Poker Strategy

Online poker giant introduces online home games

Offering users to customize their interface and invitations in order to create their own tournaments and home games will means players can reunite with their college buddies, ex-girlfriends or family on the virtual felts.

The latest addition to the myriad of services offered by PokerStars gives players the chance to host private Poker games and tournaments online with a personal touch that is meant to lead to the creation of exclusive, private clubs.

Special features of the Home Poker Games option, that has been undergoing testing and parallel running on the poker room’s play money Website and is to go live with real money users this week, include: the tournaments and cash games can deliver an online home game with a buy-in range from micro-stakes up to $1/$2; the new clubs can have memberships of up to fifty players who will not show up on the search feature while seated at Home Game Poker tables; the private games are not subject to the IP requirements used elsewhere on the Wesbite so players in the same household are able to play on different the tables at the same time.

Club managers are able to notify their members of newly-created tournaments and cash game tables instantly through direct connections to their Facebook and Twitter accounts. Once a club has been created, the manager can assign “Administrator” status to other members in order to give them to set up their own games.

The home game atmosphere can be defined by choosing your “local” type of poker played, from Texas Holdem Poker, Omaha Poker and HORSE to the Mixed Game format. Club members compete against each other for long-term glory with a point system presented as club leaderboard. Each and every tournament and statistic of the action that makes up the club’s history will be stored and available for perusal at any time by club members.

Even though the major online poker rooms have promoted the idea of private tournaments in various ways for a number of years, this new feature is the first real attempt to engage groups of users to customize their own cash games, tables and tournaments.

Tags:
Games, HORSE, Omaha Poker, Poker, PokerStars, Texas Holdem Poker

Position – the most valuable commodity at the poker table

You know what they say: if you’re unable to spot the sucker at your table within a reasonable amount of time, chances are you are the sucker. The good news is though that it doesn’t take a whole lot to catch up with the other poker players and to leave your sucker status behind for good. All you need to do is hammer a few basics concepts into your head and you’re good to go. About 95% of the players you’ll meet online are not any better than that, and it won’t take much to catch up with them.

First thing’s first: there are a few basic advantages you can secure without ever playing a single hand of poker. Take rakeback for example. Don’t know rake back is? Read around, stay informed. Be the guy who reads, and not the one who follows the pack blindly.

Sign up for a rakeback deal like the Absolute Poker rakeback or the Full Tilt rakeback and get about 30% of your rake back. Once you understand how poker rooms take their rake, you’ll understand why rakeback is so important.

Similarly, when you hit the table and you get down to actual play, you need to keep reading. If you do that, you’ll become a reasonable player within an amazingly short period of time.

One of the basic concepts that make a difference between reasonable players and suckers is starting hand selection. Another such concept, possibly an even more important one, is that of the position. Texas Holdem Poker is a fixed position game, which means certain players will enjoy an advantage over other players, simply on account of the position they have at the table. Here’s how position really works. The dealer button is the point of reference when it comes to position. Because the dealer button moves around the table in a clock-wise direction with every hand, nobody will be stuck in a certain position for good. You will still be able to secure lasting advantage over an opponent by sitting down on his immediate left, because that will mean you’ll have to act after him most of the time.

Anyway, here’s how the positions are allotted in relation to the dealer button. The person sitting on the left of the dealer button is the SB, the guy on his left is the BB. Except for the first betting round, these are the people that will act first on every street.

The position on the left of the BB is called Under the Gun. He is the guy who has to act first in the very first betting round. These are all early positions which force the players to act blindly and thus to lose value on their starting hands.

The best position to be in is the button. The button is the last to act on every street. The cut-off is a late position too, which carries the possibility to foil the blinds-stealing plans of the button. As far as the other positions are concerned: the closer they are to the UTG the worse they are.

Here are some of the strategic advantages that late position offers you at the poker table:

- If offers you numerous and cheap possibilities to steal blinds and to bluff.

- It offers you information in the form of reads which you’ll be able to deduce from the betting patterns of those who act before you.

- Value betting properly will be a cinch from late position.

- You’ll have control over the size of the pot. This is probably the most important advantage that position offers you: it gives you control. Most of the advanced strategy moves require that you have control and your success rate sky-rockets every time you’re in control in a hand.

- Your starting hands gain additional value when you’re in late position.

If you need an illustration of how position works in poker, take a look at the hand histories of the durrrr challenge. You’ll see an obvious trend surfacing: both players (Tom Dwan and Patrik Antonius) have logged most of their winning hands while in position. They both lost more when out of position.

Given the fact that these two are currently among the best cash game players in the world, this statistic should say plenty about the importance of position in poker.

Tags:
Betting, Blinds, Bluff, Dealer, Late Position, Patrik Antonius, Pot, Rakeback, sucker, Table, Texas Holdem Poker, Tom Dwan, Under the Gun, UTG