Poker and image go hand in hand. Not only in the way poker players dress with their distinctive sunglasses and designer attire but in the way they play poker. You should be conscious of how you are perceived by your opponents as this double level thinking can help you decide a reason for your opponents play. There are many ways to shape and use your image in poker and below are just a few of them.

Things like image manipulation is not usually covered in a poker school, but check out the bwin poker school for information on how to play each type of poker game and how to improve.

For those advanced Texas Hold ‘em players among you, read on.

Body Language

You can manipulate your body language to be either positive or negative but be careful! Actors talk about “leaving their characters at work” when they finish filming for the day and thinking and appearing negatively can start to make you feed bad if you do it too much. Looking strong when you are weak and weak when you are strong is not an advanced strategy, but some players still fall for it, particularly newer players.

I always recommend players having a confident air at the table because a raise because of opponents sensing unease is still a raise!

Table Talk

Using table talk (or chat box online) is a good way of appearing on tilt or under control. Many players hit the chat box online and are often banned for illegal uses of it by using swear words or abuse. They look on tilt and vulnerable. Players doing this will usually dislike being raised or beaten in a hand. You can appear to be tilting although this is a superficial part of playing poker. Don’t use all of your energy and forget to concentrate on the play!

I find putting in a little comment or joke or sign gives out signs to your opponents. What they do with those signs and how they interpret them may present you with an opportunity further down the line in the cash game or poker tournament.

Self Deprecation

If you are an unknown player you might like to create an image that you are new to the game and are unsure about what you are doing. A little like a pool hustler not looking too good in practise you can create an air of vulnerability that can push opponents into making marginal plays that you can exploit.

Image in poker is how you are perceived by others. Subtly giving out false signals (but not overselling) will disguise the natural tells we all give out, even those of us who make statues look wobbly! These types of ideas should not dominate your thinking there are plenty more important things to think about during a cash game or tournament situation but if you are aware of your image and how this image may be being perceived by your opponents there may be a situation crop up where you can take advantage of this and win a pot that you may otherwise have lost.

By Malcolm Clarke

A scary thought? It certainly is. Where would we be without online poker, we would have to find other things to do, other things to study and (god forbid) even talk to the wife on an evening. Life is certainly fun having online poker to play but in my constant look at the world of poker we are going to consider why online poker is so important to our everyday lives as poker players and what we would need to do if we could not play online poker. It would certainly be a different world than the one we are used to.

It seems that the powers that be in respective governments around the world are hoping to at least heavily restrict the freedom poker players have to engage in online poker games and this article may not be too far from the mark. When I first saw a game of online poker on UB way back in 2000 I remember thinking what a strange way to spend your time. Because I had never heard of the game before I thought it was just another way of a games company getting your money, in the same way online slots and Bingo seems to do.

Fast forward ten years and I am a converted man. Realising that poker is a skill game laced with luck I play online poker most evenings, definitely one in two evenings for a couple of hours and I can legitimately improve rather than just getting lucky. I enjoy it and whilst I relax whilst I play I try to take on board as much of my own advice as possible and play as hard as I can. If I could not play online poker and if it did not exist, my life would certainly be a lot different.

It is my view that online poker has allowed the mainstream culture to adopt the game. Football is a massive game in the UK because anybody with a football can kick a ball around and there are lots of clubs, Saturday afternoon games with friends and 5-a-side leagues to join. It is accessible. Contrast that with Ice Hockey where you need a rink, lots of expensive safety equipment and the ability to ice skate well to be able to play. The viewing figures for that game are a lot smaller and this is no co-incidence. When people watch poker on TV, even if they live a long way from a casino they can log onto the Internet and play at a cash game or tournament table within seconds. Online poker could be one of the most accessible things available.

If online poker did not exist we would be forced to visit the casino for poker tournaments and cash games. Personally I find cash games more daunting in a live setting; it just looks like people know what they are doing more than online. Tournaments are fun, but last a long time. You also have to pick yourself up and drive to a casino, or take the bus if you want a drink, and there are going to be occasions where you decide to stay indoors and not make the effort. Accessing online poker is far easier, but if it did not exist we would have to work far harder to play.

Thankfully online poker exists in today’s world. I play most of my hands on bwin.com and get to use tracking software like pokertracker to help improve my game at a far higher rate than would be possible live. Bwin.com has a cool interface which is dark and sophisticated looking and that is easy on the eye, particularly when you play more than one table. You can play a variety of poker tournaments and real money cash games so download their software and have a go at beating the many poker players that call bwin.com their poker home.

I hope to see you at the tables and we can celebrate being able to play online poker together in some big pots!

By Malcolm Clarke

Imagine playing Texas Hold’em poker in a live environment, but online from your bedroom or, for those of you a bit more professional about things, your Poker Studio. Although I am unsure whether this would ever happen, I am sure the fact I had a dream about playing this sort of poker online tells me I either play too much or I am a genius. See whether you think I am crazy or genius at the end of the article!

A quirk of online poker is that you can make a bluff, contort into a variety of shapes shouting at the screen for your opponent to fold and not give anything away whilst the hand is in progress because your opponent cannot see you. I must admit I have done this many times. This is possible thanks to the anonymity of online poker. Top professional Allen Cunningham admitted in an interview recently he is very animated and emotional when playing online poker which is completely the opposite of how he is known at the live tables. My new concept was to use a video peer-to-peer platform like Skype to personalise the players and make it possible for tells to be practised whilst playing online poker and to integrate live poker concepts into the online poker game.

The positives of such an idea would be the ability to watch opponents whilst at the table thus giving you more time to practise not giving out tells but also spotting tells which would suit the skilled player. I imagined logging into a site like bwin.com, activating your webcam and starting to play with your poker sunglasses on! For larger buy-in online tournaments it would be an innovation I think would be welcomed by players. Unfortunately my attempts to change the world of online poker have a few obstacles.

In dreams, we can fly around without wings like birds but the constraints of real life make that impossible (unfortunately). My poker idea suffers such constraints as well. Whilst players would probably embrace the concept in one off special tournaments there would not be much use in using a camera against a player that is playing twelve to fourteen tables at once! How would you know the tell is for table one where you are or for their table ten?

Other problems would occur in players not fully exposing their face, using funky lighting to hide their emotions and not fully embracing the reason why the interpersonal webcam was used. This would be the death knell for my idea I feel. I do think that rather than use the cam purely for the gameplay, it would be fun that instead of an avatar you could use your web cam on specific tables where you could chat and talk to players interactively. That would be fun and I think profitable because people would enjoy talking to others and forget to play properly!

Perhaps I have stumbled upon the next cool idea for online poker. Perhaps it has already been thought of and discounted by the leading poker rooms like bwin.com. I would love to see this innovation added to the online poker experiences we all enjoy. Innovation is important because it keeps things fresh and we all wonder how the increased capability of technology will impact on the game as time moves forward.

I would love to hear reader’s ideas on what innovations you would like to see in poker rooms aside from the aesthetic improvements that sites like bwin.com regularly update anyway. Full Tilt introduced the Rush tables, which are interesting but not necessarily universally received; surely there will be more to follow as other sites look to differentiate their product and attract new players. It would be an interesting discussion to hear what big changes you think you could make to improve the online poker experience. Can you beat my idea of Live from home poker?

By Malcolm Clarke

Pot control is the art of maintaining the size of the pot close to the relative size of your hand. There are various ways to achieve this. Part of pokers skill is pot control and making a check in the right place instead of betting and spotting these critical moments of the hand where you think ahead and make the right decision. Professionals utilise pot control extremely well, so if we want to get up to that level of skill then we better take a look at just how to control pots. If you want to win playing Hold’em online this will be time well spent!

Pot control is achieved by taking into account some significant factors in the hand and then implementing the right moves to achieve your desired goal. Let us look at each in turn.

Considerations

Stack Size – If you are very deep in terms of your stack in a cash game then pot control is of paramount importance as a big pot could mean a lot of chips. You only want to build a pot with a very strong hand. Remember the key concept, small hand small pot, large hand large pot.

Opponent Range – Knowing how your opponent plays their hands and their betting patterns helps you work out their potential range. This pulls you as close as possible to the fundamental part of winning poker which is….fold when you are beat. In a specific situation you can assess what hands your opponent may have and whether your hand ranks well against them. If it does not, get out of the hand quickly!

Opponent Style – Getting into a hand that you would prefer to keep the pot small knowing he is aggressive and bets every street is unwise because you know what will happen. Other players are more passive and you can engage with them knowing showdown is possible. Against this opponent you could play a wider range of hands and expect to reach the river for fewer chips than playing an aggressive opponent.

Implementation

Pot control must be implemented, which means the decision to bet, call, check, raise or fold must be correct no matter how well you consider the above factors whilst deciding what to do.

Increasing the pot size when you believe your opponent is on a draw is a good idea. This aggressive “anti-draw” strategy can be seen in many high stakes cash games on the videos you can view online.

I have received responses to these types of article in the past saying that playing aggressive opponents does not give you the opportunity to execute pot control. This is untrue. Aggressive players will rarely show up on the river with less than top pair. Ultra aggressive players are rare. To an intermediate player it can look like a tight aggressive player just bets all of the time but they usually have something and will fold many hands. You can play small hands against this type of player. Remember to have a hand when you play these players!

All of the techniques used in pot control must coincide with you understanding your own hands value and strength relative to the action. If you simply make plays to make your opponent fold you will not succeed because your opponents will force to you go to showdown. This keeps you honest as a poker player! Think about the pot size in relation to your own hand strength as this is a good way to step away from the hand and realise you are in too deep when the action says fold. Sometimes you just have to give up a hand and not think of creative ways to win.

By Malcolm Clarke

Poker Bots are a constant problem for poker rooms who want everyone playing poker on their site to be honest human players prone to the same errors and learning that every player goes through whilst developing their poker skills. Players using computer programs to play their hands are not only cheating because it is not their skills being used to play, but they are breaching the terms and conditions of the poker room. As online poker is unregulated, the only Policing of such activity is by the poker rooms themselves so a good question for players to ask is, are they doing enough to quash this sort of cheating?

The truth is that it is very difficult to catch poker bot users because the programs themselves can be hard to detect and easily masked as something else running on the player’s computer. The bots also click different pixels of the fold, check or raise buttons which looks human and some of the more sophisticated bots can even type in “nh” for “nice hand” into the chat box if they lose a large pot with a strong hand.

Wherever there is money involved in anything there are people prepared to go to extreme lengths to get it, whether that means breaking the rules or not. Poker bots remove the human emotion element and given the circumstances it faces it will always make the optimum response, providing it is programmed well enough. Any player prone to tilt has a major problem facing a bot who will always mean its best poker. On the other hand I have read poker articles where players were aware they were playing a bot, yet the bot was so bad they did not mind. Only when the poker bot owner saw the losses incurred would they realise their bot was outplayed, but by then it would be too late.

Poker rooms will act if a player plays over four tables for three full days solid or if players report suspicious activity. Many poker bots are discovered through the illogical action of their owner rather than their own failings when they let the bot play for so long a human could not manage that length of poker session thus their cover is blown. Some players have accused poker rooms of not caring providing rake is being generated but this is unfair as that implies they do not care about their players.

There is also the problem of proving that a bot is being used, which is virtually impossible unless the poker bot is flawed in some way. Confiscating players bankrolls on the back of random accusations by players emailing the poker room support is a dangerous situation to get into as once investigations are complete players will cash out and the poker room may lose a regular player. It is a tough balance between being seen to be actively policing their own site to trusting their regular players. I would not like to be in their shoes.

If you suspect you are playing against a bot you should email customer support and give them the reasons why you believe this is the case. Ask for them to get back in touch with their findings and if they believe you may be right. Make sure you have good reason for doing this as another player may believe the same of you and any investigation can be stressful and inconvenient, particularly if you are innocent. Some players are constantly reporting others and losing one session against a player is not a reason to think they may be a bot. They may just be better at poker than you are.

I play poker at bwin.com where I have not read of a single instance of bot related activity and their site is not listed on any of the bot sites as a playable room. That is good enough for me.

By Malcolm Clarke

Going back to the days before the poker boom who could have imagined that poker would be such a part of modern day culture in 2010? Not only that, but the game is now considered cool. If you are a poker nerd talking about three betting light and push fold ranges whilst wearing outrageous hats and sunglasses you will appreciated for your skill rather than dismissed as a weird card player. So just what makes Poker so suitable for modern day culture, and will it last?

When Chris Moneymaker turned $40 into $2.5 million in 2003 the idea that cards and poker could be a quick and easy access to wealth really caught the imagination of people. Players note sure about strategy had the added benefit that the newly implemented hole-card cameras showed them the strategy used by the professional players and the myth of “secret strategies” used by professional poker players was broken forever. Players could now see the strategies used to win by players making millions from the game and replicate them into their own poker game. The pace in the growth of poker went up another notch.

Poker rooms began marketing for new players and as the games filled with these new players the potential to earn money from online poker was so high people flocked to join in. Demand and market conditions meant that other poker rooms arrived on the scene to grab their slice of the new and juicy poker pie. The snowball effect took hold and exploded the popularity of the game in a very short space of time.

Suddenly anyone with an Internet connection could play online poker. As more and more households connected to the Internet new players were appearing from everywhere. The age old taboo surrounding the game was now replaced by a game that offered opportunity rather than a guaranteed route to disaster. Players from Backgammon, Chess, Video Games and Mathematics all realised that their skills could be used to dip into the huge prize pools on offer if they mastered poker. The tidal wave of poker had completely smashed into mainstream culture with devastating speed.

Only the global recession in 2007 to 2009 slowed down the gravy train. The bad players had either improved or left the game and people saved rather than spent their money. Gaming became a luxury many families could not afford. A consequence of this meant that the games got tougher and now even the micro-limit cash games are not easy to beat. Any player wanting to learn to play poker must now be aware that we are not in the “glory days” of the poker boom any longer. You can still win but you must learn about bankroll management and take your time before playing against more experienced players. Prize pools are still amazing, but perhaps a little tougher to win.

We have moved into the age of poker training and diligent learning. Fortunately there will always be good player pools in casinos for live events and online poker tournaments will be filled thanks to the boom. We must now earn our crust at the tables with a solid game of ABC poker. Putting in the effort now whilst times are a little harder will be worth it if there is another poker boom in the future. Markets like the Asian market are not fully saturated yet so it is not the end of online poker, only a little quieter than its crazy introduction to mainstream culture.

Things like wide screen monitors and high tech training means poker is now being linked with technology to improve the experience of playing poker online. Poker rooms continue to compete and improve their online software to draw in new customers. Poker is now growing at a smaller and more sustainable rate, but it is still growing and is still a great game to learn, participate and win money from playing and the future is certainly bright for all forms of poker both live and online.

By Malcolm Clarke

Poker enjoys a massive level of participation with hundreds of thousands of players everyday logging into their favourite poker rooms and playing their poker hands. I remember logging on to Ultimate Bet early in 2000 and thinking what a strange way to spend your time playing cards on the Internet. How little did I realise just how much I would enjoy it and so many others in just a few years time! But what makes the game so popular?

The Moneymaker Effect

Turning $40 into $2.5 million is amazing even in today’s poker world but back in 2003 before poker went mainstream it was unheard of. Most people thought poker players were steely nerved gamblers but suddenly an amateur in Chris Moneymaker demonstrated that you could compete with the best players in the world, and win! The introduction of hole card cameras allowed players to watch the professionals and learn a style of play that could win. Players discovered poker at an astonishing rate and the poker boom took off. Poker websites, poker training sites and many books and related poker material hit the market instantly and the tidal wave effect took poker into the mainstream. It has been quite a ride ever since.

The Wow Factor

There is something amazing about watching the top professional poker players fighting it out for pots worth $500,000! There is something very naughty about watching people treat money with such disregard as that contrasts how the majority of us treat money. We also are gripped with following the progress of our favourite players secretly wishing we could do what they do and live the high life. Which we will probably never achieve, but of course every poker player thinks they are good enough to sit among the top players.

Poker Tournament Dreaming

As well as watching the top players play for big money we can also take part. Can you win a fortune at a professional golf event or play football for Man Utd? Unless you are already a professional then no, you cannot. You can buy into any poker tournament or satellite in and take on the best for life changing amounts of money, at any age. Dare to dream because it is possible. Harrison Gimbel is 19 and has just won $2.2 million in one poker tournament. He was staked but a good proportion of that money is his to keep and there is no rule that you must be staked. If you have a chip and a chair you could be the next big winner. That dream keeps poker tournament fields large enough to provide this big wins and who knows, it could be you or me next in line for a massive victory and life changing prizes.

Accessibility and Image

Poker is popular because providing you have a computer and Internet connection you can play anywhere in the world. On holiday next to a swimming pool in your private villa or stuck in your dirty bedroom that really needs a vacuuming are perfect places for online poker. It is easy to play and prizes in online poker can be as crazy as live poker. Poker players are considered cool in today’s society and have a far better street image than, for example, a chess player. Poker players in a group are called “crews”, so that means you are cool if you play poker. We are certainly and most definitely not nerds. 

There are also millions of poker blogs on the Internet that have players posting video, podcasts, live poker radio, hand analysis and poker articles. You have more poker related content online than you could ever read with more being added all the time. Whatever is the main reason poker is so popular in today’s culture it seems there is nothing that can stop its growth.

By Malcolm Clarke

Poker is a game of managing risk. Those poker players who work hard, have a bit of talent and can manage risk effectively have a great chance of success. My research into poker leads me to believe that success at poker brings many relevant skills to the surface for any person seeking self fulfilment and achievement in any field. You can apply many facets of poker to everyday life. This gives poker more relevance than simply winning money and can equip you with excellent life skills. Improving your online poker game can be more than just mastering a very popular card game.

Gambling has a bad reputation. I have friends who tell me that when they are introduced to people as a professional poker player they are considered addicts who are too lazy to get a “real job”. These detractors of poker do not realise that property investors, stocks and shares investors and any entrepreneur that has ever lived has been a gambler. There is a risk in everything and good poker players are as good as businessmen at managing risk. Just as a businessman knows their market, poker players know how to play, who to play against and where their money is best placed for profit. Poker players are acutely aware that what they do is risky, giving them an advantage over other forms of investors like property entrepreneurs who do not think they will lose because “property always goes up”.

You should know through goal setting where you want to be in twelve months time. Using the principles of good bankroll management and to be frank, common sense, you should not risk all of your capital wealth to be a professional poker player. This is high risk strategy for poker and for life but some people do live this way. Learning the patience and discipline required for winning poker leads to more self control in situations away from the poker table. Anyone who can grind $100 into $1000 or rebound from $500 down to $60 and back to $500 again following good bankroll management is set for life in terms of emotional control. Poker can train you for all of these things if you learn poker carefully and diligently.

Dealing with the negative image poker has is also character building. I remember reading an article about a leading UK poker player in one of the national newspapers that said how worried his family was over his high stakes gambling. It made out that this person was about to lose everything and live on the street. As someone part of the poker community I know that this person is far from losing everything. They are established and fortunate enough to be sponsored and earn enough each month from poker away from the table to more than cover reasonably large cash game losses. While the losses look bad they had sustained over a short time, they had earned far more elsewhere from poker.

Emotional control that you must exercise at the poker table is necessary when dealing with opponents who want to put you on tilt and take you off your A game. Anyone who works knows that co-workers can be like this to a large degree in some cases. Self control and control of your emotions will positively impact your life in many ways aside of poker. Improving the way you deal with such behaviour is a great life skill.

Many areas of poker from the financial management and tilt control, patience and self awareness and control can be of great benefit to your everyday life. This article may not completely convince your family that your poker playing is beneficial to you but hopefully you can prove them wrong by becoming a winning poker player. Depending on your frequency and stakes you play people often waste far more money drinking in a pub three or more times per week than you wager at cards, it just looks worse to an outsider who worry you will get addicted.

Well done for reading articles such as this and approaching the game in the right way so that it can really help you in many ways from profits to self development.

By Malcolm Clarke

Sit still because everyone is watching. Say nothing, do not breathe or move or speak. This is the standard primer on not giving any poker tells at the table and is, if I may say so, a little extreme. When you play poker there are a range of different things you can do to avoid giving tells. Texas Hold ‘em poker players all have a different approach to detecting tells and avoiding giving them and it is very interesting to learn the tactics players use in relation to physical tells. This article is more focused on live poker rather than online poker because when playing on your favourite poker sites you can put your head in your hands and scream for a fold if you make a bluff attempt and nobody can see you!

If you ask a none poker player to do a poker face, what do they do? They try and look unemotional and keep as still as possible. Many new players think that the key to poker is looking for tells on an opponent then exploiting them to win all of the chips. In reality it is a little more difficult and a lot different. Tells are important but it is so difficult to know whether a tell is real, genuine or just you trying to convince yourself you can see something that is not there that it plays less of a role in poker than a novice may think.

What players cannot hide is the way their hands are played. Optimal poker strategy suggests that in a certain scenario a player plays poker in a certain way and if you can detect these patterns you can put them on a hand and know how to play against them. This gives you a great advantage in a tough situation if you know how the player plays poker. The true poker tells are in hand reading and opponent profiling. Having a read on a player is knowing their tendencies and being able to predict backwards why they made the play they did. They may be twitching, poking their hair and being physically predictable but one thing that never ever lies is the way they play poker hands.

Rarely does a player deliberately play a hand badly to deceive opponents in the way they would shuffle, cough or do something else to deceive a player from knowing their physical tells. Doing things like this is quite a basic and effective way to hide any physical tells. Only a weak player deliberately loses money to give false information about that style. If only to set up a future bluff it is a risky and losing way of playing poker.

Professional players often use scare tactics to make a player feel uncomfortable. They stare down a player looking for reads in their behaviour. Daniel Negreanu says that professionals use these scare tactics to make a player think twice about making a move in future hoping they remember feeling decidedly uncomfortable during the tactical stare down. This method tries to take the less experienced player out of their comfort zone so they either play badly or reveal more about their style by either talking or revealing information through body language.

Sometimes you can be so focused on working out a player physically that you forget to watch the betting. Do they always raise pre-flop with the goods? Are they trappy or tricky? Before watching out for physical tells do your homework learning their playing tendencies through their patterns of play and player style. This is far more profitable to you than risking all of your chips re-shoving because the player touched their nose like they did when they were bluffing three hands ago. They might just have a cold!

By Malcolm Clarke

With two hole cards facing down and one face up Seven Card Stud is immediately different from Texas Hold ‘em. Learning the correct starting hands for seven card stud is essential to getting a good win percentage. By the time you read this article you will have a better idea on what constitutes a good starting hand in seven card stud.

In the low limit Stud games, lack of knowledge on your opponents part means that many hands are played all the way to showdown. This increases the need for selective starting hands to give you a good chance of getting a winning hand come showdown.

It is recommended that where possible the lowest card you hold is the highest card showing around the table. In stud games you are only making a hand with your own cards, there are no community cards. In seven card stud high (this article does not deal with Stud Hi-Lo) it therefore makes sense to have more than one way to win in the hand. An example of another type of strong starting hand in seven card stud is three cards to a flush. The higher the flush draw the better. Ah-Jh-2h is a strong starting hand. You could catch a Jack, Ace or flush cards. Count how many of the suit you hold is showing elsewhere on the table and then work out the odds of hitting your flush accurately.

Suited connectors or three cards to a straight give good open ended straight draw opportunities or back door flushes. The benefits of these starting hands are that when you are drawing to these hands, because two of the cards to the straight are face down they are concealed from your opponents rather than the having most of your straight in the up cards. You can also monitor which of these cards are dealt face up to your opponents so knowing when to fold becomes easier with more accurate pot odds. High connected cards also offer opportunities for hitting high pairs, which are likely to be strong hands.

Sets are good starting hands however you must be careful that straights and flushes do not hit later in the hand that beat you. Sets look incredibly strong when dealt as stud high starting hands and this type of hand will be the most common hands to be overplayed by intermediate players. Lower sets in particular should be approached with a degree of caution as they are beat by straights, flushes and better sets.

When your face up card is an Ace there are certain benefits to playing the hand. If there are no other Aces showing from your opponents then providing you have another positive reason to play the hand, whether that be a flush possibility or straight possibility then you can proceed in the hand. It is not a very strong hand, but certainly playable. Other poker strategy articles say that a hand like this can only be played if it is raise worthy. This follows the same lines as having extra strength in addition to the Ace in terms of potential flushes or straights.

Learning seven card stud will help you learn good hand reading skills and learn the changing odds better than Texas Hold ‘em can. As you can see your opponents up cards there are more calculations to make and tougher decisions during a hand. By learning to play only positive expected value starting hands like the ones mentioned above, then you improve your chances of beating the stud games significantly. This used to be the game that before No Limit Texas Hold ‘em hit the big time was the game of choice for poker players. When you play it you will see why that was.

By Malcolm Clarke