Poker Site

Archive for the ‘Texas Holdem Articles’ Category

There are a few factors involved in continuation betting in no-limit Texas Holdem. The main factors to consider are the flop texture, the strength of your hand, the number of opponents and to a lesser extent your stack size. Also the game history has a lot to do with it as well. In this article then we will look at a few examples of when and why it is better to continuation bet. It has been folded to you in the cut-off and you open raise with Jc-10c and the button and both blinds call you. Now with three opponents and with one having position over you then any continuation bet is probably going to have to be based on hand strength more than anything else. Read the rest of this entry »

There are many players who go down the live poker route because they want to experience the thrill of playing live. Playing live is still exciting but you need to remember that when you play live in a casino setting then you are being charged for the privilege of doing so. I have not played live poker in a casino setting for eight years now and I have no frets about that whatsoever for several reasons. Firstly let us look at the earn rate of a very good live player at a level like £2-£5 no-limit hold’em. Based on the benchmark earn rates for many players at this level then a good solid winning player could be making as much as 8bb/100 hands. Read the rest of this entry »

I have read more articles on bankroll management than I can care to remember and I have also written numerous articles as well on this subject. I really think that there is a massive misconception to this topic with regards to how certain people view it. I suppose that I was fortunate enough really coming from a background in sports betting and blackjack that I always had a very good grasp on the subject. In this article though then I am simply going to concentrate on players who only have a set amount of money put to one side to play the game and if they lose that money then they are finished with poker. Read the rest of this entry »

I was playing NL200 Online Texas Hold em game a few days ago when the following hand came up which I feel is instructive. I had pocket eights under the gun, now in a full ring game then you are not really folding this hand. Raising while being deceptive is a little too loose aggressive for my style. Read the rest of this entry »

I have often received criticism for recommending that some players who are risk adverse but who want to play poker at a certain level would do better multi-tabling. This statement sounds strange but not once you understand the implications behind it. Let us say that you would like to play $10-$20 limit hold’em but a good bankroll for that level would be 500 big bets. This means $10,000 but yet you may not want to take that sort of financial risk when you play limit Texas Hold’em.

Even if you didn’t lose the entire bankroll and had a 300 big bet downswing then this is still $6000 and this may be well beyond what you are prepared to accept. Your optimal earn rate may be 3ptbb/100 which means $60/100 hands. If you were single tabling then you may only see 60 hands per hour at six max. But that $60/hour may be a mirage if you simply cannot mentally accept the losses and swings that come at the level.

But what about if you played $2-$4 but played eight tables at that level and trust me when I say that this is definitely possible if you work up to it. The rake at these low levels is very high but the flip side of this is that your rakeback payments will be far higher also. So eight tables of $2-$4 is probably the equivalent of playing $16-$32 which is far higher than $10-$20!

So let us say that you could manage the same 3ptbb/100 but at sixty hands per hour per table then you would be seeing almost 500 hands per hour and so $12/100 would be nearly $60/hour. The far bigger rakeback payments would mean that a player multi-tabling $2-$4 would actually make more money per hour than a player single tabling at $10-$20.

But yet the biggest factor in terms of variance comes from the size of the swings that a player would incur at $2-$4. That same 500 big bet bankroll would only mean $2000 and not $10,000 and a 300 big bet downswing at $2-$4 would only mean a drop of $1200 instead of $6000 but yet the earn rates would be comparable in both instances and even more once rakeback is taken into account.

If you had a successful run then you may find that depending on how well you played that you never actually encountered a downswing of more than 150 big bets. It seems absolutely amazing that someone could make $60/hour and yet never encounter a negative downswing of more than $600 but yet this is the power of multi-tabling at any form of Texas hold’em. For me these days then the best way to go is to multi-table but the dark side to this is that it has led to the online poker arena becoming far tougher in which to make money. It is also pretty amazing that a player could make $60/hour and still only need a bankroll of $2000 and that to me is the biggest plus point of multi-tabling.