If the flop came Q-10-4 and two players checked to you then I may venture a bet here to try and win the pot straight away using the strength of my pair of tens and also the fact that two players have checked. If this bet gets called then I would possibly check the turn unless the turn card improved my hand. If one of the blinds had bet then the situation becomes far more marginal. In fact if the small blind bet and the big blind raised then I would definitely fold the hand.

The combination of a mediocre hand and a bet coming through me would force me to fold here. Let us look at another example here and you raise from the button with 7c-5c and only the big blind calls you. The flop comes 10d-9d-2c and your opponent checks. You have no hand but your opponent has shown no aggressive intention either pre flop or post flop. However a continuation bet is more fraught with danger in this instance even with just one opponent.

The presence of flush and straight draws and the lack of high cards may mean that your opponent may not believe a continuation bet. This is where game history comes very much into play here. Do not get me wrong, betting out in this instance as a continuation bet is never a bad play. You only have one opponent and they have shown no intention to continue in the hand. That flop has still missed a large part of your opponents range here. Another example could be when the button limps weakly and the small blind completes. You have As-9s in the big blind and try to take the pot down pre-flop and make a pot sized raise and both players call you.

The flop comes Kd-Ks-2c and the small blind checks. In this situation then the flop is unlikely to have hit anyone and your pre-flop raise could have easily been with a king in your hand. So even though there are two opponents and you haven’t connected with the board then you can still find a bet here. There are times when c-betting is pretty straight forward and there are also obvious times when c-betting isn’t profitable as well. The key though is in the marginal situations where you could make a case for c-betting or checking. As always though there is no substitute for experience.

This means that they are making £40 for every 100 hands that they play. In online poker then with this kind of earn rate then you would be seeing possibly several hundred hands per hour. However if you were on a relatively slow game because of dealer inexperience or players arguing about pots and rules etc and misdeals then you may be seeing as little as 25 hands per hour. So this £40/100 hands earn rate needs to be divided by four and so the hourly rate is now only £10/hr as it would take a live player in this situation four hours to see 100 hands.

This is still winning and doing very well except for one very important factor! This is to do with the casino table charge which casinos tend to charge every hour. In this instance then the casino charges £10/hour and this wipes out the earn rate for this player so that they are breaking even. When you factor in the costs incurred in travelling then they are losing money despite earning a very impressive £40/100 hands. So you can see now why I do not play poker cash games in live casinos.

The low number of hands per hour means that whatever earn rate you make in terms of big blinds per one hundred hands has to be divided because no live game sees one hundred hands per hour. This is the cost of playing live and you need to have an absolutely crushing earn rate to make money playing live and this means that you must have a large skill advantage over your opponents. So perhaps now you can see why I do not play live and when you play online then despite the average game being better then you do not need to be as good in many ways because of the capacity to be able to play multiple tables.

So in this instance then a player who was making far less in terms of bb/100 could be making far more because the £/100 figure would be multiplied instead of divided. If you are making £40/100 hands and playing 300 hands per hour multi-tabling then you are making £120/hour. This is miles away from our previous example where you were only seeing 25 hands per hour in the live casino and thus having to divide your £40 by four.

Let me fly some vital but obvious facts by you for a minute. Poker has the capacity to make you an awful lot of money. Maybe not today, tomorrow, next month or even next year but it still has the capacity to do so. So if you have say $1000 to play poker with and you don’t have an awful lot of experience then you owe it to yourself to give poker your best shot. Even if you do not want to do this for yourself then at least do it for your family as their lives could also be enhanced by you making money from poker.

Any new players should shelve all ideas of winning big for the first few months or even during the first year. You need to gain experience and skill and during this educational process then you need to keep your bankroll intact or from being wiped out. How can you possibly see that big $40/hour earn rate in year two if you get wiped out during the first few days or weeks? One of the biggest downfalls of new players is that they come into the game with some set amount of money and then play too high with that money. The end result is that a lack of experience or knowledge or both coupled with a bad run wipes them out.

Some come back and repeat the same mistakes but many leave the game totally. What they never realised is that by playing properly with their money then they could have built their poker into something tangible in the future. If you have $1000 then I really do not think that you should play all that high. Forget about number of buy-ins or anything like that, your buy in level should be dependent not just on your bankroll size but also on your experience level as well.

No point in having twenty buy-ins at NL50 if the level is too tough for you. If you cannot beat $5 games at the outset then you have work to do with your game. It doesn’t matter that $5 games means that you have a massive 200 buy-ins, you are learning your trade for the future and that $1000 needs to be protected at all costs. Online poker will always be there waiting for you and it has the capacity to change your life but it cannot be there if you blow your money through poor bankroll management. So for players in this category then bankroll management really is the Holy Grail.

I like to limp and promote a multi-way pot and if gets raised after me then I can reassess. So I limp for the $2, my stack size is $246. A middle player calls but the cut-off raises the pot to $11 and everyone folds around to me. Both of these players have $200+ stacks. So the pot is now $18 and it costs me $9 to call. My immediate pot odds are only a mere 2/1 which in some instances is a clear fold.

I felt that the cut-off had been attacking limpers a lot so I had two plans here. I think that my pocket eights were ahead of his range so I could call and then look to make a play post flop providing that the other limper folded pre-flop. Or I could call and then hope that the other limper called and turn the hand into an implied odds play.

There is of course a third option and that is to re-raise and represent aces, I have done this many times and taken down the pot. I decided to call and see what the other limper did, they called as well so we now have a three way pot with $36 in the middle. The flop was great for me and was 9h-8c-7h giving me middle set. The board is dangerous for a set with a possible straight draw and flush draw out there and not to mention a made straight with J-10.

There are two possible ways forward with this hand, you can either bet out and charge the draws to make their hands or you can go for an aggressive check raise. The second option is risky because it can get checked around and your opponents can take the free card. If that happens then many turn cards will come that will not only freeze your action but will also make it far more tricky for you to continue and especially against heavy action.

The cut-off may be reticent to attack two limpers on a board like this and could simply check it back. I decided to bet $34 and the limper thought for some time and called. The original raiser shoved all-in and now it was back to me. They could be shoving with all kinds of hands that I can beat like AA, KK, QQ, JJ, TT, Ah-Kh or other suited hands.

I called and so did the limper so we had a massive 350 big blind pot. The cards were revealed and the limper had the Qh-10h for the flush draw and straight draw and the raiser had Kh-Ks. The turn card was the 6c giving the other limper a straight and the river card was the Kc which elevated the raisers hand to top set but not enough to take the pot.

My second set on the flop was relegated to being third best by the river but I was satisfied that I got my money in ahead. The thing about this hand is that if I had checked then the Qh-10h may also have checked but the kings would have certainly bet. Then I could have check-raised the limper off their hand. This powerful check raising sequence could have also forced the kings to fold.

This hand niggled me for a while but at the end of the day, you cannot see your opponents cards as poker is a game of incomplete information.

This article was produced by Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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.

The rules are identical for all players and therefore the issue, so one can get game advantage over the other, plays a central role in this theory.

That would be fairly trivial statement, if not a «but». The point is that poker is perhaps much more than any other existing intellectual games, characterized by variation methods for obtaining benefits. This is due primarily to the fact that poker combines not only the properties of games with incomplete information, but also a game in which all actions are made solely by the rates.

The range of methods for obtaining the benefits of poker in so wide that it is constantly evolving game theory, and developing very rapidly. Strategic approaches that have recently created a significant positive winrate or ROI, are near or unprofitable.

To a large extent, this contributes to the rapid and wide dissemination of theoretical poker information – in the form of books, articles, discussion forums. This is logical, just as the attendant and approval «If all played the same way, then who would have won?».

One influential players, writing on the topic of poker once wrote in his book for the novice players a phrase along the following lines: «Join the sweat from such a starting hand. This is enough to win ».

Can be plus player who plays in the so-called ABC poker, the poker is purely on the map? Of course, maybe, but with some «averaged» conditions, and in the company of strong players, he quickly turned into a negative, as would be for them on the one hand is almost completely read, and on the other – very much controlled.

Can be plus player, by contrast, plays far too diverse and «figure»? Of course, maybe, but all in the same «averaged» conditions. In the company of bad players, it also turned into a negative, because they are simply unable to adequately absorb his game «message». Consequently, the «message», not only will not achieve their set goals, but in some cases lead to the effect diametrically opposite to the intended.

Therefore, ABC poker an advantage only in the small limit, where the vast majority of the opponents played not for profit and pleasure, and do not know not only the subtleties of certain games, but even its foundations. The higher limit, the more ABC poker begins «pass». Moreover, the more developed a poker game, the lower becomes the limit at which the «ABC» starts to falter.

Return to a situation with a thin, psihological game. It is good all the more so the higher the limit at which it is applied, and the small limits virtually does not apply. And trends in the development of poker eloquently show that the bottom plank ceilings where «court» game over time, becoming lower.

Therefore, if the main task of novice players is, above all, in mastering the basic principles of a successful game, the player knows and care about the problems already experienced quite a different order. After all, it is generally the case with equal force to his opponents, that is not inferior to him owning these basic principles.

He has to deal with the task of reaping the benefits at the expense of more serious, and most importantly – a variety of tools, which means a constant search for more and more ways to gain advantage, mainly because the game patterns associated with the drawing of a hand, are characteristic of ABC-poker at the expense of psychological nature.

How can we better read the hand the opponent and not allow him to do the same with regard to their hands – to address the central problem, ultimately, is all the variety of techniques to gain an advantage.

In this sense, «style» approach, which is the approach that takes into account the style of play opponents and build on the basis of its own «floating» style, remaining true, yet somewhat outdated. Outdated in the sense that modern poker is multidimensional, rather than a model of this approach.

First, because all the variety of approaches to the drawing of any hand can not be represented in the form of a primitive classification. And secondly, because the «style» approach does not take into account some of the underlying psychological phenomena.

Is there a meaning to take into account? Depends on how we play poker. The higher rates than smaller tables (in the case online poker), the more qualified rivals – so difficult to get game advantage. Consequently, the more a growing sense of the various subtle details.

One of these components – motivation. For example, if we are very good indeed – very successful  player, when he is in the pot, «style» approach tells us that his starter is good for this. Does it be true? In most cases, yes, but not always.

After all cases, for example, situations where playability starter does not come too long, that is, the number distribution, is many times greater than the average distribution. Then, not infrequently, even literate and successful player is not enough to sweat a good starter, because neither literacy nor successful not override the fact that he is above all man and nothing human, including boredom, it is not strange.

Of course, with a literate and successful player this happens much less frequently than with loose and poorly trained, but it happens. And on such factors, especially when playing at high rates can and should pay attention.

This is just one example of «not poker» motivation of the opponent when playing poker. This example is illustrative rather than a textbook in nature. In fact, the question of motivation more deeply. And, perhaps, for the first time at a high level, it raised no professional player, as a professional psychologist, which is quite logical.

We are talking about Alan Skunmeykere, who in his book «Psychology poker» examines the basic principles of successful games in terms of psychology. In particular, it addresses the topic and the «style» approach, arguing that playing styles reflect the wants and fears of people and understanding of these motives will help win at opponents.

This is actually quite deep and the approval means it is above all that you can just fix the manner of a game opponent and adjust, based on his own this game, but if you look deeper and understand the motivation behind this is, and not to any other of action the opponent, the advantage will be much greater.

When playing poker main desire, which are all the rest – of course, to win and the main concern – to lose. But everyone has different «threshold» of desires and fears. Therefore, any game action, suggesting the existence of a mathematically equivalent alternative, such as in the vast majority of poker, is connected with «weighing» personal desires and fears. For each player in different situations have different equally.