Worst Bad Beat I Ever Saw

Two guys, I have no idea what their names were so let’s call ‘em Ching and Gerry. Ching was a young Asian kid with shades, spiky hair and leaked aggression out of every pore. He’d been playing off and on at our room and had a lot of guys intimidated. Gerry was a thirty-something regular in the room. He played a decent game, lost more than he won but won enough to keep coming back. The game was no-limit hold ‘em with $5 - $5 blinds and a $1500 max buy-in.

Click to read more ...

Making the Final Table in a Poker Tournament

This column is written for those of you who have more than a passing familiarity with tournament poker, either through playing in or watching them on TV. For those of you who do not, read on anyway. Perhaps you will be motivated to learn this fascinating, alluring, frustrating game. If you know even a little about tournament poker, you know a few basic things.

Click to read more ...

Getting Started in Poker

So let’s play a little poker I: The culture of the card room Poker continues to grow in popularity. Card rooms are flourishing in Atlantic City, in the Connecticut woods, the Mississippi shore, the riverboats in the Midwest, the entire west coast and, of course, in Las Vegas —- not to mention all those quasi-legal ’private’ clubs that have long operated in cities and towns around the country. And not only are people playing the game, they are talking about it, reading about it and debating strategy. There are magazines devoted to poker, chat rooms, web sites, poker counselors, poker ‘boot-camps,’ hundreds of major poker tournaments are run every week with entry fees from a few cents (in online games) to $50,000. The Main Event at the World Series of Poker has attracted over 8,000 players in some years, each of whom ponied up $10,000 for a shot at immortality.

Click to read more ...

Stress in the Poker Wars

Poker is: (a) A stressful game (b) A game people play to relax (c) Both I choose ‘(c)’. Your answer will depend on a host of factors: how good a player you are, the stakes you play for and your own reasons for sitting down in the first place. Most poker players actually aren’t particularly skilled, but that’s okay. They are playing mainly for recreation. They play with friends in home games, they hit the local casino every once in a while, or fire up the old computer for an on-line game. The stakes are typically low and if they lose a couple of bucks, who even notices. If they win, cool. For these poker players, (b) is the answer and stress is largely absent.

Click to read more ...

The Slow Play

A friend of mine, let’s call him Zorro, is a frequent contributor to our poker chat room. Zorro signs off all his emails with the line “more money has been lost than won by slow playing big hands.” It’s a good line. I’ve read it now maybe a thousand times and am impressed by how firmly my friend clearly believes this is gospel.

Click to read more ...