How and Why Did I Lose $50 in a Low-Limit Game?
A friend recently asked me that question. Background: he’s a good player but very loose. My answer was, “You bled chips.” The thought that it’s only another buck or two,…
Big Blind Ante
The latest innovation to build pots in high stakes poker games and tournaments is the big blind ante. The World Series of Poker has bought into the concept for their…
Zombie Poker
As you probably know, a zombie is a person who has died and come back to life. The equivalent in poker is when a tournament structure allows someone who has…
Quite a Hand
I recently played in a Hold ‘em home game with an interesting structure. It starts as a tournament with blinds increasing after each round. As players are knocked out, a…
The Moneymaker Effect
In 2003, Chris Moneymaker, an amateur player, won the World Series of Poker, besting 838 entrants. His payoff was $2.5 million dollars. He set off a poker boom. Moneymaker’s win…
Why C-Bet?
In recent years, the c-bet (short for continuation bet) has been pretty much the favored action in No Limit Hold ‘Em. What is it? It’s a followup bet after the…
Deck Check
I’ve got a couple of issues relating to card counts and rankings. Are there really only 52 cards in a standard deck? Sure, four each of Aces through Kings equal…
Top Tournament Earners in 2018
Although the poker boom may have leveled out, there’s still a lot of action and prize money sloshing around. Here is the list of top tournament winners in 2018: …
Pot Limit Omaha
Apparently, Pot Limit Omaha (PLO) is currently the hot game on the pro circuit. For me, there is enough of a challenge determining good hands in Omaha without the overlay…
Luck and Selective Memory
To paraphrase Phil Helmuth’s famous quote, “If luck wasn’t involved, I would win every time.” To unwrap it a bit, probability theory’s law of large numbers tells us that when…
2019 Resolutions
2018 was a good poker year for me. Interestingly, my tournament play was more profitable than cash games. Musing over the results, the reason appeared to be related to playing…