There are things you must be aware of in order to do well in these types of tournament. Having a solid grasp of poker poker strategy will help you gain big stacks during the initial period of the tournament where the chips really do fly around.

During the Re-Buy Period

The action is fast and furious during the re-buy period. As players can buy back in there is less risk with pushing a marginal hand. Your range for making pre-flop raises should either be widened or tightened depending on your own plans for the tournament. If you are one of the crazy re-buying players then you can widen your range of starting hands and go for the double up that will earn you a large stack.

With many opponents playing loose at this point there are plenty chips to be won. With a starting stack of $1,500 players can aim to increase that to $8,000 or more if they are lucky enough to get good hands. Raises by your opponents should mean less and you will see large pots in relation to the smaller blinds more often as the aggression is the either win or re-buy.

That said, many players have won re-buy tournaments having never had to re-buy playing tight in this stage of the tournament and picking off other players bad moves. You should play these tournaments, however, with a willingness to re-buy at least once or twice to take into account the ferocity of play in the early stages.

After the Re-buy Period

Immediately after the re-buy period ends you should see an immediate relaxing of intensity in the way the poker tournament is played. Players now have the added pressure of potentially being eliminated so they must be more careful before risking their stack. You need to make that adjustment also in that the raising range will instantly become more in line with the normal expectations in relation to the blinds like you would see in a freezeout poker tournament.

There will be some less experienced poker tournament players that have gotten on a roll during the re-buy period and will still be pounding the pot and be raising aggressively. It is probably best to avoid these players without a very strong hand. Their range is probably quite wide and they are using a poker strategy that as soon as the rebuy period ended was a mistake. This makes them attractive as a weak player but also dangerous because they are creating big pots.

The key re-buy poker tournament concept to bear in mind is that once re-buys end it becomes a freezeout tournament played in freezeout conditions. Some players will have huge stacks that you might not see in a freezeout but they will normally go quiet for a few levels sitting on their lead. These entertaining tournaments can have big prize pools because of the frenzied re-buying that takes place early on in the tournament.

This makes re-buy poker tournaments fun to play in and potentially lucrative!

By Malcolm Clarke

Whilst the following poker tips are very general, they form a framework that you can follow in order to get to a high level of poker skill as quickly as is realistically possible for you.

1. Devour the Basics

Can you recite the hand rankings from Royal Flush right down to Ace High in the correct order? Do you know what a string bet is and how to avoid it? What does min-raise mean and what does three betting mean? All of these things and much more should reel off your tongue like it is second nature to you. Having a solid grounding of strategy is imperative to your future poker success. I found arranging a poker quiz with my friends interesting. Perhaps more interesting was that none of us got 100% right despite us all doing very well. It is always worth brushing up on the basics.

Visit the bwin poker school where there are lots of guides to both basic and more complicated poker strategy.

2. Download a Poker Room and Play Freerolls

Before you grab your paypal account or Visa card take a moment to carefully select your poker room. I use bwin.com which I feel is secure, looks good and they enjoy good player traffic and plenty of variety in terms of cash game tables and poker tournaments. Pass by their freeroll tables and get used to the software and how the game works at your site. Mis-clicks can be very costly and unfortunately you have no-one to blame but yourself if this occurs. The time spent familiarising yourself with the poker software is time well spent.

3. Read Poker Books, Poker Forums & Poker Blogs

Poker research is important, but be aware of the date of publication for books as poker strategy develops over time and some books may be out of touch with how poker is played today. Poker forums are a good source of strategy, but again learn who is worth listening to and who the loud people are with nothing to back up their noise! Poker blogs are a good way of learning how a player thinks and there are thousands of them out there. Many professionals run good blogs but like books and forums there are good and bad incarnations of these blogs. Providing you have a critical eye you should benefit from the vast wealth of knowledge available online in these mediums.

4. Start Small & Take Notes

Using conservative bankroll management you can begin to play some hands at this point with hopefully a good understanding over what is happening at the poker tables. Take notes of mistakes you make and possibly consult a coach if you are unable to plug the leak yourself. Note particular spots where you struggle in detail. For example, holding AJ in early position when an Ace comes on the flop and you face a raise from someone in late position. Lots of poker situations are difficult but having confidence in your own knowledge and, more importantly, a reason for every decision is something that coaching can help with. You can also post better questions in the forums once you get more experience.

5. Keep Gaining Experience and Stay Positive

You may find that winning at poker comes very easily to you, but stay humble and stay positive and keep doing what you are doing. If you lose you should work out why you are losing. You might not be Phil Ivey but with dedication, experience and a bit of humility most players can eventually find a level where they can succeed. This may be in a tournament, a cash game or SNG format, so try each type of poker and see what suits you best.

Above all, enjoy learning this great game and enjoy the challenge online poker offers everyone.

By Malcolm Clarke

Imagine this scenario. You are playing in a poker tournament with a large first prize. You battle for four hours and build a competitive stack. After playing very solidly you make a move against a good player and they call you with 60/40 odds. Their hand holds up and as they had a slightly smaller stack than yours they are now amongst the chip leaders whilst you are short stacked and looking doomed. Can you feel the deflation of your hope and your belief that this was your big moment? I can and it is tempting to simply give up if this happens.

Unfortunately as a result of this moment of pain many players do give up and throw their chance of success away. In most tournaments such a crippling loss may mean you will not achieve what you had hoped this time, but you should take solace in that you made the right decision (do not forget to review the hand to make sure you DID make the right decision) and move on with your head held high. There is always another poker tournament to try and win!

Do not dream of regaling your bad beat story at the bar. I have seen many players lose a massive pot then look over to the bar to see who is there that they could talk to when they bust out in a moments time. It is like they have mentally left the table and are waiting for their body to catch up. They almost want to lose their remaining chips believing that the tournament is over for them. All of these things are wrong. The saying “a chip and a chair” means you are still alive and you could double or even triple up. Yes it is unlikely but if you play hard and wait for good hands (if possible) you have a reasonable chance of getting some more chips.

1982 winner Jack Straus is credited with using the phrase “a chip and a chair”. The story (which varies depending on who you ask) is that he pushed his chips into the middle and lost the hand early in the main event. Finding a chip under his napkin as he stood to leave the organisers let him continue playing as he had pushed his chips into the middle rather than declared “All-in”. He made a remarkable comeback from holding only a single chip and eventually won the tournament. This shows you are never out of contention until you have lost your last chip, so always play hard and never give up.

None of the top professional poker players give up and they have plenty of money to simply walk away if things are getting tough. But staying strong and focused helped them reach that level and you should be copying such behaviour. Never give up and play your best poker until your last chip is gone.

By Malcolm Clarke

Cash game poker players in both texas hold ‘em and Pot Limit Omaha can go 100,000 hands and despite being winning players they can suffer losses due to consistently having their hands beaten by their opponents hitting their hands despite being behind in a hand. Can the law of attraction change these results? It would be wrong to assume that just because you watch one DVD and begin to think more positively about poker and life this will prevent bad beats. A 20% chance in a poker hand will come about one in five times that situation is played out over time. No universal law however powerful in metaphysical terms can alter the pure mathematics of poker. This could be an argument to say that the law is ineffective from a poker perspective.

When thinking about using the Law of Attraction in poker it is about refining your approach, your belief and your visualisation. Preventing negativity and maintaining belief keeps you making good decisions which should lead you to success in poker.

The five steps of implementing the Law of Attraction is as follows,

1. Know what you Want

It is recommended that you write down everything you want. You must be realistic, however, do not ask for AA in every hand! Things like you will hit the flop; you will trap an aggressive player. Think positively about all parts of poker and you will attract these good moments towards you.

2. Think Big, Not Small

Having goals is important and we have discussed this in previous articles. Randomly playing poker with no goals is just playing hands over and over and this can become boring very quickly. If you goal is to win a poker tournament then visualise this happening. This sets your mind towards what you want to achieve, giving you direction and purpose.

3. Lose the Negativity

In part two of this feature we are going to look at why it is so easy to get negative when you play poker. You must lose all of your fear and concern and focus on making good decisions. Expect to make good decisions and study to ensure you have the ability, knowledge and poise to make these good decisions. Expect the good things you want to achieve from steps one and two and attract them to you.

4. Visualise the Outcome

To keep motivation high you must set time aside to visualise what it would be like to achieve all of your goals in Poker. Imagine giving the interview and feel the satisfaction of having a big cash prize. Really feel and imagine that feeling. The universe will then attract this to you. Phil Hellmuth used the law of attraction and achieved all of his goals within six months early in his poker career. Following this technique can be very powerful if you keep on believing. A positive person works towards their goals and you can achieve what you want through hard work and belief.

5. Act on Intuition

At some point you must trust the law of attraction to work for you and alter your poker life the way you desire. You are positive, focused and ready to achieve and you believe you can do it. Focus on all opponents carefully and then let your intuition guide you to the best results. Opponents will notice your confidence and the fact you are playing like a winner. I believe this is what sets apart the much discussed Maven poker system in that they focus on playing each hand correctly with a belief the winning will happen if they keep doing things right. They have many good testimonials to this effect. Positive thinking can change your life because it puts you in a position to harness opportunity.

Be sure to read part 2 of this feature where we discuss negativity and why it should be avoided and why you should fight to maintain a positive attitude towards poker by using the law of attraction to help you achieve great things.

By Malcolm Clarke

Often it is not a bad beat in poker tournaments that cause you to bust out but your reaction to them and play in future hands. You fail to recover from the hand that would have seen you become chip leader and you are mentally unable to make the correct decisions to work your short stack back into contention in the hands immediately after this. You then make a rash decision and are eliminated, I can think of many times earlier in my poker life where this happened. Having this happen to you can stop you from making a comeback in a situation where you may have recovered.

Using the law of attraction forces you to visualise positive outcomes and therefore subliminally prepares you for success. When you expect success you are not demoralised by a single act of bad luck as you view this as a blip on the road to success. Politicians face a lot of criticism on the streets as they campaign for votes. Having conviction that they can win means they are not hurt by comments, they respond well to adversity. Study their persona and you will see what I mean, they are very difficult to draw a reaction from and their control comes from their confidence.

Poker players need to develop a thick skin like a politician and a similar belief that you are following the correct poker strategy and whilst things may not always work out on one hand you have confidence following a similar strategy in the future is the right thing to do. You maintain optimal poker strategy and therefore maintain a high chance of success despite short term failure. The law of attraction promotes both a confidence in your poker game and a confidence within yourself.

If a player is obviously suffering at the poker table opponents will take strength from this outward weakness. Similarly opponents feel less confident if they feel a player is very confident. You can plant the seeds of doubt in your opponent’s mind by using the law of attraction to manifest a positive feeling inside you. They will not understand why you are confident but they must assume there is foundation to this belief and this will affect their initial perceptions of your play. Even if you are a moderate player in terms of ability you can appear more dangerous than perhaps you are by exuding an air of absolute confidence in your poker game.

Consider now if you appear outwardly nervous and you are telling players that you are new to tournaments or talking in the chat box about how badly you run. They may look upon you as a weak player believing you are scared money. However they reach the decision to raise your bluff causing you to fold you do not want to feed them any information that makes this decision more obvious and less scary to them. Your negativity therefore breeds less than desirable results in poker as well as in life.

Force yourself to be positive and research the law of attraction. It will not make you unstoppable straight away but you will be in a good place mentality with the belief that you are heading towards a goal that will greatly enhance your life and feelings of achievement. When things go well you have the satisfaction of knowing it is a job well done and when things are going less than fantastically you can take a long term view, maintain your positivity and get back to making good poker decisions quickly. This is far better than tilting and you will start winning again sooner than if you let the negative thoughts grow inside you.

That is the power of using the law of attraction in Poker; you are open to victory all of the time and you let nothing get in the way of you reaching that victory.

By Malcolm Clarke

The following advice is relevant to any weekly casino event that is not a large buy-in, although much will be the same no matter what the buy-in is.

Arriving at the Casino

Bring ID with you when you arrive at the casino, especially if it is your first visit. Some of the modern casinos do not require written membership but you will have to prove you are over the legal age to play, particularly if you look young! Once you have given your details if you need to access you can access the casino floor. Usually the poker room is situated at the back of the casino, meaning you will need to navigate through the games room to find it. Casinos do this because they want to tempt you with roulette, blackjack and craps before you sit down to play poker!

Poker Etiquette

At the poker table in a low buy-in event there is not the level of intensity of a WSOP tournament. Most players take the game seriously but are there mainly to have a good time. Aggressively table talk like Tony G is not suitable and you should not splash the pot or go any further than light-hearted banter. As much as players would like to think otherwise, poker is primarily a social activity in less than $50 buy-in events although you should play to win at all times.

Sunglasses and iPods are usually banned for low limit events in casinos as they try and promote a good social experience rather than intensive life or death poker. You can still play hard, but please remain in the confines of the house rules.

Sitting Down

When you first enter the tournament you will be given a number. This is displayed on the big screen which shows your table and seat number. This will be random and it is important you sit where you are supposed to. Take your seat, get a feel for your chips and re-arrange them as you like. Count your chips so you know exactly what the configuration of your stack is. Get into the mindset of winning and plan your strategy. It is time to play.

Playing Your First Hand

When you are dealt your cards, look at your cards after you have watched the reaction of the other players looking at their cards as many players give away the strength of their hand in their immediate reactions after looking at their cards. Begin to immediately formulate opinions on opponent’s looseness or tightness. Unless you have AA, KK, QQ, JJ or AK I like to fold the opening hand as losing a pot straight away can make you feel like this is not your day and unsettle you. I will only play AQ as first person in with an unraised pot. From the first hand start forming the image you want to profit from later in the tournament.

If/When you Bust

Most casinos give you a card and you should pass this into the tournament desk usually situated at the periphery of the poker room before you leave the casino. This allows the casino to log your finishing position and assists the management of the poker tournament. You do not need to shake every player by the hand but I always say “good luck guys” and shake the hand of the player who busted me before I leave and that always makes me feel I’ve left in a nice way, even if I have taken a bad beat.

Remember to enjoy yourself too! If you have played lots of poker tournaments at bwin.com then you should be more than equipt to do well in a live poker setting.

By Malcolm Clarke

By raising the flop with the J-10 then our hero not only finds out where he stands in the hand but he also saves a lot of money in the hand as well. Take the situation where the big blind led out with an $18 bet on the flop and our hero raised to $80 instead of calling. To many players, this may seem like an overly aggressive action with such a marginal hand but that is exactly the point of the raise.

I see players get sucked into losing their entire stacks in situations like these and it is so pointless. Now after you have raised to $80 on a broken board like this, any opponent who remains in the hand from that moment on has a hand that can likely beat top pair with a ten kicker. You can simply check the turn behind if they called your flop raise and checked the turn or fold your hand if they re-raised on the flop or called and then bet the turn. But look at the difference in the amount of money that is expended after you have raised on the flop.

As long as you can get away from your hand after your opponent either calls your flop raise or re-raises then this pot has only cost you $92. That is bad enough but far better than merely calling the hand down and losing $206! But imagine the carnage that could ensue if instead of the harmless 2c arriving on the river, you hit a ten or worse still….a jack!

This is where you are at serious risk of losing your entire buy-in and the cause of this was not finding out where you stood on the flop and letting your opponent dictate the betting.

But raising the flop lets you win the pot in numerous other ways as well. It could make your opponent even fold the best hand if they have a poker hand like K-J for instance. It will almost certainly win you the pot when your opponent is holding junk and folds but do not despair at this and think that you have missed an opportunity to extract extra money by raising them off the hand.

The fact remains that it is a better poker play to raise with a marginal hand on the flop than it is to simply call down to the river in a game like no limit hold’em where calling down to the river with a second best hand can get very expensive in this form of poker. But also, calling down tells you absolutely nothing about the relative strength of your opponents hand. Are they trying to bet you off the pot? Or are they betting out with a strong hand in the same way that Doyle Brunson advocates in Super System.

It is also worth mentioning that Super System is perhaps the most widely read poker book on the planet and especially the no limit section that Doyle wrote so I would imagine that there are an awful lot of players both live and online who are emulating Doyle’s words in that book and it is getting the same way now with the Harrington on hold’em series.

But raising in this situation lets you find out when your opponent is deadly serious about their hand and knowing this will prevent you from being stacked in many situations that will crop up both in live poker games and online games because with regards to this particular concept then there is no difference in where you are playing poker.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson
Author – “Winning Cash Game Poker”
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One of the players who came to me was actually quite an experienced player but he had a flaw in his game that simply needed correcting if he had any chance whatsoever of moving up.

The hand went like this, the game was a $2-$4 no limit hold’em six max game and it was folded around to our hero in the cut-off who open raised to $12 and it was folded around to the big blind who called. Our hero held the Jc-10s and the flop came down Jd-7s-3c and the big blind led out with a bet of $18 and our hero called the $18. Both these players had $400 stacks at the outset of the hand. The turn card was the 2h and the big blind led out again for $46 and our hero called again.

The river card was the 2c that made a final board of Jd-7s-3c-2h-2c and the big blind fired out again on the river and bet $130 and with top pair, our hero called the $130 bet. The cards were revealed and the big blind had 7d-7h for a flopped set and they had simply bet out all the way and been paid off. Our hero lost over half of his stack and was forced to top up his stack with a re-buy.

I then asked him why he had played the hand in this way and I have provided a broad version of his response here.

“I had seen this guy bluff at the pot several times and I had top pair and did not want to concede the pot. My hand is not that strong and I did not want to escalate the pot. I figured that if I was ahead then I could simply let them bluff their money off and I was controlling the pot size so that it did not get out of hand”.

I see this type of thinking all the time and in my mind, it is perhaps one of the biggest faults of intermediate poker players who have reached a certain level. But they are looking at the situation wrongly if they think that they are controlling the pot when they play like this. There are so many flaws with this type of thinking that it is difficult to know where to start.

The first thing to remember is that when you have adopted a “pot control” call down stance like this that you are in fact letting your opponent control the betting. They are firing out on every street and you are merely responding.

What this means is that your opponent can choose whether to bet out on the next round or not and you are far from guaranteed to make any more money off them even if you are ahead and stay ahead. Look out for part two of this article coming soon.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson
Author – “Winning Cash Game Poker”
Come and try the new and improved poker software on bwin.

The small blind led out with a pot sized bet and the big blind folded and I called. I felt that the small blind betting into two players like this indicated a made hand and this had to mean a straight. So a raise would not only fail to take the pot but I wasn’t even certain that I had the best set. I decided to wait until the turn to see what happened and the turn card brought the 2s making a flush possible.

The small blind bet out again and I re-raised the pot. The reason that I did this takes some explaining but it has to do with me representing the flush. My call on the flop could have been made with a wide range of holdings of which a flush draw was one of them. The lone ace of spades in my hand meant that I wasn’t in any danger of running into the nuts.

The only hand that I had to fear was top set as I had the nines and a player who had top set may not lay their hand down to this kind of pressure when in their own mind they had ten outs to improve. But a player who just had a straight and nothing more could easily believe in their own mind that they were in fact drawing dead when a flop caller suddenly comes out firing. I put my best confident face on while making the play and I could sense that my opponent was watching me.

It must have been no longer than about fifteen to twenty seconds but my opponent eventually folded their hand. But I have made this pressure play numerous times in various different guises. To be able to pull it off requires several things. Firstly you need to know what type of hand that your opponent could be holding. This can be far easier to do in Pot Limit Omaha than it can in a game like hold’em like in this situation for instance where a player bet into two opponents on a straightening board. This tends to represent a straight far more in PLO than it does in hold’em.

Then you need to know what type of player they are and if they are capable of laying down a hand. If they cannot do this or they are too weak to do this then you have no fold equity in the situation whatsoever and will end up having to make a hand too often. Before anyone asks, no I don’t always get these plays right but then again who does? Sometimes my decision making seems so bad that I sometimes despair that I can actually play the game but it all seems to come good in the end.

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

Six years later and Durrrr has never had to re-deposit, building a bankroll of many millions of dollars and a reputation as one of the finest cash game players in the world at the highest stakes. But is this reputation justified? Results certainly suggest that it is. Dwan has an average record in poker tournaments and is one of only a handful of poker players who have forged their reputation from solely being a ring game specialist. Dwan is a cash game prodigy, in every sense of the word.

Dwan has his critics. Success in poker is usually judged by tournament success and he has not really had any of that. He is unconcerned with winning WSOP bracelets and prefers to sit in the highest stakes cash games instead during the World Series. When he was bashing players up during online poker games, people said that he would be unable to take on the best and win. Players like Doyle Brunson, Phil Ivey and Gus Hansen soon found out Dwan was the real deal when he started dominating the live games too. They quickly realised this player was here to stay.

His cash game success was tested when he issued an open challenge to everyone except close friend Phil Galfond for a multi-table cash game contest. At the time this was considered the big news of the poker world. With 33,000 or so hands played of an allotted 50,000 Dwan is leading Patrik Antonius by $2 million. He was considered crazy to offer three to one on a $500,000 bonus if he wins, but now he seems certain to collect from Patrik when they eventually finish this challenge.

To be considered great you must return from adversity. Life is easy when things are going well. Durrrr was tested in November 2009 when he suffered a horrific series of losses to Isildur1. According to pokertableratings, Tom lost $6 million between August 2009 and December 2009. People were claiming he had been found out and could no longer beat the online games. Durrrr managed to avoid tilting (amazing when you consider the losses he endured) and he has gone on a recovery run and has won about $5 million of that money back so far in 2010. Just last week he is reported to have made a profit of over $1.2 million. He will be a far wiser and more rounded player having had the experiences he has had over the last six months.

He is fearless, talented and has a wealth of online poker and live poker cash game experience. Every single top player respects his abilities at both Texas Holdem and Pot Limit Omaha. Players like Phil Hellmuth, begrudging at best in praising other player’s talks very highly of Dwans poker ability as does poker legends like Daniel Negreanu and Phil Ivey. Not many players can match these boys as top players, but Dwan is now part of that elite group of players.

Does it matter how good he is? Would you relish seeing Tom Dwan sit down at your cash game table with a large stack of chips? I guess he would say he is good enough.

By Malcolm Clarke