OnlineFreePlay
    Poker.com

These are some other poker sites that you may find of interest, including blogs of several professional poker players.

Ashton Cartwright Poker Blog

Aaron Nicastri Poker Blog

Jesse McKenzie Poker Blog

Other Link Directories:

Top Poker Directory | Online Poker Sites
GooLinx
Thales Directory
Easy Seek – Free Search & Directory

When you find yourself in a difficult situation, often your first instincts are you best.

There will be times when your opponent makes a big bet on the river, and for some reason you just know that he is bluffing. It’s not as mystical or magical as it seems! Often there are many tiny tells and minute mannerism changes that your brain is picking up on subconsciously, which is why you can sometimes be certain that someone is bluffing, even though you aren’t clearly able to explain why.

Perhaps after years of playing against the same person, he all of a sudden makes a play that is entirely out of character. Maybe someone who is always talkative is suddenly silent after making a big bet. Maybe someone who is usually very animated when involved in a pot is now dead still. It could be a combination of all these things and more, but no one ‘tell’ is the entire reason that you know he is bluffing. Your brain may have analyzed a dozen simultaneous actions and simply presented you with the results, i.e.: “This person is bluffing”

In situations like this, your first instinct is usually the right one. Obviously you should still think the hand through logically, and if your opponent’s actions still don’t make sense, then go with your instinct and call.

Everyone has heard a story about some guy who won a major tournament while drinking whiskey for 10 hours straight, but the obvious truth is that when you play poker drunk, you are not playing your best.

Poker is a game that requires its competitors to make many complex decisions all the way through a tournament or playing session, and complicated decisions and alcohol just don’t work well together. Most players are more inclined to gamble when they drink (which is why most casinos offer free drinks to the players), and a player who is more inclined to gamble will often be getting his money in with the worst of it.

Even though it might be more “fun” to play while drinking, it almost certainly will adversely affect your chances of winning. The marginal situation where you would usually have folded becomes a call when you are dinking. When sober, you would have noticed a tell from your opponent that indicates to you that he is bluffing, but drunk, you fold your hand because you aren’t able to pick up on those subtleties.

Poker is a game of the mind, and anything that impairs your ability to think things through carefully will undoubtedly affect your ability to profit from the game.

One of the biggest mistakes that new players making is refusing to fold their hands when they should. This might be preflop when they decide to play J5 offsuit for a raise, or it might be on the flop when they refuse to fold their QQ and the board reads A K 7.

Folding your hands when you should will save you a huge amount of money in the long run. All good players know that folding is one of the most important moves in poker, even if it isn’t the most glamorous. A good player will fold hand after hand until they are either dealt a strong hand, or a profitable bluffing situation arises.

The money you don’t lose is money that you don’t have to win back. Keep this in mind and realize that by folding hands correctly you are actually protecting your stack, which is important in poker tournaments just as it is in cash games. On television it can sometimes seem that good players are the ones who are always making big bluffs and massive moves, but the truth is that most of the times good players make money because they avoid difficult situations that might cost them their stack.

Learn to fold when you should and you will find your success increasing steadily at the poker table.

The term “odds” simply means “The chance of something happening compared to how much you win if it does happen”, and it is extremely useful information to have. It would be difficult to bet or call bets correctly if you don’t have a solid understanding of odds.

Many new players don’t take the time to learn the basic odds for the most common drawing hands such as the straight draws or flush draws in Texas Hold’em. They don’t know the odds of hitting and Ace or a King when they raise preflop with AK. They don’t know how often they will hit a set if they see the flop with a low pair like pocket 4’s.

Knowing these basic odds can give one player a massive advantage over another player. The player who knows the odds can make bets and raising that give his opponent incorrect odds to call, thus causing his opponent to make continuous (and costly) mistakes. Understanding of poker odds is essential to playing good poker, and is one of the biggest factors that separates a winning player from a losing player.

For more information on the odds in a game of Texas Hold’em, click on this link:

Poker Pot Odds and Outs

In poker, just as in life, common sense is usually a very accurate meter for deciding correct actions from incorrect actions.

Many times players get over involved by being tricky, and forget the power of taking simple actions:

“I have the best hand, so I will raise”

“I have a losing hand, so I will fold”

Both of these thoughts are not hugely difficult to master, and yet they are some of the more powerful poker concepts that you will encounter. While it is true that at higher, more sophisticated levels of play there will need to be many other factors that come into consideration, at the heart of it, this is correct poker strategy. Get out when you are losing, and get more money into the pot when you are winning. Remarkably simple, and remarkably powerful.

If you have never seen a player bluff before, and that player now makes a big raise, common sense would indicate that he probably has a big hand, and unless you have a monster hand yourself, you are best to just fold. It’s possible that this is the first bluff that this player has ever done, but common sense says that isn’t very likely, and thus you would be ill advised to try and push your opponent out of the hand with another re-raise.

When in doubt in a game of poker, let common sense be your guide. 

In most forms of poker, such as Texas Hold’em or Omaha, the more players you are up against, the more cautious you need to be. If you are up against a single player on the flop in Texas Hold’em, then being aggressive is usually the best plan. You might have the best hand and get more money into the pot, or your opponent might have a better hand and fold, or your opponent might have been inclined to bluff, but folds when you make a bet first. Against a single player, aggression is better than caution.

Against multiple players however, you need to rely on hand strength a bit more. There are several reasons for this: If you try and bluff, there are more players who could actually have a moderate hand that could call you. If you bet a medium strength hand into multiple players, there is a higher chance that one of them has an absolute monster hand that may even raise you. Also, if you bet into multiple players, there are more players who might be inclined to make a move, and try and re-raise you off your hand.

All these factors combineed means that it is usually best to play with caution in a multi-way pot, as it is more likely that there will be a player or two that hangs around to the river.

One of the most boring stories ever told in the history of the world consists of a “Bad Beat”. These stories usually go like this:

“I had aces, and this other guy had kings, and he went all in and I called and I totally lost.” Or some other amazingly uninteresting variation of the same story.

There are only 52 cards in a game of poker, and so there are only limited variations of what bad beats can actually occur, so if a particular bad beat happened to you, then it has definitely happened to hundreds and thousands of other people too. You had the nut flush and someone got quads on the river? It’s happened before. You had quads and someone hit a straight flush? That’s happened before too. These stories are not only boring for everyone at the table to hear, they are also depressing.

When a player tells a bad beat story, they are often in search of sympathy. They want someone to say to them “Gee that’s amazingly unlucky. Nobody could ever be as unlucky as you. If only you weren’t so unlucky you would be the most profitable poker player in the world” or some other such nonsense. Just don’t bother dwelling on bad beats. Focus on playing a good game of poker, and let the odds sort themselves out in end.

If you intend to play poker well, you need to keep accurate records of your wins and losses, even if the money isn’t important to you.

When you keep proper records of you poker results, you get to see when your best winning sessions are, if you lost money during longer sessions, an even whether certain styles are more profitable than other styles. Perhaps you have decided to start being more aggressive pre-flop, and your results reflect that this is showing positive results for you? Or maybe you have started playing higher stakes at the casino, and your results seem to indicate that you aren’t yet reading to tackle that caliber of player yet.

By keeping good records you may discover that when you play with your friends from the pub you are consistently profitable, but when you play online you tend to lose money. This can help you discover weaknesses in your game that may not have been apparent had you merely relied on memory to tell you when you were winning and when you were losing.

All poker players who try to play their best keep good records, and you probably should to.