Probably one of the coolest things about poker is pulling off a monster bluff.

Misrepresenting your poker hand is not as easy as everyone thinks.  You have to set it up, fold a few times to make them believe that you are tight player and then you suck them in with your betting.  Sounds easy doesn’t it?  But I wouldn’t recommend it to beginners, just play tight and conservative poker if you are new to the game.  Learning how to misrepresent your poker hand takes subtle poker skills that you only learn over time.

You have to pay close attention to what cards are on the board and what potential hands your opponent might think that you have.  If there is no ways that you could have a strong hand, don’t pretend that you do have one.  The good poker players would have worked out all the permutations already.

The good players will spot a bluff a mile away, with the way that you have played hands before, the amount that you bet, the speed with which you bet and the subtle tell tale signs that you give away…

Exercise caution when you want to misrepresent your hand, when playing poker.  Get it wrong and it will cost you.

“Mike is Stud poker losing popularity?  Everywhere I go all I see is Texas Holdem or Omaha.”

I know that you see a lot of Texas Holdem poker and Omaha, on television and the internet, sometimes it seems that the other kinds of poker have been forgotten about.  But that’s not the case, people still enjoy playing Stud poker and I don’t think the popularity of Stud poker is decreasing.

Online poker sites are mostly offering Texas Holdem and you can learn to play poker by playing free holdem online.  A lot of people start off playing poker and learning Holdem, then they progress on to Stud poker and the other types of poker.  People always want to learn something new and progress onto other forms of the game.

So dont worry, I think that stud poker is alive and well and will be around for a while to come.  Nothing to lose sleep over!

Need I say it – Poker is becoming one of the most popular games played on the web.  It is incredible how the game has taken-off over the past 15 years.  The game attracts millions of players to online gambling sites and poker tournaments, ranging from new comers to professionals.  The many variations of poker have specific rules for each game.  However, there are some universal strategies that all poker players should take into consideration, if you want to make your game better and win.

First off – Know your Game – Read as much as possible about poker through websites, books or any other source of information.  Knowledge is power indeed and you will never know everything about poker, know matter how good you think you are.  There are also continual changes in the online gambling industry and it would be wise to keep yourself informed as much as you can.

Never feel shy to ask advice from those players who are better than you.  Remember, no-one was born knowing how to play the game of poker, we all had to learn somehow. We all needed a poker guide.

Then, practice, practice, and practice.  Once you have enough theoretical knowledge, it is time to apply it to real poker games.  The best (and also cheapest) way to do this is to download free poker software from the web and practice until you acquire enough confidence in your poker game and until you polish your skills.  When you feel that it is the right time, then start gambling for real money.

Improve your math skills – playing the game of poker, you should know about probabilities or odds, the importance of outs and the way to calculate the pot odds.  If your mathematical skills are terrible, you risk playing a weaker game.  Refresh tour math and practice your odds until you feel that your math skill is good enough to play for real money.

Learn to be disciplined – In the end discipline is the thing that separates winners from losers!  A disciplined poker player is aware of how much cash he/she has to spend as well as how long every gambling session will continue.  Not only this – the disciplined poker player will stick to these decisions.  Such a player will know when to finish playing – straightway when on a “tilt” and a bit later when all is going well.

Develop your psychological skills. To make your poker game better, you should learn to understand what the other players around the table are doing and thinking.  You should be asking yourself, “What hand does my opponent have” and “What kind of a hand does the opponent guess I have”.

The easiest way to understand how implied odds work is with an example.  Let’s consider a small fixed limit Texas Holdem game.  At these tables, normally most of the players are deep-stacked, a few dollars here represent an excellent bankroll. Due to the limited nature of the betting, all the skill-related twists like bluffs and putting pressure on your opponents are not as affective.

Schooling runs rampant and basic tight-aggressive play gains in value, because – provided your opponents do make mistakes – it is the only way to squeeze money out of these tables.  Tight aggressive play is based on the exploitation of the implied odds.

Whenever you’re well bankrolled, you can afford to take a look at a number of flops – after thorough starting hand selection, of course – in order to see whether or not you’ll be hit by them, without serious consequences towards the size of your stack.  Given the fact that your hand is around 70% made on the flop, you’ll be able to decide what to do once there.

If you do get hit and you believe that your hand is the best hand at the table, your objective becomes, getting as many chips as possible, into the pot.  If the flop misses you, you fold.  This is the exploitation of implied odds.  As long as you can afford to see your flops, you give yourself a chance to hit a good hand and you’re able to play in a healthy, tight-aggressive way.

To understand the mechanisms behind the implied odds, let’s take a closer look at how set mining works.  In most cash games it pays to play small pocket pairs, at least right up to the flop.  Seeing a flop on such a starting hand gives players the possibility to hit a set on the flop.  A set is an extremely solid hand especially in short handed games, one that is bound to earn you a nice pot, even more so because two thirds of it are concealed in your pocket, rendering its reading quite impossible.  You will lose money on the flops that do not bring you a set, but the theory goes that the few times you do catch your trips you’ll more than make up for those losses.

Depending on the type of players you’re faced with, you should play your pocket pairs either passively or aggressively.  If you’re faced with a bunch of rocks, you’ll be able to limp along and see your flops cheap, thus minimizing your losses.  If you’re faced with an aggressive bunch however, putting in a pre-flop raise might give you more opportunities to win the hand than limping along.  In this case, limping is bound to cost you a lot of money too, so you might as well use that money to put pressure on your opponents.

Regardless of how you decide to exploit your implied odds, you should know that this is what solid poker strategy is based upon.  Don’t forget to sign up for a rakeback deal too, as it will further minimize the losses you incur on the fruitless flops that you see.

In fact, rakeback will give your EV a tiny boost on every hand that you play, regardless of whether it turns out to be a winning or a losing one.

The technique of exploiting the implied odds is never enough by itself.  You also need to read your opponents and decide how to approach your implied odds based on those reads.

You probably remember that back when you were a beginner at online poker, you found it extremely difficult to move from the play-money tables to the real-money tables.  Sure, the opposition was much more focused and play was generally much tighter.  But there was something else that made the task of getting money out of the setup much more difficult; the rake.  Regardless of how you twisted and squirmed, you just couldn’t get rid of the rake which ate into your meager winnings… ruthlessly, hand after hand.  If you were a marginally losing player, chances are it was because of the rake.  This is why signing up for rakeback is such a great idea, but more on that later.

What exactly is the rake though, how is it calculated and who pays it?  The rake is a small fee you pay on every real money hand that you play in a poker room.  The poker room itself incurs a series of operating costs, since all the features offered – the action, money transfer procedures and other such services do not come for free.  On top of that, the online poker room is also a business, one that needs to generate a profit.

Although the rake on every hand is a minute amount, at the end of the day, when you add up all the raked hands that players have played, you’ll be amazed by the result.  Likewise, you’ll also be amazed by the quantity of money you personally pay out in the form of rake, over any significant period of time, especially if you are an active player.

Some rookies may think – since the rake is a percentage of the pot – it is only the winner who pays it, but that is wrong.  Every player who contributes money to the pot pays some rake.   Why?  Because the pot is an independent entity at the table, it doesn’t belong to the winner until after it’s been raked.  Every player who put money into it has equity in this independent entity, therefore, they will also have an equity in the rake which is paid.

A relatively simple example to illustrate how it is in fact not the winner who pays the rake alone, is to consider two tight players who have a poker session every evening.  They pay a certain amount of rake, which the floor-master collects at the end of the day.   One day, a third player joins them who is a beginner and is a loose-aggressive type.  This guy loses all his roll to the two seasoned veterans, and at the end of the day when the floor-master collects the rake he is surprised that there’s much more money than usual.

The loose-aggressive style of the third player gave the rake a huge boost, even though he failed to win a single hand.   The amount of generated rake does not depend on who generates it, it depends on the style of play, and more precisely on the amount of money that goes into the pot.

In conclusion: rest assured, if you play real money poker, you pay rake and you need a rakeback deal.   A good rakeback deal (like full tilt rakeback) gives you a high percentage of your rake back, thus taking a bite out of the biggest enemy of the beginner real-money player.

Sign up for a rakeback deal today, regardless of whether you’re a small-stakes beginner or a high-stakes pro and redirect your rake cash flow towards your own bankroll.

When the Texas Hold’em wave swept the world a decade back, it brought quite a few casualties with it. One of the games that unfortunately ended up on a distant shore, with only a few loyal players visiting it, was my beloved Seven-Card Stud.

Luckily, more and more people are getting fed up with “holdem this” and “holdem that” and want to try this century-old game that started the first poker boom a 100 years or so back.

Stud is played in the WSOP, plays an essential role in popular mixed-games like H.O.R.S.E and there are nowadays many active Stud players on the Net. Therefore, Stud is no longer just a historic game. Its future actually looks brighter than it has for many years.

In this blog, I will keep you updated on the world of Stud including Seven-Card, Five-Card, Razz, Eight-or-Better, Mississippi Stud and more. I’ll provide strategy tips, post results from stud tournaments around the world and give you my view of the game; what it was, what it has become, and naturally, how you should do to beat your opponents.