Washington D.C. Legalizes Online Poker

The issue of legalizing online poker in the US has been the source of several long standing debates. Several states in the US have been trying to legalize it in the hopes of generating bigger revenue. Washington D.C. recently became the first US State to pass a law allowing people to wager on online poker. This law was passed on the 7th of April 2011 without any objection from Congress. The bill has been titled the Lottery Modernization Act of 2010 and has made Columbia in Washington D.C the first US district and State to incorporate an online gaming law that allows internet gambling.

The Lottery Modernization Act of 2010 passed with a few amendments that include a change in the definition of the term ‘lotteries.’ The bill stipulates that it only includes games of chance as well as the skill-based game of poker. This will allow Intralot, a lottery provider in Washington D.C. to offer poker over the web to players within the district. The bill also allows the operation of a fantasy sports site for players.

This law has been much debated and has gained considerable attention and importance over the years and it has been long awaited to see which state would implement a law permitting internet gambling first. Now that Washington D.C. has done it, it is expected that others will follow.

However, it will take some time for the poker sites to be up and functional within the district. Regulations outlining the exact terms of play have to be stated by the Washington D.C. municipal government and these terms should ensure that the games comply with the federal law. Also, new regulations with regards to online gaming have to be drafted and passed through a public comment period.

When the potential benefit of offering online gaming was realized, this step to introduce online gaming was taken up. Even for the small Washington D.C. market it is expected that the intra-district internet poker sector will be able to generate $13 million for the district initially. This was predicted by council member, Michael Brown, who had proposed the bill.

While the bill is not exactly what the American players were hoping for, it looks as if it is headed in the right direction. Other jurisdictions would do well to test and see how much intrastate online revenue can be generated and what this would mean for the district. Passing this bill is a significant note to subtly state that the Congress is now not strictly opposing iGaming and is softening up to the idea.

Poker Books

Acquiring and reading poker books is a great way to learn this great game. There are many different kinds of books that you can buy, under many different types of themes. It all depends on your level of game play or your learning habits, and what kind of poker game you want to try. There are many different variations of poker that you can learn, and there are many different poker books for each. Here are a few examples of poker variations that you can read about when you want to learn poker or want to be better at it:

•Texas Hold em – This has become, by far, the most popular variant of poker, all thanks to TV documentation of tournaments by the world’s greatest poker players. For beginners, it is highly recommended that you buy poker books for this kind of poker first and foremost. Learning Texas Hold Em poker is still the best way to learn poker in general, as well as be able to play other more complicated kinds of poker. As can be expected, there are many poker books that have been written about Texas Hold Em. A great example would be Harrington on Hold ’em Expert Strategy for No Limit Tournaments, Vol. 1: Strategic Play. Don Harrington, the author, has been playing poker professionally since the early 80s, and is now considered as one of the foremost experts when it comes to poker books. If you want to learn poker, then learning Don Harrington is one of the best things you can do.

•Omaha poker books – In the Omaha variant of poker, you are given four cards in order to make a hand. Omaha is played in two different formats: high and high/low. In the high/low format, the highest hand at the table will split the pot with the lowest hand in the table, so using one of two strategies will be beneficial to the players. The high format is when the pot all goes to the person with the highest hand at the table. Omaha may be a little bit too complicated for beginners who want to learn poker, so it is recommended that you read poker books about Omaha when you have become more familiar with the general rules of poker. A great example of a book about Omaha poker is Championship Omaha by T.J. Cloutier and Tom McEvoy, who are two of the best Omaha players in the world. In this book, you will find amazing and winning strategies that they use, as well as everything you need to know to start out with and get better at Omaha poker.

•7-card stud – This kind of poker was a lot more popular before Texas Hold Em took the world by storm. Today, a lot of people have a hard time trying to learn this style when they try to learn poker because Hold Em is so radically different from the 7-card stud. If you want to learn this style, then buying books that are written by people who have been playing poker for a long time is the best way to go. This is because these are the people that were playing 7-card stud when it was still the most popular poker variant. A great example of this would be How to Beat Low Limit 7 Card Stud Poker by Paul Kammen. This book contains a lot of tips on how to start off when you are just learning, as well as strategy tips on how to get better as you go along. For more advanced players who are looking for poker books on this variant, you can try to read Seven Card Stud For Advanced Players by David Slanksy.

•Draw poker games – Draw poker is probably the most basic type of poker there is, and a lot of people learn this type and never really move on to the poker variants used in tournaments. If you are interested to learn poker but are not really all the interested in becoming really, really good, then you can get poker books on this kind of poker. Because it is really basic, you can opt to get some free online books on this kind of poker, and there are also a lot of forums and other websites of the like that teach people how to play this kind of poker.Other than buying poker books according to what kind of poker you want to learn, there are also a lot of books that are categorized by what level you are already in. For beginners, there are those that are more general when it comes to subject matters. A great example of this would be Doyle Brunson’s Super System: A Course in Power Poker. First published in the 70s, this book has provided the world with decades of expertise, so you can be sure that you will learn everything you need to know about poker in general with this book.

For players that are in the middle ground, reading poker books is a great way for you to be able to move onto becoming an advanced player. Fortunately, there are a lot of poker books online for people of this expertise level. Of course, there is more information in books that you can buy, but if you are looking for information that is more streamlined, such as certain strategies that you want to learn, or a certain questions that you need answered, then online poker books are the way to go for you. Not only are they easier to acquire, but a lot of them are free.

Remember, the best way to become really good at poker is to keep playing and to gather information through experience. But with that being said, everyone will certainly benefit from reading books about poker. This is because a lot of the experienced players of the field have chosen to put down their own experiences and the things that they have learned in these books. That way, not only can you learn from your experiences, you can learn from the experiences of the masters as well. Here’s to you, Texas Dolly!

Poker Pot Odds

When I began playing poker, I used to be a regular calling station and used to feel pretty depressed when I lost a hand with good hole cards. I called every such hand a bad beat, and it took me a while to realize that I was playing it all wrong. I wasn’t thinking. Poker is a skill game, and it requires a lot of thinking; and outthinking. It usually doesn’t work if you are calling everything that comes your way, and it takes you a while to learn that there is no shame in folding. It is then I learned about poker odds. Robert Border, my friend and colleague, later refined the technique for me and my game improved immensely.

Well, some poker players depend on bluffing their way to victory, while others try to guess what is in your hand. If you want a better strategy in your poker arsenal, you can utilize the power of mathematics to get an upper hand, this is what I learned the smart way. Calculating, counting and thinking about numbers in your head during a high tension game might seem quite daunting, but employing a “poker odds tactic” is actually pretty easy to learn, the only thing is that it may take some time to get used to. There are a number of very complicated formulae available for you to learn and try out, but as long as you comprehend the basic concept of poker pot odds, these techniques would be a lot easier to learn. Here are a few are poker odds tips that I tried to put in layman terms so that it would be pretty easiest to understand. A few minutes of reading them can give you a lifetime of triumphant poker battles, trust me.

Poker odds utilize the odds of winning when you are on a drawing hand. Its main purpose is to aid you in deciding of whether to call or not to call, rather than be a reckless calling station. This technique comes in handy when you are on a straight draw or a flush. Your decision in poker odds will be based on the probability of completing your hand, along with your bet and the pot size. There are two ways to utilize poker odds. The more complex way is the ratio method, while the other simpler way is called the percentage method.

The Ratio Method

For example, consider the situation of getting a flush in a game of Texas Holdem Poker. You have two cards of the same suit in your hand, and you fortunately discover two cards of the same suit on the flop as well. The difficult question is should you call or should you fold to a sizable bet? Books and forums often recommend the ratio method to calculate poker pot odds. So you have two cards of the same suit on your hand, and there are three cards on the flop, two of which have the same suit as your hand as well; what you need to do is to find out how likely it is for you to get a fifth card of the same suit on the turn or the river in order to successfully complete a flush. There are five cards in the table that you know of including your two hand cards, and the three cards on the flop. This leaves you with 47 cards on the deck that you absolutely don’t know anything about. In that deck of 47, 9 cards can complete your flop, while the other 38 will not. If we put that into a ratio: 38:9, or simplified 4:1. This is what you call the card odds. Now, compare the card odds with the pot odds. In order to calculate the pot odds, you should delve into the size of the pot. If your opponent bets $20 into a pot that is worth $80, the pot is now worth $100. If you look into this, it means that you have to call and bet $20 as well in order to win the $100. If you consider that in your calculations, it makes your odds $100:$20, simplified, you get 5:1 as your pot odds.

Now you have 4:1 as card odds, and 5:1 as poker odds. Here comes the trick. You should only call when the pot odds are larger than the card odds. In the long run, this will make you win more money.

The easier poker odds method which is actually a lot more plausible to use in a game is the percentage method. Here are the mechanics of this poker odds strategy.

The Percentage Method

• You should now use the possibility of a straight draw in order to figure out if you should call or not. If you have a seven or nine in your hand, while the flop has 6, 8, and an ace. This means that you need a 5 or a 10 in order to successfully complete a straight draw.
• The card odds: There are 4 fives and 4 tens in the deck that could complete our straight, which gives you a total of 8 outs. Outs are cards that can successfully complete your hand. In order to find out our percentage, you need to double the outs and add one. Calculated:
• Double the outs: 8 x 2 = 16; add one = 17
• Therefore, you have a 17% chance of successfully completing that straight
• You should now compare the card odds to the pot odds. Your opponent bets $30 to make the pot $90. In order to win the pot, you have to call $30 as well, which makes you win $120. Always use the final amount when it comes to calculating percentages. Calculated.
• $30 is twenty-five percent of $120
• The card odds are 17%; the pot odds are 25 percent

The rule is to never call if the pot odds are greater than the card odds. The percentage of making your hand should always be greater than the poker pot odds. You can employ poker odds on a number of different card combinations, just always be smart about your calculations and you’re home free.

Venus In Poker

Venus Vs Mars or Adam, Eve and the pot! Let’s face it. Like the forbidden fruit, many gaming events have eluded “the Eves” for decades until they finally get to enjoy it. Women have always been considered the underdogs, may it be Football, basketball, cricket or Golf, and now poker due to the age old conditioning, societal pressures or their own ignorance. Whatever the reason be, here is a game of broken toothed, cigar chewing, pot bellied men which women could fight single handedly in the enemy’s den. No Kidding! Poker is a game which is intrinsically intuitive, manipulative, tactical and of high discipline. Somehow women just score so well in all of these sections!

Entering the casino and playing with all men at the poker table has been one of the most adventurous experiences for many women. The key is not to lose cool. There would be plenty of domination, picking and provocation; guys would just want to have fun. Yet there is the other side too of getting those not demanded favors or more importantly being underestimated. Add to it women are generally more spendthrift, would always make the best bet or get the best poker deal which makes the odds of losing less damaging. Add to that another dollop; women are born lie detectors. Bluffing wouldn’t get away very easily with these devilish angels. Now sprinkle that recipe with oodles of charm, a kind look and a mischievous laughter equals Success Story of Women in Poker.

But if no one gives a care to sex rations and the focus is just to concentrate on the game then Online Poker is an Eden. Online poker sites offers lots of interesting options to make money to its players. With complete anonymity, experienced players to test skills with, brilliant graphics, great deals and offers, BINGO! Moreover, poker as a game is a great equalizer. Whatever, whoever you are outside; at the table you are all on the same plane; are all exposed to the bare essentials: honest talent, wit, cunning and good old-fashioned guts. And WOMEN sure as hell have plenty of those guts.

Making money online by playing poker is an open, level field for both men and women; we need to see more women in poker and on the poker tables soon.

Poker Judgment

Sherlock Holmes seems to be my current flavor! As long as interesting lessons keep getting learned, all is good. Now, Holmes was extremely choosy and precise about his knowledge. Can you beat the fact that he did not know that the solar system existed and that the earth rotated around the sun! But whatever he knew, he knew it to perfection. Now for those who are less aware, poker is far from a gambling proposition. It is a game of chance, yes, however a calculated chance and probability and odds all of which are dictated by mathematical judgment. Thus one has to be exact and perfect with the technical knowledge of the game. One has to develop a keep sense of poker judgment. A number of tools are available these days to assist you and help evaluate your game. Find out just how much of a bad beat you suffered or whether or not you made a good call with the Poker Odds Calculator. Or you could try a poker stats tracker which lets you keep track of every single penny you win or lose playing poker and provides charts, graphs, and stats for tournaments and cash games! Will help in only enhancing your poker judgment.

PT3/HEM are even better software coming up now-a-days. By reading and gaining an understanding of the game you will be able to look at the HUD and think: well I hold x… He plays a range which probably beats me right now, however his post flop play is weak and he tends to fold to decent sized bets in this situation. Therefore my best option is to raise. He will fold x% of the time. I know that my bet has to only work y% in order to show a profit. Other than cards 1, 2, or 3 coming on the turn, if he calls I am done with this hand. The important aspect here is to be thorough with what you know and always in tune with the latest. There are many tools available and it’s easy to get lost in the swarm. One must not forget that these are tools after all and play a role in “aiding” your own original play and poker judgment. With a healthy mix of intuition and these latest software that technology offers, you’re sure to be on the roll!

The easiest way to make money online by playing poker is to maximize the productive output of every single resource you can lay your hands onto and increase your awareness of the game and your poker judgment 🙂

Making Money Online as a Poker Affiliate

Knowing that they might not be able to sustain the costs required to promote an online poker room or online casino, I am asked by quite a few of our company website visitors about alternatives to create their own poker card room with our poker software. Keeping this post short may not suffice, but here’s my answer to them, short and sweet:

Well, building poker software or playing poker online is not the only activity that can make money online in the booming online gaming and online poker industry. There is a sure fire way to earn a good and steady income by becoming a poker affiliate. A Poker Affiliate (PA) is someone that owns a website and sends traffic and customers to poker sites for a fee – which is a percentage of the players earnings or a flat referral fee. In some wonderful cases you can even opt for a combination of both!

The competition between the top poker sites today is so intense that they are willing to pay good returns to you if you manage to drive depositing customers to their sites. The name of the game is: traffic. If you have a website that is already getting some traffic on it, by creating a poker affiliate account with an online card room you have the opportunity to convert that traffic to money. A standard poker affiliate payout is at least $75 per paying customer or 20% of the player’s lifetime earnings!

How do you go about getting this in motion? Simple, actually. Remember, it pays to have your own domain instead of promoting a domain that a few affiliate program networks offer. You can tweak your domain to drive traffic to poker sites – have a good online marketing plan. You can even do it through your blog sites, which can be promoted and geared specifically to market your poker affiliate business. There are several how-to and do-it-yourself kits available free in the market. If you do not want to go through the pain of the grind, you can begin by tying up with a poker affiliate network and take it from there. They already have tie-ups and offers with all major poker sites and they can get you good deals.

At the end of the day, it is wise to remember that making money online truly requires patience and perseverance.

Estimating your opponent’s poker hands

Being able to figure out what kind of poker hand your opponent has is the difference between winning and losing in poker. You usually make a guess based on previous behavior, how much aggression your opponent has shown so far, the position your opponent is in (acting first is a huge disadvantage) and so on.

Starting Hand Chart (Courtesy of pokerGTA.com)

If you make no estimate what kind of poker  hand your opponent has, you can only reason in three ways:
a) You assume he always has the best poker hand. So you throw away your hand.
b) You assume he always has the worst hand. So you put your chips in.
c) You bet big if you have good cards, and you throw your cards away when your cards are lousy.
Clearly (a) and (b) are bad strategies.

The last strategy is not as bad as the other two, but still terrible. More often than not your cards are bad. So your opponent will figure out you’re not willing to make large bets with lousy cards, so every time you don’t bet, he will, and every time you bet, he won’t. You’re going to lose your chips that way. This is basic game theory.

So you need to figure out what cards he could have been dealt so that his actions make sense. Then, from that range of plausible cards, figure out how often he has a better hand than you do. If you like your odds, you put your chips in. Otherwise, you throw your cards away.

It’s a lot more complex than this, of course. But the point is that “estimating your opponent’s hands”, as difficult as it may be, is absolutely crucial if you want to win.

The Poker Player Thought process

Different players think of different levels.

A beginner will primarily focus on what his own cards are. An intermediate will focus on what his opponent’s cards are. A more advanced player will focus on what his opponent thinks his cards are and so on. The best poker players in the world are experts at figuring out which level you’re thinking on so they can think one level beyond you.

Once you estimate your opponent’s range based on his style, the cards, his previous actions, etc, you need to know what to do with that information. There are dozens of online poker software specially designed to help with the second part.

Estimating your opponent’s hands I assume means guessing what range of holdings he would play that way. For instance, if a tight player raises under the gun, you can narrow down his hands to just a few. It has immense value; in fact, it’s the hardest part of the game. Figuring out what to do once you’ve estimated someone’s hand is (with a little practice and the help of a good computer program) pretty easy.

The entire game is one big war to see who can estimate his opponents’ hands the best, while preventing his opponents from doing the same to him.

Poker Advertising

Aren’t online gambling sites some of the biggest spenders on online ad sales? With revenue of $1+ billion per year, I think a good chunk of that must go to lead generation. Poker advertising is now cache.

In some businesses, there simply is no other way. For example, recently I heard from some online dating services that they really boil down to the hard calculation of “how expensive is it to convert a user we bought with advertising”. Like, if they raise their conversion rates, they can afford more advertising, and so on. Sure, maybe sometimes there will be a “hit dating service” that spreads through word of mouth, but the others seem to do OK, too.

Especially in the world of Online Poker it seems advertising is huge! It IS! Big budgets are the current hot flavor for poker advertising.

I used to be all negative about advertising, but I changed my attitude since I realized that nature itself relies heavily on advertising. A beautiful flower is advertising, too. Even a flower has to announce “I am here” with colors and scents. Maybe in some cases a “social recommendation mechanism” is also at work (like the bees who inform other bees about food sources), but without such a mechanism, how are your clients going to discover you? And even if you can be successful without advertising, it seems a bit silly to be against it. If you know that by investing 100000$ in advertising, you can earn another 1000000$ in revenue, why would you not do it? With the advent of televised slick commercials, poker advertising took on a totally new look. You are sure to be sucked in to visit and try a hand or two after seeing one of those fulltilt pokerpro commercials on television or some of those humorous storyline poker advertisements from partygaming.

To all poker players the message goes out loud and clear: play poker on those sites that advertise the most! Poker advertising pays super rich dividends indeed.

Well, being a fairly new industry, the online poker industry rakes in the moolah the more money they pump into ads. It’s silly at face value making the user look like an idiot, yet it’s not consumer goods, it’s internet poker!

Hence, moral of the story: If you’re spending more on poker advertising, you must have something really good going for you.

Online Gaming Addiction Myth Uncovered

I see zillions of articles and claims aimed at branding internet gaming as an addiction. For example, figure this: Around 1 million South Korean gamers are suffering from serious addiction that brings them to neglect eating, bathing, skipping school and even quitting their jobs. Last year saw at least 7 people dropping dead after playing too many games for too long a stretch. Talk about playing hard unto the death!

Talk about being stupid!

With the evolution of internet technology, people are presented with new mode of entertainment all aiming for fun and relaxation: online games. If you are sick with your monotonous life all you have to do is visit the different gaming sites on the internet. Then, again you are asked to fear the addiction it may bring in, conveniently forgetting that to play or not to play is a matter of choice and you are in control of your own mind.

Most internet games are easy to get “hooked on” once you start playing them and they are also popular since they maintain great quality and content, thus providing endless hours of fun, entertainment and growth whether you play them by yourself or with family and friends. It also gives you a connecting experience with others.
internet gambling

From a global point of view, the Internet has become like a living organism that hosts many online systems. Boundaries drawn by geography, economy, culture, degrees of education and family traditions have largely disappeared. Everyone with a computer or a laptop and an internet connection can take part in the experience. Online gaming communities are becoming huge playing fields for social interaction. When gamers send messages to other gamers, they are free to exchange email addresses and meet beyond the gaming community. Communities have become an extension, a new medium of human touch – interesting and educational. When such interactive communities form, a semantic world of sharing knowledge, solving problems, working as a team, playing, building, quarreling, cooperating, planning and forming relationships develop. It can all be classified under “fun” and “recreation”.

Being addictive to something would be in many contexts to describe an obsession, compulsion, or excessive psychological dependence on something, such as: drug addiction or alcoholism.

I believe that any “activity” can never be at fault. How could it? It is inanimate, without any consciousness of its own! It is the person partaking in the activity who is responsible. An online casino, a top internet poker room or online games are invented by us for our pleasure, for our recreation for spending some time and money in a healthy pursuit – not a means to blow up your college education. As long as online games are played for fun and entertainment and even as a profession, it cannot be an addiction. Like in everything else, pleasure derived from any online gaming activity is desirable, not addictive.

Yet, when it is a recreational activity, it should occupy only the time slot meant for your recreational activities, not overlap your productivity or your rest.

This, is the golden rule!