Poker tips news Page 2

I firmly believe that it's impossible to play too tight in Omaha Hi/Lo, especially in a ring game.

I'll be the first to admit that it's not especially fun to play the game that tight, but if you have the patience for it, it's as good a game as any to make money in. Here's an idea of how tight I play Omaha Hi/Lo: if I'm playing HORSE and get dealt 10 Omaha Hi/Lo hands before we move on to the next game, there's a good chance I won't play a single hand.

For obvious reasons, we’d all rather have a medium stack than a short stack.

But there is one advantage to being short-stacked: your decisions are easy. With a medium stack, almost every decision you make is complicated and almost every move is awkward. A medium stack is defined as when you have about 30-40 big blinds, and learning how to play it is absolutely vital to tournament success.

When most poker players think about tells, they visualize physical actions that occur at the table.

For example, the way an opponent’s hands start shaking whenever he has the nuts or the way he handles his chips in certain situations. Online players don’t have this sort of information to work with, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t tells in online play. 

Many of your opponents will treat you differently when you're winning than when you're losing.

That's because they're conscious of luck and fear you more when you're "running lucky." When this happens, everything is as it should be in the universe, and your opponents are easier to control.

For me, poker is a game that is meant to be played joyfully, and the path to playing the game joyfully begins with finding the game that’s right for you and entering it in the right frame of mind.

If you're going to be an emotional prisoner when it comes to your wins and losses, you won't play at your best. You need to play with patience, joy and a certain amount of indifference towards winning and losing.

No matter what poker variant you're playing, it's vital to constantly think about the players left to act behind you and what their tendencies are.

Too often, when facing a raise, poker players think only about how to play back at the raiser to their right, without thinking about the opponents still holding cards on their left.Let's say you're on the button in Pot-Limit Omaha with a powerful hand and facing a raise.

At every stage of a Multi-Table Tournament, your stack size relative to the blinds should be crucial to how you approach different hands and situations.

You may start a tournament with anywhere from 50 to 500 big blinds, but by the final table, the average stack is often between 25 and 40 big blinds.

Fifth Street is the big decision point in Seven-Card Stud because that’s the critical juncture in the hand when you have to put in your first big bet. While it’s nice to have a made hand at this point, you don’t always need one to put in a raise on Fifth Street.

If you have a big draw, that can be enough to warrant raising your opponent. Some players don’t think like this, and I believe that’s a costly mistake.Here’s an example of a situation where I believe raising with a draw is the correct play.

The semi-bluff is one of the most powerful weapons in any poker player’s arsenal. If there’s a decent chance you can steal a pot by semi-bluffing, you should usually take it. But, as with any play you make at the table, the semi-bluff is always most effective when you use it at the correct time in the correct situation.