Gambling News

Poker Network

If you play online poker for a living or if you are considering that as a vocation you should understand that despite its mostly solitary existence one of the keys to success is maintaining a Poker network . As with any job or career having an extensive list of colleague or contacts, in this case a poker network, can help you attain success quicker. You should seek outlets were you can make friends that are as devoted to your profession as you are. Not only, will it help you grow as a player it will also ground you and keep you emotionally healthier. Many online poker players fit the stereotype of being intellectual introverts. Nothing wrong with that, and online poker is a great way for people like that to have a career without having to network too much or comingling with the masses more than they’d like. However, there is a degree to which you can take it too far like becoming a shut-in or an online hermit. If you become completely detached from the real world you need to make time to get out of the house and interact with real people. If you still maintain some interaction with real world people you should also focus on developing a group of friends or peers online and form your own poker network. This can be done via the social networks, in the chat-box with players you respect or come to like, or on any of the many online forums, communities or message boards. Sure, there is a natural reticence or shyness that many players will have to overcome in building their poker network, but that is a good skill for all walks of life. You’ll also find that many of the people you approach share similar dispositions and reluctance to mingle like an extrovert. You’ll find that the initial contact may be a challenge but after that the reward is well worth the risk. Of course, the feel of rejection is high, probably more so with the personality type of an online poker player, but so is the fear of putting out a big turn bet bluff knowing you may have to make an even bigger one on the river. To become a successful poker player you’ll have to overcome both fears. A poker network allows you to discuss hands, strategy, and life skills. Your give and take will make it easier for all of you to grow as professionals. Understanding the rigidness of bankroll rules, and hearing cautionary tales from similar people undergoing similar life-experiences is invaluable. Not only that, your real world friends won’t be able to relate to your gambling travails as easily as your new friends will because your poker network consists of people living the same life. Any career is advanced with the help of others: even an online professional poker career. The draw to the game may be the same elements that causes a player to withdraw from developing such a poker network, but that is an easy hurdle to overcome. Let’s face it, most of the rejections will come in a digital form and that’s far easier to take than getting shot-down in real life. Also, the weeding out process kind of takes care of things for you. If a player you respect doesn’t respond to your email, then he probably wouldn’t have helped you out anyway. Obviously, you need to be on guard for the types that will befriend you to steal from you but that’s true in all aspects of life. You may never meet your poker network in real life, but you can certainly profit from building one electronically. AIMS, Skype, email, messenger, are all tools of communications that can be used while playing to build your poker network. Befriend or reach out to someone today, you’ll be glad you did tomorrow.

Implied odds are everything in no-limit hold’em

When you come to no limit hold’em from limit hold’em then it can be all too easy to have a pot odds mindset (also known as expressed odds). However in no limit hold’em then it is not the current pot odds that are important but how much you could potentially win and this is known as implied odds. Let us look at an example here to highlight what I mean. You open raise to $3.50 in NL100 full ring and the button and both blinds call you making the pot $14. You have the Jc-10c and the flop comes Ad-Kc-4s and the small blind bets $10 and the big blind calls.

There is now $34 in the pot and you just have an inside straight draw and nothing more. That is 11/1 against happening on the next card and your immediate pot odds are only 3.4/1 which is woefully short. There is also the possibility that the button will re-raise as well. However the button only called pre-flop and so is unlikely to take aggressive action here. Each player has a $200 stack and so should you hit your hand then you could be taking a lot of money off not one player but potentially two or three.

So your pot odds are poor but your implied odds could be huge. The button folds and the turn card is the Qc and you had called making the pot $44. The small blind bets $27 and the big blind calls making the pot $98. You decide to drop the hammer and you raise to $98. The small blind shoves while the big blind folds and you call. The end pot is $444 (less the rake) of which $244 is pure profit. The pay off in this instance is way above what your pot odds were on the flop when you called with the inside straight draw.

Folding on the flop and saving the $10 is not a bad play as you will miss in ten out of every eleven situations that you face here. However in no limit hold’em then you simply have to be prepared to risk money in the pursuit of big pots. Your entire series of results including your long term earn rate will be focused around the big pots that you play, the frequency of them and your success rate in them. The reason why many players shy away from making calls of this nature is that it increases the variance. However there are clear links between variance and earn rate and in order to increase your earn rate then you absolutely must take more calculated risks.

In fact it is only when you are prepared to accept risk do you really surge ahead with your poker earnings. This is all assuming of course that your game is strong enough to begin with. So remember that it is implied odds and not expressed odds that are king in no limit hold’em.

Last but not least, are you playing poker at a site full of fish? Check out the Texas Holdem poker tables at: https://www.bwin.com/texas-holdem-poker. The site is full of fish!

Price is everything in sports betting

Novice sports bettors seem transfixed with finding winners in my opinion however finding winners is illusory in nature. The basic idea is that you cannot go wrong identifying the winner. This is all well and good if your selection does indeed win but the fact of the matter is that you cannot be certain that what you have selected will win. If it was a certainty then there wouldn’t be any market for you to bet on. There is no greater proof to what I am saying here than the myriad of scams that frequent the internet these days from people offering systems that are based on strike rates. For those of you who are unaware then a strike rate is the ratio of winners to losers that you have. So if a betting system has a 50% strike rate then it has one winner for every loser. There are many systems out there that flaunt these sorts of strike rates but nearly all of them do not work. Firstly we will assume that the system seller is telling the truth to begin with. The psychology of it all is that many of these system sellers understand the mindset of the people who want to buy their systems. Your average punter wants winners on a regular basis. No average punter wants to work like the professional who may be enduring long losing runs in the pursuit of value. They want regular winners to soften the blow of losing money in the long term. Let us say that your typical system seller is selling a system that has a 50% strike rate. However to build confidence in the purchaser they offer short priced horses and competitors but the problem is with the average price. If the average price of this 50% of winners is say 1-2 then you would be risking $100 (assuming $1 bets) and your return would only be $75. You win $0.50 a total of fifty times which comes to $25 plus your stake back. So you lose $25 over 100 bets which is -$0.25 per bet. All of this is despite a strike rate of 50% which highlights my point. Getting a good strike rate is not really all that important if your average price does not reach a certain level. A punter who had a 10% strike rate could be making money if their selections that won were high priced. I have known professional punters who bet on golf tournaments have successful careers with strike rates of a mere 2%. Only having two winning bets out of every hundred is taxing mentally but when your winning bets are in the 100-1 to 200-1 category then you are certainly going to make money with a 2% strike rate. So this article highlights that price is everything in sports betting and also that strike rates without price levels means very little indeed and once novice punters realise this then they can eventually move on.