If you have aspirations of winning a large poker tournament, a small poker tournament, a home game tournament or even a $1 Sit and go poker tournament then you will need to become adept at winning in a heads-up situation. The game of Texas Hold’em changes dramatically when you reach this important stage of a tournament and whilst you are guaranteed a good pay-out in comparison to your stake your biggest jump in terms of prize money faces you at this point. If you constantly get dominated in heads-up matches you will enjoy far less success than earning your fair share of first prize finishes.

1. Always Raise Pre-Flop in Position

This tip incorporates two major points to remember in heads-up poker. The first is position. When you hold the button you act first before the flop and last after the flop. Your basic strategy must be to cause your opponent to pay chips in order to catch their hand and then play the rest of the hand knowing they are out of position. Position in heads up play is very significant.

Raising is the second important point to remember. Limping in worrying about a possible re-raise is a bad strategy. You must be aggressive in heads-up play and force your opponent to make some tough decisions on the value of their hands.

2. Learn the Odds and Master the Math

Math is important in all forms of poker but maybe even more so heads-up. Every bet and check gives you information that you can feed into your knowledge of poker math to help you decide how to proceed. You need to remember things like outs to a flush, outs to your overcards and so on.

Shove or Fold if you are getting Outplayed

Hand values on a large range of hands improves against one opponent heads-up because of the likelihood your hand is best. Use Pokerstove and other tools to learn about the strength of any two cards against any other two cards. Using this information you can show a profit over time simply shoving the positive expected value (+EV) hands when you get them. If it appears every time you bluff you are raised and your chip stack is dwindling, put your opponent to a tough decision by shoving your chips and forcing coin-flips. You can often slow down a very aggressive opponent heads up if you show a willingness to fight back against their tough play.

React to your Opponents Style

Heads-up poker is an intimate form of poker where your focus is entirely on one player. As the match progresses you are constantly given new information on how hands are played. Make notes on what a check means, what a bet means and what raising means from your opponent. You can then adapt to their style. For example, if they are too tight you should bet out more and if they check when they have no hand bet and take the pot from them.

I recommend that you practise heads-up play by registering for the many heads-up Online Sit and go poker tournaments available at major online poker rooms like bwin.com. Although the stacks are level at the beginning of play the same principles apply and you will experience within these matches situations where you are the large chip leader and the short stacked player. It is time well-spent as a huge amount of money could depend on your proficiency in this type of poker format if you have a good run in a large poker tournament.

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

Online poker games are played with very little in terms of information about your opponent. You get an avatar, a screen name and little else to start with. It is very difficult to get tells from a player you cannot see so you must look at what you can see in order to get information. The style of play is visible thanks to their betting patterns and the speed with which they make these decisions. Watching these things closely helps you get a handle on their playing style to the point of understanding their style and reading what hands they could hold. Poker players usually play in patterns so whilst what you can see may change (i.e. they may bet $14 – $18 in one spot), they will generally do the same thing repeatedly, like betting in a certain spot with certain cards.

Here are a few observations you may see at the online poker table that your online poker software will not tell you.

Long Pause, Then a Raise

Many articles say this is an obvious tell. The long raise suggests thinking by an opponent or uncertainty. Few players wait to act when playing online poker, most of the time it is so easy to click the button they just click it. Most of the time in this spot you will see a big hand from your opponent. Rather than working out if they can bluff you they will be working out the best move to extract chips from you in the hand. You will see a long pause then a fold most of the time in tough spots but if the raise is made you will need a big hand to continue.

Weird Betting Amounts

Some players think that marketing strategies work at the poker table. They like to bet $9 instead of $10 thinking it looks smaller, or $19.97 instead of $20! If you fall for this then please start looking more carefully at what your opponent is doing. Look at the bets in terms of chips and betting ranges and this should give you all the information you need. It does not necessarily mean a weak or a strong hand but shows a wish to trap and deceive. This may indicate a strong means weak, weak means strong player which you can easily exploit.

Small Bets Offering Pot Odds

If the pot is $100 the normal bet to make is between $50 and $100 dollars or half to the full pot bet. If your opponent bets $20, this is a tell, but what does it mean? It could mean weakness but most of the time an opponent will bet a larger, more standard amount to win the pot. I find that offering you 6/1 pot odds either means an overpair or strong hand and they want to build the pot bit by bit during the hand, therefore making this an online poker tell. If they make a similar bet on the turn then this suggests a continuation of their strategy. Often I will call down these small bets and find out whether it means a strong or weak hand for this particular player. Once you find out what the bets mean the future hands are usually played out the same way and you will know what to do.

There are many more online poker tells, but not enough room in this article, we will re-visit some more tells at a later date.

The key thing to remember is patterns. Your play will fall into patterns and the way to combat giving away these tells to good players is to do everything the same. The continuation bet which you should vary between a strong and weak hand should always be the same so your opponents cannot read your action. Checking the turn after a C-bet should be randomised between strong and weak hands and around the same size in terms of amount of chips bet. This creates your deception and makes you hard to read. Hopefully that results in players playing with you when you hold a good hand and folding their bad hands more often against you.

By Malcolm Clarke

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

Playing poker is essentially a battle of wills between players. Given that many hands are decided before the showdown your ability to exude an aura of confidence in your own game and your hand has a big part to play in whether you are a winning player. Of course there are times that you may act weak in order to be called, but there are real benefits to being confident whilst playing poker. This article will investigate why confident players seem to do better in poker.

Knowing you understand pokers nuances and strategies will make you feel better about playing. You must have the inner-strength and belief that you are capable of capturing those big prizes. Confidence is faith in one’s ability to achieve certain tasks. In Poker, you must believe you can win. Away from the table you need to be sure of your abilities. If certain areas are lacking in strength you can then work on them to become a better all round player so objectivity about your shortcomings are important. Just as important is confidence in what areas of poker you excel in.

You will need confidence if you are convincing a staker that you are worthy of their investment. Stakers are not going to invest in a timid and self-deprecating poker player. They will quiz you on your reasons for believing you can do well in the tournament. You must come across ready to invest the effort, the time and overcome bad beats effectively in order to put yourself in a position to win.

Confident behaviour also affects your cash game results. You must develop a resilience to keep playing and believing in your game even when you are losing. Maintaining faith in your game is very important. When Tom “Durrrr” Dwan lost $4 million in late 2009 with some awful results he carried on believing he could win and eventually he turned it around. That takes real guts, mental belief and, above all, confidence he had the right answers. You need some of that steel and inner strength to be successful at live and online poker.

How do you get this confidence? You will either naturally be a confident person or a more introverted character. You need to find something to use as a reason to be confident and what better to use than your skills as a winning poker player? Poker is cool and if you can show a good graph this can do wonders for your self-esteem when you get praise online.

Your quality of life goes a long way to deciding your confidence levels and your relationship with family and friends. You may have noticed that you operate better in life when things are settled in relationships and finances and in poker stability of this nature is also a positive thing for your results.

Feeling good about yourself and your game will not allow small things to bring you down. You will not be downhearted by bad results or bad beats and this allows you to stay in the game and perform well under adverse conditions. I am sure you will agree this is a great life skill to learn. Poker forces you to meet these challenges head on. By giving yourself a confident perspective you increase the chances of doing well because you have belief and self-worth.

This will not guarantee you hit Aces every hand, but it will guarantee your personality is suited to being a winning poker player. Couple that with having the necessary skills and tactics to win and that is a powerful combination towards meeting and surpassing your goals.

By Malcolm Clarke

Play Texas Hold’em poker for any length of time and you will notice how difficult it is to fathom out these marginal situations. You get dealt 66 in middle position and raise it up. You get one caller and make the continuation bet into the caller on the flop with a rainbow board and one face card. You are called, or raised. What do you do? On the WPT, you may hear the distinctive voice of Mike Sexton saying, “These are the hardest hands to play in No Limit Holdem, what does that player do next Vince?” Although the WPT is a poker tournament, the same problems occur in cash games.

Holding pocket tens pre-flop looks great, but any Jack, Queen, King or Ace or a selection of paint cards has you worried. There could be sets, two pair or a very strong draw willing to give you problems.

When holding 55, 66, and 77 you should be happy in early or middle position to pick up the blinds. Low limit players can get frustrated picking up only $0.03 cents on the micro-stakes table but do not worry. These hands allowed you to steal a pot out of position with some value if you are called. You will be playing in late position with hands soon enough. You should always raise it up and hope to hit your set. You need to reduce the field to one opponent if you can. If you find yourself against more than one opponent after the flop tread carefully.

88, 99 and TT are better pocket pairs, but still vulnerable. In my opinion you should be even more careful with these hands as they look better than the lower pairs but hold most of the vulnerability of the weaker hands.

Define Your Hand

After the flop I like to look at the board and decide my bet accordingly. Against a board full of draws, high cards or one suit that I do not hold a draw to I will check-fold, particularly if face cards are abundant. Your opponents could have you crushed or raise a strong draw, either way there is too much danger for you to proceed into a big pot with what is probably third pair.

My bet is usually a pot sized bet if I make it here to try and take it down straight away. The flop bet is a half pot bet and turn bet rolled into one so if I miss then I check fold as this defines your hand and your opponent still bets. Opponent knowledge about their style is helpful here as this situation is marginal.

Watch the Turn and River

If the turn and river cards give you more of the cards you did not want to see, give up the hand. You were dreading those cards for a reason. This is especially true when your position is not late and you do not know the street action from your opponents yet because of it.

Be Prepared to Fold

You should always be prepared to fold, but as the strength of your middle pair is at its highest at the beginning of the hand when the pot is small and decreases due to board cards, pot size and opponents showing their intention to build pots you should be more open to folding as the hand progresses. If you improve to a set or full house, or course you will proceed, this refers to an unimproved pair. By the time you reach the turn or river, you are often only beating a stone cold bluff which is rarer than some people think.

Playing middle pairs in cash games are difficult, because it gets harder to work out where you are as the hand goes on. Never be unhappy to take the pot on your first raise and look for the improvements to sets as that is where the real profits are made.

By Malcolm Clarke

One of my main interests is making money. When I am playing on my favourite poker room bwin.com, whilst I enjoy the challenge of playing against good opponents and the fun poker tournaments on bwin make no mistake about it, I am there to make money. Whether I do make money depends on my own ability to play solid winning poker. I am in control of that, although luck does play a part in my success over the short and medium term. I view Texas Hold’em poker online as part of my overall investment strategy.

You may already have your own portfolio of stocks and shares that you trade. I also enjoy this type of investment. As cynical readers will read this article and think that I am a “poor deluded soul” littered with addiction to online poker I say this before we proceed; if you play online poker properly and treat the study and playing of the game with respect then your chances of success are just as likely as any stock you invest in that you have diligently researched.

Now that I have made my position clear, let’s consider the arguments. You can learn a lot about investing in shares from poker and vice versa.

Picking out a good stock and holding it for a period of time involves risking your money against your judgement. Just like in Poker, you are betting on yourself to get it right. You reduce the risk by researching your stock and analysing factors that might affect its future performance in the market. In poker you make your money at the table but searching for good tables or well-structured tournaments is money in the bank. You also reduce the risk in poker by studying the game and gaining experience in real hands and doing session reviews. In shares you are told to keep a trading diary to remind you of the good decisions and bad decisions you made so you can start making more good decisions and reducing bad decisions in the future. This works for poker too.

I will admit that I am relatively new to share trading. So what am I currently doing? I picked out some books from well-known and successful investors and I am reading through them carefully. I am not trading in the meantime. This is a good idea for you poker players. Too many players start playing poker without stopping to learn the game first. Of course losses can be controlled through bankroll management and justified as “paying your tuition” but learning the basics before risking any money is a good risk management solution. After all, winning poker demands a solid base of fundamental skills before you start introducing the more creative plays into your game.

In terms of whether I would choose Poker or shares first depends on your own circumstances, as does everything else you do in your life. In my view you are more prone to tilt through Poker but this makes Poker a good starting point for learning essential risk management skills and analytical skills based on incomplete information. Your share research and analysis will benefit from these skills being developed. Remember that fundamentally in any risk management situation you are training yourself to make good decisions.

Personally I play Poker for fun and use bwin.com to heighten this fun thanks to their cash games and excellent tournaments. But for those who can get a high return on investment for their money time set aside for playing Poker is a good investment for them. As the games get harder, however, money is not so easy to come by so you must make the maximum effort to succeed and hedging your money into a cohesive investment vehicle likes shares seems a good idea to me.

There is no reason not to do both ventures and I look forward to seeing you at the bwin.com poker tables in the near future.

By Malcolm Clarke

We hear it all of the time. Tight aggressive play in a Texas Hold’em poker cash game wins. Gus Hansen is famous for his ability to make a career out of being loose aggressive, but he has a huge amount of post-flop skill and it is this skill that allows him to be unconventional yet remain profitable in poker. For the rest of us mere mortals, we strive to become tight aggressive players.

So what is tight aggressive? Simply put, it is playing only a small handful of hands and when you get a hand you like, you bet it hard to build a big pot whilst you have the largest chance of having the best hand. It sounds straight forward enough when you put it like that doesn’t it! But there are many times when we think we are playing correctly but we are making errors due to the way the session is working out for us.

In my poker challenge I started off my opening session on bwin.com thinking “I will play tight aggressive”. Then I was dealt pocket sixes in middle position and had one limper before me. For a moment I paused before hitting the fold button. After all, I thought to myself, I have a pair! But this is a fold. Any other action else is a mistake. In fact, even if it is folded to you it is a marginal call. I would prefer to know more about my table and have a bit of profit already accrued to pay for the limp/fold when it occurs. Hopefully my composure later in the session remains this disciplined so this correct decision can be repeated over and over in different spots.

It is very difficult to maintain a tight aggressive style when you have lost a couple of big pots after doing everything right. You should not get negative and in your mind start thinking it is not your day and everything you do will go wrong. You need to keep folding AJ in early position and stay tight. I personally believe that every player considers (even deep down inside them for the best players) that QT is worth a call or a raise in middle position when they are down a few buy-ins on the day. Don’t do it! If you truly believe TAG is your best style then maintain it throughout your cash games without fail. At least then your post session analysis can be more accurate rather than having to identify the moment you changed styles because of your success or failure in the session so far.

The same goes for the sessions where you win. It is very easy to change styles because things are going well and everything seems to work. 67 suited seems much more friendly when you expect that luck will deliver that hidden straight or nut flush draw that hits for you. Do not become reckless. Think of profits as one step closer to your goals and nothing more.

This is a weird thought for you poker thinkers out there; if you get carried away by wins and tilted badly by losses then the only time you ever play your best game is when you are even, which is likely to be only the beginning couple of hands in your sessions! I’d rather play my best poker all the time, or at least try to, hopefully you are the same. Maintaining an emotional equilibrium is a major part of this. I try and become a robot when I am playing without a concern over my bankroll status. If you use good bankroll management it should not be a concern. It will grow if you win even if you don’t count it!

By Malcolm Clarke