The Law of Attraction - Poker Style

Let's take a different look at an approach to the game of poker. Many people are familiar with the book titled "The Secret", it was based on a theory from Abraham Hicks, which he called "Law of Attraction". Basically, this states that if you think positive, then positive things will happen. If you have a negative outlook, bad things will happen. Like attracts like. This theory can get a little out of control. Some state if you constantly think about money, thousands will come in the mail one day. I personally look at it like this: We shouldn't be thinking about things we want; it should be more about feeling good and maintaining a positive outlook. As it is related to poker, what sounds or feels good may not actually be the best way to make decisions while playing poker. If someone has that "good feeling", they tend to take chances outside of playing the appropriate odds, or they might play outside their bankroll. It begins to distort thinking and can develop into bad habits. Obviously, feeling good plays a great roll in confidence. When you play with a sense of self-assurance you are will to approach the game differently. Your energy level, and focus is at a whole different level. If you play within your bankroll it is much easier to take out the emotions involved in the game. When you combine emotions with poker it becomes -EV on the other hand if you can exploit your opponents emotions that becomes +EV. Most online players that play will either lose or simply break even in the long run. Attitude is one aspect of the game that keeps players on a negative downswing. If you start a session with a negative attitude it will effect your game and decisions. In all honesty, this is has the same effects on normal life. If you approach people with a negative attitude you will be treated differently. You must always try to keep your head up and your confidence strong. This is why many of us have found a love for the game of poker. It is really isn't always about the money, it can be more about the dopamine that is released into your brain when you win a game, or a big hand. The key to successful poker is to understand the basics of the game, maintain a positive attitude, and exude confidence. Start each session as a new beginning. Don't focus on bad beats or losses. It will only manifest into a longer downswing and a negative outlook on the game.

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How to Spot and Exploit Weakness In Poker Cash Games

Aggression in your betting is an important component of any winning poker strategy. Being the aggressor means you have two ways of winning the pot - either showing down the best hand or having your opponent fold. The real key to developing a winning cash game poker strategy is the use of selective aggression. Knowing when an opponent is weak will help you to get this right. This article looks at both obvious and disguised weakness from opponents. Before we move on to the details there are two important factors to mention here. Firstly watch out for you very skilled opponents, they will be aware of how their actions are perceived and will try to mix up their play to deceive you. Secondly paying attention to the table, the betting patterns of all opponents and how different players react to different flops is important here. For example there is no point trying to push an opponent who always calls off of a 'weak' holding - he will call you anyway!! Obvious weakness is the scenario where an opponent makes no attempt to show any strength. The first example of this is a pre-flop limp. Any opponent who limps from one of the later positions at the table when first to enter a pot is showing weakness. Re-raising from a later position will often take the pot down immediately. When called you will usually have position on the limper after the flop - when your opponent checks to you fire another bet to take the larger pot there. If called a second time you must slow down of course, however this works so many times that the rare scenario in which you are forced to fold will be more than made up for by the times you take down the pot without resistance. Players who raise from stealing positions may also be weak. If your opponent raises the button when ever they are folded to you do not need to give them credit for a good hand. A healthy re-raise from the big blind will often take the pot pre flop. Remember to ensure that your opponent is capable of making the fold - no point bluffing a calling station here! Many players who call raises pre flop will lead into the original raiser when the flop comes with a small bet. This is called the weak-lead and is usually a sign of a draw or vulnerable holding such as bottom pair. Firing a large raise will often take the pot down immediately in this situation. This is opponent specific - some players will make this same move when strong here so it pays to be aware of your opponents previous betting patterns. Likewise some players bet very strongly from out of position after calling a pre-flop raise. Here the texture of the flop is a significant factor. If there are flushes or straights draws available then your opponent may be protecting a strong but vulnerable hand such as an over pair. If the flop is 'rags' the strong lead is more likely to be a weaker holding. How to react here will depend on your opponent, however a strong raise will usually take the pot in this scenario.

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How To Easily Incorporate Tells Into Your Game

Utilising poker tells is an advanced poker strategy that most people don't understand. I'm going to explain this in an easy to learn manner. Now I am going to reveal an advanced poker strategy trick on how to pick up on and identify Holdem tells. Holdem tells are the little things other players do to give away what cards they have, or what actions they are going to do. It's advisable to incorporate poker tells into your advanced poker strategy because this is a crucial area of any good Holdem poker strategy. Whether you are playing a full table or heads up Holdem you need to be able to have some idea of how to read another player to get some more info out of them. Advanced Poker Strategy - Types Of Poker Tells There are two main types of Holdem tells. 1) Involuntary. These are actions and tells that the opponent doesn't realise he is doing 2) Voluntary. These are actions and tells that the opponent is doing on purpose to try to throw you off. Your advanced poker strategy should be built around the more useful one: Advanced Poker Strategy - Involuntary Tells Involuntary tells can consist of any number of things which may give away what cards the opponent likely has and how they are playing. There is an extremely long list so I'll go over the main ones. - Facial Expressions Facial expressions can consist of anything from forehead to chin wrinkling, eye movements, squinting and widening eyes, concentration expressions to name a few. The main point about facial expressions is many times people don't realise they are doing them. We express almost every single emotion and thought that goes through out heads on our faces, and 99% of the time we have no idea we are doing it. That's why learning how to read peoples faces is one of my favourite Texas Holdem lessons. If you want to learn more, go and research FACS (Facial Action Coding System). - Body Movements and Posture The next most major area is a participants body movements and posture. Are they leaning forward or relaxed back? Are their arms crossed, open, fists clenched, arms shaking? Do they shrug their shoulders down or are they open? Body movements are also a major area where people do them and don't actually know. The brain will automatically put the body into the best position for a particular job. So if someone feels they are being attacked and need to defend the body will cross itself (arms and legs) in an effort to "block" the attacks. This is just one example, there are a million more. Like when you aren't confident you will slump your shoulders and move/look towards the floor. If you are confident you open up and move/look up. If you are nervous you will sweat or shake. Anger is usually a fist and tension throughout the body. If you want to learn more, go and research body language. Incorporate Holdem Tells Into Your Advanced Poker Strategy Today Being able to identify and read the different Holdem tells is crucial to any solid advanced poker strategy. The extra information you can get from a player just from watching them careful can make all the difference to your decisions and outcomes of the game. If I had a dollar for every time I saw something and it helped me win...

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Texas Holdem Poker Strategy on Bet Sizing

Texas Holdem Poker strategies are often the talking point for most Poker fans as your game can enhance quite dramatically with better planning and strategical. Tristan Wade is often seen as the straight forward player with easy strategies that can work for anyone. When not playing Poker, Wade teaches in the Deepstacks University, and his specialization is "Strategic Management". Let's see some interesting ideas and strategies being presented by Tristan Wade about Texas Holdem Poker. Most Common Mistakes The most common mistake in Bet sizing according to him is the making of Preflop. This problem is often due to the fact that the players exceed the limit from two to four bets. Once in blind range above that their bets are inconsistent. This leads to flop, and the obvious reason of that is that they are not aware of the Pot size. The players often make the mistake in judging the pot size and their bets quite easily too. What are Some Factors of Preflop? The two most important factors in this matter are the stake size and blind level. Every player must try to play with the 100 deep blinds in back of his mind. The 3x is often the best strategy for blind Preflop. The stakes are important and one should not keep them shallow. Incase of shallow stakes one should try to keep the bets up to 2.5 only. Similarly in the antes the blind bets need to stay under 2.5 as well. The other factors in this game that can influence include the table size and the players also. What is Preflop Strategy for Big Blind? The big blind can be huge factor, and if not understood that can out play you easily. To defend from the big blind the good players should find a path in which they reduce their loss. This is vital especially when the bet is on the big blind side. The idea is to remain in the game till you have better hand and win back all the chips too. Same approach can work for the other players also. What are Three Bet Size Strategies? The three bet size is a situation where you can apply different approaches too. Different players use different approaches for this, and each works to some extent. One approach is to having small Preflop while you fold. If you are playing live, the one thing you can do is to keep the bet size up to four at most. The other option can be to increase from 3x but this might depend upon the style of player too.

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The Importance of Poker Bonus

The craze for online poker is definitely on the rise. Many new players who have never played poker in their lifetime are now trying to test their skills on various online poker sites. Hence, we can see new poker sites that have emerged successfully. Many poker experts claim that the best thing about poker site is that it allows you to play your game from wherever you want. You can sit comfortably in your home or take a break at work to enjoy some cool poker games on the web. However, many poker players feel that the best part about these sites is that they provide poker bonus. When you are playing poker games in a real casino you never get any bonus, but you do get a poker bonus when you are playing poker games on the internet. There are different poker bonuses and they are really important to attract more players on the website. Poker bonus can attract many poker players from all over the world, and therefore these websites come up with various poker bonuses that can help them to get more players. These bonuses are really important to uplift the confidence of the players because they get extra money that they can gamble and try to win some more money out of it. Most online poker and casino websites have welcome bonus for all those players who register and transfer their funds for the first time to their account. This means that when a new registered member transfers $100 in their account, the bankroll shows up as $200 straightaway. This really adds to the self confidence of the player because the player can now first gamble with the bonus money rather than using their own money. However, players can only use that bonus money to gamble on the website and they cannot withdraw that money because it is a bonus and not a winning. Apart from that, there are reload bonuses available that encourages players to keep playing more and add little amount of money every time they run out of cash. This definitely helps the players as well as the poker website to get more funds that can be used for jackpots. Some of the new poker sites have poker bonus without deposit option. These websites are rare, but they allow players to get registered and get instant poker bonus. The players get additional welcome bonus when they transfer funds from their account for the first time.

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First Depositors' Freeroll

Your $4,500 welcome to 888.com! From the moment you make your first deposit as a new 888.com member, you're already in with a chance to boost your bankroll. Not only do we start you off with a huge Welcome Bonus but by making your first deposit at 888.com you'll score a free seat to seven daily $500 Depositors' Freerolls*, where a share of $3,500 is yours for the taking. No bonuses to wager, no points to accrue first. Just make your first deposit and a share of $3,500 could be yours for the ride home. And you'll also have a share of $1,000 waiting for you in the free-and-exclusive-to-depositors $1,000 Depositors' Freeroll. If it's all a bit too much to take in, that's because it is! It's the best new member offer on the poker circuit so let's go over it one more time: Make your first 888.com deposit and get: Free entry to seven $500 First Depositors' Freerolls - share in $3,500 in cash! Free entry to $1,000 Depositors Freeroll - share in $1,000 cash! PLUS, 100% Welcome Bonus up to $400 With so much to start off with, go on tiger, it's time to deposit now. *Entry to seven ‘$500 Depositors’ Freerolls’ will be granted within 48 hours of making your first deposit, excluding weekends.

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Fold Your Way to Winning Online Poker

It turns out that the #1 cause of losing in poker is simply not folding. Therefore; the first, most basic, skill in poker is folding. If you said, "no duh, yea I know that" then go let's see if you do. The purpose of this article is to begin to teach you how to be nothing more than a winning poker player. What's a "winning poker player"? It's a player who can make a profit consistently. Any idiot can win at poker (for a short while), but that's not the same as being a "winning poker player". At the end of the week the "winning poker player" has made money. At the end of the month they have made money. The difference is that a "winning poker player" doesn't crash and burn. This article teaches the key skill of folding. Folding is the most overlooked skill by the majority of players. They can't fold. They won't fold. They find reasons to play when they should be finding reasons to fold. They think and then re-think, they try to read minds. They play pure position plays and think they can steal pots after the flop with any two cards. They think folding will make them look weak in the eyes of their opponents. It deflates their ego. They think they are poker geniuses. They are actually action junkies. These guys are going to be your new best friends, because they are going to make your mortgage payments for you. The main reason people don't fold is because they want to play. They see each poker "session" as a thing that has a start and a finish. If they are going to play for only one hour then they want to play some hands during that hour. YOU, on the other hand, are going to understand that your poker career is One Big Never Ending Poker Session. If you sit down to play for an hour and you don't have any situations, cards and scenarios where you should play, then you won't play. You will fold for an hour, turn off the computer and know you did your job!! If you want to play a game for fun, play Monopoly. If you want to play winning poker then it's time to get a pen. Get a pen and a pad of paper. On the top write "I ALWAYS FOLD..." then write the following. You have to write this out. Reading it is pointless. If you really want to burn it into your brain then you can write the list twice. As you write each hand THINK about it. If you decide you aren't going to ALWAYS fold some particular hand then you better have a fantastic reason why, and you better be able to create a strategy for playing that hand in about 15 different scenarios. Otherwise, just convince yourself that you will always fold it for the next couple months - while you're becoming a winning player. Then, if you want, you can add it back into your starting hands with purpose and with a plan of action for the hand. I always fold T8. I always fold J8. Now keep writing "I always fold" for the rest of this list. It's not every hand in poker, but it's enough for what we're doing right now. 's' means Suited, 'x' means "any numeric card". So KQs means "King Queen Suited" and Ax means "Ace plus any numeric card". Write "I always fold" for each of the following combination: Q9, A9, 74s, J7s, 85s 96s, K9, 54, 65, 76, 87, 32s, 42s, 43s, 53s, Q8s, T7s, Kxs, 64s, 98, t9, j9, 75s, j8s, k9s, 54s, QT, KT, 86s, AT, 65S, Axs, 97s 76s, JT, T8s, Q9s, 87, KTs, J9s, 98s, QTs, T9s, ATs, JTs That's your list of unplayable cards. UNPLAYABLE, any position, any situation, the only time you will be playing these cards is if you post the big blind and check into a hand with them. Otherwise you're folding. You are folding on the small blind, you are folding on the button, you are folding with multiple limpers, raised pots, unraised pots, etc. Before we continue though, I must state something that SHOULD be glaringly obvious to you, but might not be. When you check into a flop from the big blind with one of your "I fold" hands, it's extremely important that you do not get drawn into playing your cards unless you really strike it lucky on the flop. Let's say that you hold 83 as the big blind and it comes round to you unraised, so you check and get to see the flop for no extra cash, "free" if you like. The flop comes 864. You have top pair! You are DONE with this hand. Fold it. Don't bet it. Don't call with it. Just let it go. In these instances your hand is no good. You are probably beaten already. If you aren't beaten already, it's highly likely you will be before the hand is finished. Very occasionally you will flop a monster - with your 83 big blind you could see a flop of 883, K33, or even 888 as some examples. It does happen - but these will be in the minority, and remembering this will keep you out of a whole lot of trouble. Just because you got to see the flop for free doesn't mean it won't cost you dearly if you play your mediocre flopped hand above its real value. We will cover this more in detail when we talk about playing the blinds. Did you find that you said, "No way, I'm not folding this in 'whatever' situation"? How about TJ or ATs? There is an excellent chance that the list of hands you are always going to fold preflop is more than you can accept. That's OK! Just stop reading. This system of making consistent profits playing poker can be... in a word... boring. The fact that it works consistently is really secondary. Action junkies and people who play poker to prove how "smart" they are will have serious issues with the remainder of this article. Finding more and more hands to play, and more reasons to play them make good players bad, bad players worse, and sucky players out of everyone. Please, for the love of all that is pure and holy understand this one thing. All the books you read and all the advice you got from people who read those books are based on the same antiquated concept of playing ONE table LIVE. That means that you are physically sitting at a table and only one table since there's only one of you. The cards are being shuffled; you're seeing maybe 35 hands per hour - if not less. You are playing the maximum stakes for your bankroll, because that's what you should do if you are single table, live playing. The winning system in this article was created for a modern, multi-table, online style of play. Instead of playing one table at $2/$4, you're playing 4 tables of $.5/$1. Instead of seeing 35 hands per hour or less, you're seeing about 200 hands per hour. Instead of playing "whatever table is available" you are selecting only the best tables for playing your game, tables with huge pots and tons of passive preflop callers. Do you see what I'm saying? The hands that you think you want to play preflop might be right for some other situation. But we're talking about a game where you can sit and play 4-5 tables at a time for hours on end and make money. This is a game that's designed for the 21st century online poker reality. Yes, it is still possible to play poker online for profits from the U.S.! Now, for whatever hands you have reservations about... Like ATs... write 25 times. "I always fold" and the hand. Each hand 25 times. Each time reminding yourself that you are creating a new game, a disciplined game, a money making game that will bring you hundreds of thousands of dollars over your poker career, a game that's going to make you into a poker monster. Done? If you didn't do this exercise and you think you're ready to go to the next section, then do me a favor. Go to the bathroom, remove the roll of toilet paper, and place a print-out of this article on the spool. You might as well put it to use, because you're not using it to learn how to play winning online poker. Do the damn exercise before you move on, please. It'll only take an hour, unless you're writing with your feet. If you learn how to fold and you stop falling in love with every two cards you see, then you will be ahead of most online poker players. It's good to be an optimist! It's good to see potential in the future. However, when you do that with too many starting hands in poker then you end up slowly losing whatever money you actually won with your good hands. See, becoming a consistent winning poker player isn't just about winning with good hands - any idiot can win with a good hand. Becoming a consistent winning online poker player is also about HOLDING ONTO your MONEY! You cannot hold onto your money when you play too many starting hands in poker. I'm not saying that you cannot win hands with the cards that are in the "I always fold" list. You can! However, I'm trying to help you create a laser-focused game that will consistently make a profit with lower risk of leaking away you wins. You don't have to play so few hands. But if you aren't going to try this system then why read the article at all? Poker is fun! All types of poker. This is a very tight style. Try it! See what happens. If you fold all these hands, then what hands can you play? All pocket pairs, AK, AQ, AJ, KQ, KJ, and QJ. THAT'S IT! 19 preflop hands! How can you win by playing only these 19 hands preflop? If you play them correctly then it's pretty much impossible to lose!!

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