the best hands to keep. Just because you don’t have this list memorized does not mean you can’t play poker well in the meantime. If the poker calculator indicates you have a bad hand before the flop, fold.

Online poker calculators can help you learn how winning hands rank in poker. Most people can remember that a triple beats a double which beats an Ace high. But when you are just starting out, remembering whether a straight beats a flush or if a full house beats both of them can be overwhelming. Most good online poker calculators will show you how your hand looks compared to a list of poker hands, ranked from least to best hand.

Poker calculators are also a great way to understand learn poker odds. After the flop but before the turn or river, you must decide whether to check, fold, or bet. If you understand the chances that you’ll make the winning hand you’re banking on, you will have a much better idea of what to do. Learn the rule of 2/4 to estimate your outs odds quick and easy. Use the poker calculator to see if you are figuring your out odds correctly.

Understanding pot odds is also really important. If you do not understand how the cost/benefit breakdown of staying in the game, you won’t have a good long-term strategy when playing poker. By comparing your out odds to your pot odds, you can make an educated decision on whether to play on or not. Poker calculators help by showing you what the pot odds are at all times.

Poker calculators are a great help if you want to play multiple tables at the same time. Instead of having to keep all the odds straight in your head, you can rely on the poker calculator to spell out what your situation is at any time. Players often play multiple tables to maximize the amount of money they make in the same time.

British sports fans are more used to cheering against the Australians during Cricket’s Ashes series where England and Australia do battle for the symbolic urn. But there is another sport very much capturing the imagination of both countries that all players can enjoy together; poker. Cricketing legend Shane Warne is known to enjoy a game of poker and the poker market down under is thriving and becoming a major influence on the poker world.

The Aussie Millions

In January of each year players from all around the world flock to Australia to take part in the Aussie Millions poker series. As the name suggests, there is big money to be made by winning or even making the final table. In 1997 the first ever Aussie Millions was held but now, with the poker playing community etching the series into its calendar as a “must visit”, the series of a lot bigger.

The breakthrough year for Australian Poker was in 2005 when the $10,000 buy-in event attracted a record 263 participants creating a massive prize pool of over $2.5 million. The first prize that year went to Gus Hansen and second prize to flourishing tournament whiz-kid Jimmy Fricke. That particular tournament has had repeated air play on TV and the series continues to be the first major series of the year in Poker.

Each year bwin.com has lots of satellite tournaments offering amazing packages to the Aussie Millions. You can literally travel around the world and take part in a tournament that could earn you millions of pounds thanks to bwin.com.

Australian Players have much Poker Success

Who could forget that in 2005 Australian poker professional Joe Hachem won the main event of the World Series of Poker for a first prize of $7.5 million that Joe got to keep because he paid the $10,000 buy-in to the event himself! Joe later went on to come second to Dutch Boyd at another WSOP event and won another $2 million plus prize money by winning a WPT event. Joe Hachem is the pioneer for Australian poker players and has already made over $10,000,000 in prize money. Joe will surely have more success in poker very soon.

Poker in Australia has an earlier high profile ambassador. Mel Judah came third when Stu Ungar won his third main event championship in 1997 and has amassed over $2.8 million in poker tournament prize winnings in a career that has spanned both the poker boom and pre-boom. Mel holds two WSOP bracelets and a WPT title and is, along with Joe, one of the most decorated and well-known Australian poker players of all time.

Like Joe Hachem, Tony G (originally from Lithuania but who took permanent residence in Australia some years ago) is outspoken at the table and likes to use his skills both verbally and at the poker table to make his opponents uneasy. Tony G now enjoys a glittering business career owning pokernews and Chip Me Up, a staking site. Tony has a raft of WSOP cashes totalling 14 for over $425,000 and has publicly offered to stake Isildur1 in live tournaments. Before settling in Melbourne Tony G was, at the age of 11, Rubix cube champion of Lithuania.

With poker booming in Australia bwin.com now offer poker tournaments throughout the 24 clock to cater for this emerging market. This means that at any time or day you can find a game being played at bwin.com full of players from countries right across the planet. Do not miss out.

By Malcolm Clarke

I don’t know about you but I was not a natural cash game winner at No Limit Texas Hold’em. For every chip that I have earned playing poker online I have had to work for it. We will not get into my jealousy on naturally talented players or we will be here all day! Suffice to say I have worked hard getting where I am today which I believe is above average in terms of knowledge to the average poker player. One of my most profitable lessons in learning winning poker was how to play on the flop.

Winning pots on the flop is one of the best times to take the pot. This is a point of the hand before any player has shown a keen interest in the pot and establishing a strong case to win the pot with a good bet is a good strategy. Although poker players should not consider what chips they have already invested into the pot at later stages into the hand for some players defending their investment is a factor along with what they stand to win by forcing a fold. Once players are betting into a hand the likelihood of them continuing to bet and call increases as the hand plays out. Therefore the flop is a good time to take the pot and increase your stack with the blinds and the chips acquired through your opponent calling the pre-flop raise you should have made.

Standard poker strategy that is easily accessible through poker books and online poker articles recommends for players to play a wide range of hands particularly through middle and late position. This gives you a good chance to take down many pots uncontested as after the flop many players simply fold if they miss the flop.

Continuation bets are the bets made immediately after the flop. You should make these bets both with hands and as bluffs because of the message they send to your opponent. When you make a continuation bet you are sending a clear signal to your opponents that you are going to be betting throughout the hand. The incremental increases in the bets your opponents are likely to face causes them to commit to the hand straight away or fold. This makes the flop a key moment in any poker hand and this is why playing this street correctly is essential to your ability to play effective cash game poker.

Flop play can be made more difficult by your pre-flop decisions. Hands like KQ, QJ, KT or KJ are difficult to play because of the drawing hands you often flop. When an opponent is betting into you it is easy to convince yourself of the implied earnings you may obtain if you hit the hand, but remember if your opponent is playing a hand that contains an Ace they could have you soundly beaten even if you improve. Similarly, low flushes are also vulnerable.

It is important you study flop textures and be willing to fold if a bad flop texture and your opponents bets signal to you that you’re otherwise reasonable hand has been counterfeited on this occasion. If you have a tendency to overplay some hands then start being more cautious and you will limit your losses. Ideally you want to decrease the amount of marginal decisions you make.

You should vary your bets and checks in order to maintain variety and therefore deception. The flop is a very important point in the hand because each player can see 60% of the community cards and make a decision on their intentions for this hand. Avoid giving opponent’s information that if you check a bet will win the hand and if you bet you have a hand. This is a weak cash game strategy. You can do better with more deceptive plays!

By Malcolm Clarke

One of the most satisfying sights in both poker and outside of poker is when a loudmouth is given their just desserts. Poker players know that they can berate each other at the table without worrying (normally) about a player being violent. I have witnessed many times when a player takes advantages of this presumption and they go a little bit too far and upset people. You can wear your iPod and block out the noise, but there are ways to punish the chatterbox at the poker table. Do this properly and you will get to participate in that wonderful moment when they bust out.

When playing online I would simply turn off the chat or open another tab so you cannot see it. My friend Gary Hurst emailed the poker room and asked for his chat to be banned so he would not use it as he felt it was a distraction. Having embroiled myself in meaningless chat battles many times only one thing ends up happening; you stop watching the action and start watching the chat. It’s a bad move.

One thing you should never do in live poker is try to instigate a confrontation and never risk being banned by breaking the poker tournament rules. Getting into a confrontation will see the other player innocently state “I was only table talking and he got violent” or “We were just talking and he flipped out”. If you are steaming and red in the face you look like the guilty party. It is far better to implement the following strategies to punish a loudmouth player to take the wind out of their sails.

A Clever Put Down

If you are confident enough and have a quick sense of humour when a player loses a pot you chime in with a put down designed to say “stop chattering and saying you are the best because you are not”. Normally it has the desired effect, especially if the other players back you up.

The best put-down I have seen was one player at my table had been talking about writing a poker strategy book. He then made a really bad play calling an overbet on the river because he thought his Ace high might be good. His opponent showed a set and took the pot. Another player, keenly observing the action, instantly said “Which chapter is that hand going in then?” Embarrassed and deflated, that particular player was quiet from that moment onwards. I have yet to see his poker book.

Tilt them when you see an Opportunity and then be Quiet

I am used to players berating me and it does not bother me. When the player loses a pot and if they have been getting on my nerves I might say something like “It really hurts when that happens doesn’t it”. By saying this you are massaging their open wound and they will be angry that you have said something. Most loud players can dish out the table talk but are not very comfortable getting it back. As they target you to re-establish their alpha status at the poker table (which essentially means nothing to anyone but them) their eye is firmly off the ball. Get a good hand at this point and guess who will join you in the pot? You can win big pots this way, and people are that predictable sometimes.

If you are not confident then simply ignore these people and get on with the job in hand. When you engage with them, do so within your concentration and not instead of it. Watch the game at all times. The way I see it if you can needle them and shut them up it is good for you for no other reason than it is less irritating! But there are scenarios where this type of comeuppance can become chips in your stack.

By Malcolm Clarke

When the online poker scandals of 2007 and 2008 broke I was very relieved that I had not been a member of the sites involved. It must have been a hollow feeling for many players who would have had to defend having lots of money situated in those online poker rooms and who would have assured both associates and themselves that the site could be trusted despite suffered what they would have deemed as a series of bad beats, when actually they were being cheated. Those irresponsible sites preyed on the “bad beats happen in poker” concept to cover their misdemeanours towards their own players.

Going against the “once bitten twice shy” philosophy I think that there is more reason to believe that online poker is safe than ever before. When the scandal broke, the two plus two poker forum community did an amazing job decoding numerous small pieces of evidence to build a case demonstrating beyond reasonable doubt that cheating had occurred. There is always an audit trail in terms of hand histories and players pieced things together in an expert way. Poker rooms will have noted this and realised that just like playing with a friend and raising opponents out of pots, your patterns of play will be your downfall in the end. This type of self-policing is what keeps eBay monitored in terms of negative feedback and it is benefiting online poker too with a collective monitoring of the hands.

If you come across cheating or collaborating and you report it to no avail then it may be time to look for a new poker room. This is another reason poker rooms have a lot to lose by cheating players or allowing cheating to happen at their site. What they lose in rake is more valuable over time to them than a short term gain from cheating. The poker room market is a competitive business and this is why retaining players with VIP programmes and maintaining a good reputation is very important and, to be fair, it appears most poker rooms are not involved in any sort of wrongdoing.

I would still recommend if you are unsure about the security of your poker room you consider transferring to a more reputable and secure site that has no history of any wrongdoing. When using a new poker room take a look at the overall quality of the online poker experience. Play in a few freeroll poker tournaments to assess both the quality of the play and if you like the design. If it appears that the skin is primitive compared to other more established sites and their cash-out procedures are slow then I would pick another room. I believe this is a key clincher in that the business behind the poker room can cope with the demands of players wanting their money. To me this is an essential process that can all but be automated like paypal if the company is large enough to invest in the security required for this operation.

I am happy to recommend bwin.com as a site that has a large sportsbook that is largely automated in terms of accepted bets and their poker software is also of a high standard. I have found their cash outs to be fast, customer support to be very good and I like the look of the tables they use to play out the poker hands. All in all this is a site you should consider and I have said in the past the bigger the business the more they have to lose by cheating. Bwin.com are a big business in online gaming and betting and therefore I stand on the shoulders of giants and say if they 20 million customers are happy I have less to worry about than depositing on a small skin of a small, unknown poker network.

By Malcolm Clarke

I started my poker career as a Seven Card Stud player.  I quickly discovered that in many venues, Holdem was the main, and sometimes only, game in town.  I started playing NL Holdem just like every other Holdem monkey out there and while I had reasonable success, I wasn’t a big fan of the game.  I was then introduced to Limit Holdem.  I quickly took a shine to the game and is my preferred form of poker when I can’t find a stud or stud 8 game.  Here are some reasons why I like Limit Holdem over NL.

Bad Beats Do Not Hurt You as Bad

Let’s imagine you are playing $5 – $10 NL Holdem and pick up pocket aces.  You raise to $30 and get called in one spot by a player that has been relatively loose.  The flop falls As-4h-8h.  Your opponent bets $50 and you decide to slow play the set and just call.  The turn falls the Qd.  Your opponent bets $150 and you decide to raise to $350.  Your opponent moves all-in and has you covered.  You have the nuts at the time and call.  Your opponent turns over 10h-2h for a flush draw only.  You need to avoid a heart on the river.  Guess what, you don’t avoid the heart and you lose your entire stack of around $500 in one hand.

Look at the same hand again, but it is $5 – $10 Limit Holdem.  Your assume you three-bet pre-flop and he calls.  You have $15 in pre-flop.  On the flop, you call a $5 bet from the opponent hoping to slow play your set.  $20 from you is in the pot.  On the turn, you raise his bet and he just calls the raise.  You now have $40 in the pot.  On the river, let’s assume you went crazy and kept raising.  After the fifth bet from your opponent, you stop and just call just in case he has the flush.  He does.  You lost $50 more on the river.  You just lost a big pot, but you lost $90 in this hand as opposed to $500.

The difference between the two is massive in the swings you can take in bad beats.  While many will argue correctly that you can win much more in a single hand, the opposite holds true as well.

Bluffing is Tougher and Pot Odds Helps Neutralize

If you have a lowly pair in NL or are drawing, many times players will bet in such a way to give you negative odds to staying in the hand.  However, this isn’t the case in Limit Holdem.  Many times after the flop, you are almost going to call down with any type of reasonable hand.  Bluffing isn’t impossible in Limit Holdem, but you need to realize that if someone has any type of a hand, they will usually have the odds to call you.  Of course, you will have rocks and other types of players whose style will allow you to bluff them out.  That’s their problem and one you can take advantage of.  For the most part, you will not be able to bluff your way out of many pot.

Players Are Poorer Than in NL

With the explosion of NL, many limit players have moved onto NL.  The players that play limit now are a mix of players waiting for NL game, players looking to expand their poker game, and players that have never been able to move onto NL.  It amazes me every year when I go play either cash games or tourneys just how bad that many players play the game.  The common mistake is that players try and play it like NL.  The experienced limit players usually wipe the floor with them unless the player is running very hot.

Now, I am not saying that you need to give up NL Holdem for Limit Holdem.  If you are doing well and enjoy the game, then stick with what you love.  However, if you are looking to expand your game or are having issues with NL, give limit a try.

- James Guill

I love Stud Hi-lo.  More than that, I love Stud Hi-lo players.  Why?  Most are incredibly bad or just have a basic understanding of how the game should be played.  Every year, almost without fail, I enter a tournament or a cash game with at least one or two players that like to constantly criticize my play.  They think that I “only play good hands” or that “I must not make a lot of money at the game.”  What usually happens is that they try to take me on and prove my inferiority, and in the process they give me their chips.  If you are a bad Stud Hi-Lo player, continue to do the following.

Play Your Big Pairs Against Multiple Lows

I love this.  The player decides “there isn’t always a low, so I will come in with my kings.”  Then when both players catch good, they stay in the hand.  I cannot count the time where a player will start with kings, bet out on fourth, and then start checking on fifth if one or both players show three babies.  I am going to almost always bet here.  If I have indeed made my low, I am betting.  Of course, there is nothing better than to catch a scooper and then extract the extra bet, or even two on sixth and seventh street when they think you are going for low only.

Chase Your Big Straights and Flushes

Stud high players love their three card straights and flushes.  There are times where you might could play these, but heads-up and three-way is really not wise.  Heads-up you could try it, but once I improve on fourth, you better slow down unless you improve in a big way.  Even then, you better hope you get there and I don’t.  Yes, you might catch your big pair and make your hand and take half the pot on occasion.  Most of the time, you will either fold on fifth when your draw doesn’t improve and mine does or you will chase to the end and lose to a pair and low.

Slow Play Your Rolled Up Sets

A guy at the United States Poker Championships decided that it would be wise to slow play rolled up fives against three players.  I made a six low in five and hit running sixes on the turn and river to max trip sixes.  He never improved and looked like he was going to implode when I scooped him with trip sixes and a six low.  If you get a rolled up set, raise as much as you can.  Then keep betting to get people out.  Slow play if you don’t like money.

Don’t Fold to the Nit that Three-Bet on Third

If after a raise from a five and re-raise from an ace, I three bet with a queen showing, I have something.  If you don’t have a three card potential scooper, fold.  Split fives, even with a baby card, does not play well to three bets.  I may even consider folding split aces here.  If it was a nit that raise only with the near nuts, I am going to probably fold 95% of hands here.  The nit just told you he had a hand.  Believe him.  I played in an event last year and three-bet with a queen up.  Everyone, including the two callers, said I had rolled-up queens.  One player still called me down to the river with aces-up.  I turned over the queens and he said, “Yeah, I was afraid of that.”  Why did you call my bets?   While I am not the typical definition of a nit, I do play fairly tight.  Why am I going to three-bet potential aces with only queens?  Think people.

If you want to let me keep beating you at the tables, do the things above couple with the other bad plays you typically make.  I will just sit back and take my pots when I have the chance.  Yes, I will look nitty.  Yes, my play is boring.  However, I will be the winner and you will be the one on tilt.

- James Guill

One of the most common ways to engage in playing poker is by organising a home game with a bunch of your poker playing friends. Beer, pizza, lots of laughs and, of course, plenty of Texas Hold’em poker is a fun way to spend an evening at home with your friends. With this in mind it might surprise you to learn that I actively avoid this for all but strategy sessions where the purpose of the game is to learn rather than compete.

A year or two ago I organised a poker game with my friends. We had a proper table, a new set of poker chips and we decided that a Sit and go poker tournament was our preferred game. Equipt with plenty of beer, my customary bottle of Diet Coke as I do not drink, pizza, an assortment of nibbles and stupid sunglasses we were ready to go. The buy-in was £20 (alas I failed to negotiate a fee for my game arranging services) and there was nine of us playing.

The poker tournament, aided by my cool tournament clock I had bought, went along fine and we finished in good time. The pay-outs were for the top three players and I finished third. As the night wore on the other players got more into the game and decided a cash game was in order. Out came another £20 each and they started playing a £0.10 – £0.20 game. The stakes were fine, but after two hours of play, by which time I had retired to the living room to watch some DVD’s, things were apparently getting heated. One friend stormed out £60 down and another was claiming foul play after a string bet incident. It was a case of lesson learned for me as I had selected tournament poker for a reason; to avoid people getting drunk and losing lots of money. That was not what the night had been intended for.

Unfortunately once the cash games had started things got a bit more intense. I am sure you already know this but once you include real money in any situation friendships can be won and lost easily. The players got caught up in the spirit of mates playing poker and got in too deep. The friend who stormed out £60 worse off was actually the guy who earned the least amount of money out of everyone. He had asked for the money and when rejected, as you would be, that hurt his feelings. He could not see why his friend could not see his problem. What he failed to understand was where money is concerned there is little charity. Fortunately they made up later on but in some cases that could have been the end of a friendship, which is never worth it.

When you arrange a poker game at home I would avoid cash games unless they are at micro-stakes levels. Even if you win your friends are out of pocket so telling them how well you are doing will be far less fun. I would rather seek out a game full of people I do not know and beat them (hopefully) rather than take a friends money. Yes you must be ruthless, but in the spirit of knowing I will be ruthless I would rather not play my friends. I once played heads up against a friend and beat him out of some money then gave him his money back. Now we just play for fun and for the round of drinks, but only once. It is easy to get carried away with your friends and you should always go home happy at the end of a night out.

There is a time for socialising and a time for poker and rarely do I find the two mix without problems unless the guidelines and rules are very carefully set out before play begins. Be careful not to fall into that trap, friendships are not worth losing over a poker game particularly when it is so easy to log onto bwin.com and play online poker.

By Malcolm Clarke

I have not actually played live poker in a poker room for quite some time now so I have had to go through the contents of my notes and records to compile this article. This article talks about dealers choice cash games where the majority of the play tends to be pot limit although at this time of writing due to the popularity of no limit play, there are an ever increasing number of cash games being spread using this format.

There are so many extra variables with live play that you don’t get online with regards spotting behaviour patterns and tells but that subject is so deep and involved that I could never hope to do that topic justice within the confines of this article and I am certainly not going to try.

But it needs to be pointed out that to become a fully competent live game player then you will need a thorough study of tells both in identifying them and in learning how to conceal your own and in this field I recommend the excellent book Read’em and Reap by Joe Navarro which is an excellent piece of work on this subject as is the old classic Caro’s Book of Tells by the mad genius himself Mike Caro.

As usual I will discuss my ideas for each of the major variations of poker that you will encounter in live dealers choice cash games within the confines of hand examples. But speaking of live cash games, it has been common knowledge now for quite some time that as of the time of writing of this article that live bricks and mortar cash games have been considerably weaker on average than their online counterparts.

I also think that those differences have also magnified over the past few years with the recent law in the United States prohibiting many players from being able to buy in to online card rooms and this has constituted to many online games becoming tougher to beat. Also, there is a serious side with regards online poker that has not always been there.

With many players realising that they can make serious extra money all from the confines of their own home. Then we have rakeback schemes, proposition players, staking sites, ability to multi-table, analysis poker software….I could go on and on.

For any player to set out now from novice level and make money in online poker then they are going to have to be better than their live game counterparts. But having said that, there are still areas of live game play that an online player needs to address and this has already been mentioned.

Savvy live players will come at you in a variety of different ways and present you with gamesmanship and underhanded tactics that would not be possible to implement online. I could go on and on talking about the differences between live and online play and filling an entire book would not be a problem.

Suffice it to say that once you understand that online poker is not a true representation of live poker and vice versa then you are halfway towards being successful in the other environment. Look out for part two of this series coming soon.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson
Author – “Winning Cash Game Poker”

Due to the increase in poker playing popularity on the internet, more and more online poker tools are being created by developers in order to help a player gain an advantage over players who are either inexperienced or have not studied the game for a long enough period of time to be at a point where they are fully aware of issues such as pot odds.

A large number of these tools are created in a program format, with the developers looking to connect the new program into the software used by online poker rooms.

With their creation comes a firm denial of their use both via internet law as well as by the online poker sites themselves as they look to ensure that players are only able to use their knowledge of the game to influence their online actions.

There are a number of online tools that are free for players to use and some are some obvious that many players forget that they are there:

Notes Section

Could be seen as the most underrated online poker tool available to an online player because so many players fail to even recognise its potential.

Poker is a game of analysis and the ability to remember how your opponents play in certain situations, now what better way would there be for remembering something than to write it down and attach it to a player for later reference?

There are a number of things that you could comment on when writing notes about a player:

How a player prefers to play their game – are they tight or aggressive?
Any patterns that a player may demonstrate – Do they always bet 3 or 4 times the big blind if they are holding a pocket pair?
Do they offer any tells while they are playing their game – Do they check-raise alot when holding high strength cards?

Simple things that you notice about a player help for you to really begin to analyse their play, meaning that you are better prepared to go head to head with them should you need to.

Hand History

Another built in feature that so many online players overlook, the tool offers players the chance to review hands that have already been completed in recent games and they often include a complete breakdown of how the hand played out.

Although its a job that many would rather not do, reviewing how players play their power hands with the use of this tool is vital for spotting patterns and tell tale signs should you run into the same actions from your opponent again.

This feature also becomes a great tool for spotting the weak players and making it easier to track them around the tables. Creating a note of a players name that you have just beaten out of their entire chipstack means that you are able to search for the player to see if you can find them active on any other table on the site. Using the hand history tool, you can completely read into their game and their playing style, head to their currently active table and exploit them all over again, this time armed with more insight into their play.