With millions of people playing online poker today the competition at the tables can be tough and successful poker players use any edge they can find to beat their opponents. Be it tells, betting patterns or whatever the case may be. Some amateurs feel that it only applies to live games though and not online play, but I am here to tell you otherwise. There are many ways to get an advantage against others in online poker: learning their strengths, what hands they bet on, how aggressive they bet, and many other things.

Readers may ask how it is possible to learn all this information about an online poker player. Well one of the old ways is by taking notes and saving them for further use. I have done my share of this and it works well. One of the things I had always liked about playing at Carbon Poker is the tool on the site that allows players to take notes on their enemies at the felt and just save it on the software. It’s a valuable tool that the site offers with no added cost.

That was all nice and dandy, but there are better tools out in today’s market that are far more sophisticated and valuable for the more serious poker player to use. One of the best that I have run across is Poker Table Ratings. This software offers all the tools that any poker player could ever dream of using online, and it is all legit. No collusion or cheating and no bots, nothing of the sort, all 100% legal to use.

Poker Table Ratings is a collection of reports and tools which are designed to help online poker players maximize their profits and saving players hours upon hours of time from doing research and taking notes. Clients will find all the following accurate up to the minute data:

• Real Time Player Research Tool – In-depth player stats, position analysis, player modeling, and opponent match ups, are just some of the many features unlocked with premium access.
• Hand & Session Replayer – Watch hand replays with stats on every player. Was that a call the player would normally make, or was he on tilt? Now you’ve got enhanced insight.
• Table Selector – Find the best tables, who’s sitting at them, their key stats, and stack sizes without ever opening your poker room.
• HUD’s – View of the tables you’re playing, with your opponents and their key stats listed while you play.
• Buddy List with Email Alerts – Keep track of all your favorite fish. You will never have to waste time looking for certain players again.
• A wide variety of other Interesting Reports.

Poker Table Ratings supports most all of the best online poker rooms:

• PokerStars
• Full Tilt
• Bodog
• Party
• Ongame Network
• Cereus Network
• iPoker Network
• Cake Poker Network ( DoylesRoom ) was added June 2010
• More sites are being added as fast as possible!

So if you are serious about having an edge and being a winning online poker player you should give this site a look. You can become a registered guest for free at Poker Table Ratings by just clicking here.

Bankroll management is a must to being a successful poker player. It’s one the first things I try to tell young beginners at poker to learn, and besides not playing while drunk , I really think it’s the most important thing to learn.

Proper bankroll management is when you play at certain limits to avoid losing all of your money due to a bad run of cards, and every poker player must expect from time to time for that to happen. This is what playing within your bankroll is all about.

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Whether you’re playing for fun or a living, a bankroll is necessary. Without it you’re just stuck playing in the freerolls that places like Carbon Poker offers or the play money tables at the online poker rooms… and what sorta fun is that ?

Some of the best Pro’s in the world will tell you to bring no more to than 5% of your bankroll to the table when playing poker and that’s very solid advice for anyone to use. I personally think this works out really well for buying into tournaments.

I’ll be honest about it though, I do like to stretch the limits a bit and play with 10% of my bankroll if it’s at the cash tables for any one session. The advantage to only bringing 10% (or the 5%)of your bankroll to the felt is that you can’t lose more if things go bad.

But whether it’s 5% or the 10% just remember to step down with your buy-ins if you go on a losing streak. Never keep playing above your bankroll and taking that gamble that you’ll win it all back. It’s always better to win it back slowly at smaller stakes than it is to lose it all in one big hand.

Here are some online poker tips for the beginner that should be helpful. Sometime it’s good for those of us that have been playing online for a while to remind ourselves of these tips as well !

* Always learn the software of the poker room you have chosen to play at before depositing any money. Every site offers play money games and you should spend a little time playing these in order to get used to how everything operates.

* Many beginners to online poker get distracted by doing too many things at once, like talking on the telephone, reading their e-mails, or playing too many tables at once. I even had one person tell me they knit and watch TV while playing ! I say let your opponents be the ones who make mistakes at the table because of them not paying attention, not you .

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* Always study your poker game to learn how to improve your results. One of the biggest online poker mistakes by many beginners is playing way too many hands. I advice beginners to start off with playing only strong hands until they become more experienced. You can learn to improve your game by reading poker books, web-sites and by joining some good online poker forums. Most folk at forums are always ready to give out some playing advice.

* Poker is a game which is meant to be fun, and to have fun you need to be sure that you are playing with money that you can afford to lose. Learn to manage your Poker Bankroll…..

Whether you are playing poker for fun or to make a living, a bankroll is necessary. Here at Carolina Gambler I advice you to always practice good bankroll management. That is the key to becoming a successful poker player that most every beginner to online poker fails to realize. At FullTilt Poker Academy, Poker Pro Chris Ferguson recommends playing with only 5% of your bankroll in any one cash table session and 2% when playing multi table tournaments. The big advantage to doing that is so you can’t lose more than that if things go bad. And if they do, move down a step with your buy -ins. It’s better to be a winning .25/.50 player than it is a losing 1.00/2.00 one !

So till next time, play smart and never bet more than you can afford to lose !

Every poker player in the world knows the name “Daniel Negreanu”, mostly due to the rising popularity of televised poker and of Daniel’s many appearances and impressive track record. Daniel Negreanu is a master of poker strategy and he developed his own play style over the years. Thanks technology. anyone you can learn directly from the master with Daniel Negreanu Poker training videos.

Small Ball Poker

The name of the play style used by Daniel Negreanu is “Small Ball Poker”, a play style he his credited for having created. That’s probably not accurate as many poker players before him have used similar poker strategy, but Daniel certainly deserves some credit for having defined and “formalized” it.

The concept behind Small Ball Poker is relatively simple. It’s about playing a wide range of starting hands, but without investing too much money in the pot. The idea involves playing not just premium hands, but pretty much any hand that is suited or connected, as long as the price to do so is relatively cheap. The Small ball poker style works best in cash games but can work in phases of poker tournaments.

How Daniel Negreanu Plays Small Ball Poker

Daniel’s strategy usually involves playing hands when he has position. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t play in early positions. If he has a good starting hand, he’ll play it obviously, but you’ll notice he plays a lot more hands when he’s in late positions.

Typically, the small ball poker players enters the pot with a small raise that is no more than 2.5 the big blinds, or simply calls the minimum bet. Beyond position, an important factor that Daniel Negreanu will take into considerations is the number of players in the hand. Pre flop, the goal is to see a flop without investing much. But the odds of making a hand, or the probability that no one else makes a hand, is greater when there’s fewer players involved in the hand. The style does invoke small raises on occasions, where the purpose is to discourage limpers from sticking around, but you should save your raises for when you are in position.

Table Image Matters

By frequently playing from good positions and by seeing many “cheap flops”, the small ball poker style creates an aggressive player image and this is critical to the strategy. The idea of playing suited or connected hands is that you will on occasions make some really big hands and when they happen, you want get as much money out of your opponents as possible. That’s why the aggressive image is important: opponents have to doubt your hand strength when you bet. If they are prone to see you as a bluffer, they will be prone to calling, and this is exactly how Daniel Negreanu manages to be successful. By playing many hands, his chip stack gradually decreases, but when he does make a big hand, he also reaps big benefits, making his chip stack increase in the long run.

Editors Note: This article is written by an online associate .

Do you want to improve your poker skills? Most poker players do, yet most fail to get results. This article explores different ways to learn and improve your poker skills and explains the pros and cons of each option.

Obviously, the first step for anyone is to understand how their poker game of choice works. Read about the rules online, in a book, or just watch a youtube video that explains it. Before considering any strategy, you should play the game for at least an hour or more, just to get the feel of it. Go to your favorite poker room and try it out with play money. The goal is not to win, it’s just to get comfortable with the game mechanics.

Now that you understand the mechanics of the game, focus on developing a specific skill. Trying to do everything at once doesn’t work. Things you could focus on include:

1. Table position concepts
2. Table image concepts
3. Reading the board cards (in games like Texas Holdem)
4. Betting
5. Reading opponents
6. Bluffing

In fact, it is recommended you learn the topics in this order. You can’t read opponents effectively if you don’t understand table image and betting. So how can you go about learning things relating to these general topics?

1. Read poker article online
2. Read a book (Daniel Negreanu wrote several good ones)
3. Watch videos
4. Get a poker mentor/ Join a poker school
5. Watch other players play – online or on TV
6. Join a discussion forum and ask questions
7. Join a poker league
8. Play regularly

To become a good poker player there are plenty of things you can do, but there is one thing you MUST do: play and gain experience. The problem with reading a book is no one can tell you if you truly “got it”. If you misinterpret a concept, you’ll apply it incorrectly in the real world. By attempting to put the theory in practice, that is where you’ll learn. The same goes with poker articles.

Poker schools and mentors are great, but they cost money. There are some good ones, and some not so good ones. Joining a school means you have access to a live person. It’s not just you watching videos and learning on your own, it’s getting an observer to coach you and give you personalized attention. Again, this is beneficial, but not cheap.

Watching videos is certainly less boring than ready dry content, and if the poker training video is well done, it will be much easier to “get”. You’ll learn by seeing actual examples shown in the poker training videos. In fact, you can learn poker strategy directly from Daniel Negreanu and other poker pros. Check out the Daniel Negreanu Poker Training program, it’s quite good. Of course, quality comes at a price and the program isn’t free but you can learn a lot in no time. About 50 new poker training videos are added each month so.

Watching other players can be a great way to learn. One thing you can do is fire go to your favorite poker rooms join a table not as a player but as an observer. Try to identify the table image of all the players. Try to anticipate how a particular player will act before he does, and try to identify patterns. An example of a pattern can be related to how a poker player will act in certain table positiosn, like the button. Some people always raise on the button. Some always call. Poker is a game of patterns and humans are creatures of habits so the two go hand in hand.

Discussions forums can be good or bad. It’s great to have the chance to ask someone what they think about a poker topic, but you don’t really know who you’re dealing with most of the time and you might just end up getting bad advice.

The last point was about playing regularly. Truly the best way to learn is to play. Strategy is important, but there’s only so much you can learn by reading and talking to people. At some point, you have to sit down behind a stack of chips and put those concepts into practice. Learning poker strategy isn’t really that hard to do. The challenge lies in knowing when and how to apply strategy. This is because poker strategy is contextual. The best poker strategists are those who can accurately assess their environment, and react accordingly. That only comes with experience.

The other night at one of the home games I had a feller that was asking me a lot of questions about online poker. He wanted to know what games I think are the easiest to earn money at. My answer to that is very simple, in my opinion the sit-n-go, which are also known as single table tourneys are by far the easiest way to build up a bankroll.

For the player that is new to online poker I recommend starting off with a site that has a good sign up bonus to work with as they are playing the sit-n-goes (SNG). For a while I made most all my money playing them at PDC Poker ( use coupon code “UPTO600″ to earn a 100% bonus on deposits up to $600. You also receive 14 days entry to the daily $500 freeroll ) . I would sit down and play for a few hours each evening and slowly build up my bankroll at the site. Usually I would play till I would not finish in the money (normally about the 5th or 6th game) and then quit for the afternoon. The whole time while playing I would not only earn money from the game, but would be making money with the 100% matching bonus too.

There are many factors to consider when playing a sit-n-go, but some of my advice includes doing the following;

1. My first bit of advice is to get experience at the lower limit SNG games before you even think of moving up to higher limits.

2. Play tight and aggressive in the early stage of the game. In sit-n-goes most of the money is made in the late stages of the game. I have found that you can actually coast your way to the final 3 by playing hardly any hands at all, and just let the other players bust each other out.

3. During the early stages of the tourney, watch and learn your opponents’ betting patterns. This goes for multi table tournaments (mtt’s) as well !

4. In the middle and late stages of the game change up your game a bit. Remember that the value of starting hands like A-10 offsuit and K-10 offsuit along with others are fairly weak during the early stages of the game, but they rapidly increase value as there are fewer people in the game. Adjust your play accordingly.

5. After about 4 people have been eliminated you should start to play more hands and become more aggressive, but play smart. Knowing when to fold’em greatly increases your odds of making the money !

6. Your goal should always be to make the final three. After that, you can become super aggressive with any good hands that you may have.

So good luck at the felt and remember, always play within your bankroll.

I’ve had folk tell me that they would love to get paid to play poker or to be a prop player and I tell them that it’s really a fairly simple thing to do online. The first thing to do is to find a reputable poker room that offers you deposit bonuses or a percentage of your poker rake back that are trustworthy, and here at Carolina Gambler you find nothing but reliable and trustworthy online poker rooms that are also friendly to the American Player.

Some may ask, what is poker rake ? Poker rake is a commission fee charged by the poker rooms (the house) it’s how they make their profit. Players do not play against the house, but against other poker players, so in order to make money the poker room takes rake from every hand played, which is just a small percentage of the pot. It comes down to being the cost of playing poker and is money that you never see again unless you are getting what those players that are in the loop know as rakeback. Regular poker players can play up to thousands of hands in a month and the rake does add up to right fair amount of money.

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Players can earn quite a bit of free money with deposit bonuses, but if you are the type player that likes to remain loyal to a particular room and play for long runs at a time, getting poker rakeback is just simply the way to go . Whether you lose or win at poker, the amount you gain from rakeback will quickly exceed any amount you gain from some sign up poker bonus if you continue to play with a high rake back program.

Some rooms like Carbon Poker even pay you 35% of your rake back daily, while others like DoylesRoom will give you 27% rakeback !

So if you want to get paid while playing poker and be like the props, the solution is simple. Play where you can get a sizable deposit bonus, or even better a percentage of your poker rake back ! A note to online players though, you do need to have a completely new account at most any online poker rooms in order to get a percentage of your rake back.

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Creating a table image when playing poker is easier than most beginners to online poker would think. It’s one of the “tools” that will benefit you at the tables when grinding away, or in the tournaments as well if used properly. Before we go any further lets find out what type of player you are.

Loose/Aggressive - If you play loose/aggressive you are the type of player that’s not afraid to make big bets or raises, and will re-raise others quite often. Being a loose/aggressive also means that you don’t need to be holding premium cards in order to take a shot at taking huge pots.

Loose/Passive - This is a style that most players really don’t want to be. You’ll know if you are a loose/passive player when you stay past the flop too often and waste money by betting past the turn or river with second rate cards, and don’t raise or re-raise folk when holding strong cards.

Tight/Aggressive - There are plenty of poker players that fit this style of play and do enjoy some success. You are this player if you fold before the flop quite often and only bet past the turn or river when holding great hands. The only problem with this style of play is that other players can and will steal your blinds a lot when you’re not holding the nuts.

Tight/Passive - This style of play isn’t as non-profitable as loose/passive, but it’s not the best either. This player will fold before the flop quite often, wait for big hands to play past the flop, and does not take advantage of his big hands by making raises. Much like the loose/passive style, it’s best to move away from being a tight/passive player if you want to make money with poker in the long run.

Setting the Image

Now that you know what type of poker player you are, we need to decide which image you want others to see at the felt. Loose/aggressive is a great category to be in since many of the best cash game players in the world play loose and aggressive, but my opinion is that you want others to think you are the tight/aggressive type.

Many newcomers to online poker may wonder how this may be possible. The answer to that is by choosing the right times to show your hole cards. That is one of the features I really like at Carbon Poker. You can show either one or both hole cards at this online poker room. Besides PDC Poker, I can’t think of another online room that lets me do this.

Every so often I’ll show that big hand pre-flop if everyone has folded to my raise just to let them see I was raising with a monster hand. You want others to “see” you only raise with big hands. This will improve your overall table image and gain that respect from opponents. Your future raises will be called carefully and anyone looking to re-raise will remember your style of play and might think twice. This will set up that tight image and allow you to play and even pull off the big bluff with the smaller hands at times.

Just remember to always play both the small and big hands the same way and be cautious, as the more advanced poker players can pick up on your style and make the necessary adjustments.

It makes you groan when you hear about it. You hope that you never have to deal with it by making good general decisions. You may even have failed it in your first year at college and decided then and there that you wouldn’t have anything more to do with it, but the mathematics that online poker strategy requires is quite easy in comparison to all of these other things. If you can do simple arithmetic like adding, subtracting, dividing and multiplying then you are going to be good to go as far as the mathematics of poker strategy are concerned. In particular, division and percentages are important because of the scenarios outlined below.

Probability

The first element of mathematics in poker that you need to know for poker strategy is probability. Say for example that you are in a 10-handed poker game of Texas Hold‘Em and you need to know the likelihood of rivering a three of a kind if you already have a pair. Well, you can figure this out through basic probability. You know six of the cards in the 52-card deck, leaving 46 of the unknown cards (you
need to count all unknown cards including the cards of your opponents because one of the two remaining cards of that rank is just as likely to be one of those cards as it is to still be in the deck). Since there are 46 cards left and two cards of your rank left, you know the chances of getting a third card of your rank on the first card are 1 in 23. This means that the odds against you getting your third card of the same rank on the river are 22 to 1.

Pot Odds

The second element of mathematics to know in poker strategy is pot odds. Pot odds are simply the odds that the pot is laying you to call. If there is $30 in the pot and you need to call a bet of $5 to see the next card, then the pot odds are 6 to 1. It is as simple as that. You can also expand pot odds to include implied odds, which take into account what will happen on the next card. If you are in a $2/$5 limit game against a single opponent and you are facing $30 to $5 (or 6 to 1) pot odds on the turn but think that you can get another bet out of your opponent if you hit your winning hand on the river, you can change those pot odds of 30 to 5 to implied odds of 35 to 5 and factor in that extra bet that you think you would win. This would make the final odds in the calculation 7 to 1 as opposed to 6 to 1.

Putting Them Together

Compare the odds against you hitting your hand to the pot odds and if the latter is better than the former, you are mathematically good to call. If you are 4 to 1 against making your hand on the river but are being laid pot odds of 6 to 1, calling is the mathematically correct thing to do because it has a positive expected value.