Thank you so much for the phone lesson on Feb. 5th. I really appreciate the time you spent talking to me. I learned a lot, but more than anything, I felt so confident and motivated after the lesson. I tried your recommendation of going to $5 sit-n-goes and playing like a total maniac. At first, it was very uncomfortable, but after a while it was fun to see what I could get away with. I kept track of how many hands and I won and how many I lost. I was amazed at the power of betting with nothing. I definitely understand what you wanted me to see in that exercise, and I can’t wait to apply what I learned to bigger tournaments. I look forward to winning a lot more often.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!!! 

Sincerely,

Lara, aka, Faralone

p.s. I watched the Craig Ferguson show on Thursday…very funny!

Precards:
Rounder63 posts the small blind $25, onesilygrl posts the big blind $50.

Preflop: onesilygrl is dealt Kd Jc (9 active)
6 folds, SSCallery raises to $150, Rounder63 calls $125, onesilygrl calls $100.

Flop: Qc 3c Td ($450, 3 active)
Rounder63 checks, onesilygrl bets $250, SSCallery folds, Rounder63 calls $250.

Turn: Qc 3c Td 9d ($950, 2 active)
Rounder63 checks, onesilygrl bets $550, Rounder63 calls $550.

River: Qc 3c Td 9d Ks ($2,050, 2 active)
Rounder63 bets $870 (all-in), onesilygrl calls $595 (all-in).

Final Pot: $3,240
onesilygrl, net: -$1,545, Lost at showdown, has Kd Jc (a King High Straight)
Rounder63, net: $1,695, Won at showdown, has Jh Ah (an Ace High Straight)
SSCallery, net: -$150, Folded Flop

Dear Linda,

So, I like the play till the turn.  Let’s look at the bad cards for you:  There are two flush draws (18 bad cards) and the K might counterfeit or beat you and ditto for the jack (2 more cards). 20 cards that give you trouble and there are 46 unknown cards!  1.3 to 1!

By betting only $550 into the $950 pot you are making a small bet.  Plus, you only have $595 behind that so you are committing almost half your stack so you are pot committed anyway.  This hand clearly wants protection and there are no more decisions to be made because you are pot committed anyway so push in on the turn.

The problem is that by betting only 550 you create a 1500 pot for Rounder63 to call 550.  Now, mind you, he was not getting the right price with AJ and he made a ridiculous call.  But you don’t know what his hand is. You also know that there is a 1.3 to 1 chance there will be a troublesome card on the river.  But you are offering Rounder63 nearly 3 to 1 on the call. Not only that, but Rounder63 might call because he thinks he can bluff you if one of the suits hits.

By just moving it in you offer a much worse price for yourself and remove the possibility of being bluffed off the hand when a bad card hits.

The take away is that when the texture really sucks we want to bet big no matter whether we have the nuts at the moment or not. That is particularly true when you are pot committed anyway.

Xo
Annie

Dear Debbie,
If you are looking to support a family on poker tournaments I would actually recommend you try ring games instead.  This is only because tournament poker is extremely high variance and requires a very large bankroll.  If you are good at ring games they offer a much steadier income for someone looking for stability in supporting a family. 

In terms of how to start, living in Ohio with a family makes it much more difficult to just chuck it and move to Vegas and go for it.  Really, you might want to try online poker (be aware of laws in your jurisdiction).  There are a lot of pros making their living playing online right now, both in tournaments and cash games.  It is very lucrative and a bang for your bankroll online can actually be better because you can play multiple tables at once, maximizing your earn per hour.  I personally like UltimateBet.net.
Hope that helps,
Xo
Annie

Jon

Dear Jon

Being able to fold those kinds of huge hands is a very big indication of skill.  In multi way situations where, say, you raise, someone reraises and a new player moves all in you really ought to be folding those hands like Ak and QQ since you are generally hoping that you are in a race and not completely crushed.  You should call big all ins when your best hope is a 50/50.

In heads up situations you need to know your opponent.  If only one opponent moves in on me I want to know if they might do that with JJ or worse.  If they are capable of that then you really have to call.  If they are not, you should always fold.

Good luck in your league.  Sounds like you are doing great!

xo
Annie

Limit tournaments are my favorite so I am glad you have discovered them. It is interesting that you say drawing hands are more important than high pairs in limit.  It is actually the reverse.  In no limit, when you play a drawing hand, a hand where you know you are not starting the best hand, like JT suited for example you can justify playing it because if you hit the hand hard you know you can get a huge payoff from your opponent (his whole stack).  The pay off you might get in the future is called implied odds. In order to take a hand where we know we are starting from behind we need to have large implied odds to justify playing, to make it a money making hand.

So here is the problem, in limit the implied odds are, well, limited. Because the betting is structured we know that our opponent is never offering us their whole stack on a hand.  They are only offering us at most a few bets.  Because the implied odds are limited, you can’t justify starting from behind in most hands.  So drawing hands go down in value, not up.

So here is the key to successful limit play:  Be very selective in your starting hands but when you do choose to play, play your hands very aggressively.  If you choose to play then come in raising.  If someone has raised in front of you, reraise them.  Really the only time you would just flat call is either out of the blinds or when multiple players are in the pot before you.

So remember:  Play selectively, choose your hands wisely…but once you choose to play, play strong and fast.

I’ve always been curious about this.  Lets say I flop a flush draw. I of course have 9 outs to catch it.  The advice from your brother was to multiply 9 by 4 to get a pct. of roughly 36 to get it.  But is that assuming that all 9 cards that you need are still in the deck after say, its heads up between you and an opponent in a 10 player game?  There are 19 cards(16 hole cards of opponents who folded and 3 burn cards).  Isn’t reasonable to assume that maybe 3 or 4 cards that you need or in those 19 cards and you would only have maybe 5 or 6 outs?  The pct. would go down then.  Or am I mistaken and that is calculated in the 36 pct?  I would really appreciate your answer as I really respect you as a player. 

Thank you.

Alan

Hi Alan

I understand your confusion but in calculating odds the other cards don’t factor in.  Let me explain:

The 2 and 4 rule are just shortcuts for estimating the odds.  The long way around figuring out odds has to do with a few factors:  The number of cards you know about, the number you haven’t seen, the number that help you and the number of cards yet to come.

So let’s take the flush draw example.  You have J9h and the board is AK2 with two hearts. You know you need to hit a heart to win and there are 9 hearts left in the deck.  What I mean by that is you have actually seen 4 hearts and you have not seen 9.

The fact that other hands that folded might have a heart in them is irrelevant because the fact you haven’t seen them means they might be live in the deck. You are just calculating on the cards that are still out there, that you haven’t seen.

Ok, so there are 9 cards that are good for you.  You know exactly what 5 of the 52 cards in the deck are…those are the cards you have seen in your hand and on the flop.  That leaves 47 cards that you haven’t seen, for 47 unknown cards.  Of the 47 unknown cards you know that 9 of them help you and 38 of them don’t, right? So there are 38 bad cards left compared to 9 good cards left. If we reduce the fraction it is about 4.2 to 1 if you only get to see one more card, or right around 18% (notice that is 2 X 9).  If we get to see two cards we can basically divide in half for 2.1 to 1 or right around 34%.

The fact is that of the unknown cards, the ones that help you and the ones that hurt you, they are likely to have been in the hands that for thrown away or the ones your opponents still have in equal ratios.  There will be 4 good cards to every 1 bad card in all the unknown cards, the ones in the hands, the ones in the muck and the ones in the deck. We are concerned about the ratio when calculating odds and that is the same throughout all the unknown cards.

I hope that explains it

Xo
Annie

I am an avid poker player that has to curtail my desires to play brick and mortar games by playing online, The casinos are too far away and having 4 kids makes it difficult to take the ’short’ vacations I would like to Las Vegas.

With the introduction of the Unlawful Internet Gaming Enforcement Act it is becoming more and more difficult to play poker online. What is your stance on this piece of legislation? Assuming you are against it, what are you doing to get it changed. What would you recommend others do? Since you are ‘in the biz’ what do you see other professional poker players doing about this bill or does it mainly effect the non-professional players like myself?

Ron

Hi Ron–
 
Well I love your question.  I am very much against the bill as it relates to poker and any other game of skill.  I have several issues with the bill.  First, it allows for betting on State Lotteries and Horse Racing online.  This is very hypocritical in my view as State Lotteries are a) clearly a game that has no skill and b) a regressive tax.  I can overflow the Capitol building with people who make their living playing poker and yet I would be unable to find one person (who is not cheating) who makes their living playing lotteries. As for the regressive tax part, we all know that it is mainly lower income people who play the lotteries.  That money is used to fun state programs and that money is coming from the poorer segment of the population.  I have a big problem with that.
 
Of course, the States argue that lotteries generate billions of dollars for education.  But if you taxed online poker the PPA has estimated that revenue would be over 3 billion.  That would fund the Port Security Act to which the bill was attached.  Or the money could go to education, raising teachers’ salaries, expanding police forces, whatever the state wanted it for.  So that argument is specious since it only applies if the government chooses not to regulate online poker.
 
Another huge problem I have with the Law has to do with censorship and prohibition.  Anytime the government tells us what we, as consenting adults, can do with our discretionary income we are treading dangerous ground.  The authors of the bill argue that 5% of the population have an issue with gaming online.  Well I will not argue with that statistic.  But, rather, I will point out that 5% of the population also has a problem with online shopping.  5% of the population has a problem with online stock trading.  5% of the population has a problem with alcohol.  This is because the numbers of people who have addiction issues in our population is around 5%. 
 
We tried once to sacrifice the majorities freedom of choice to protect a small minority who had a problem.  It was called Prohibition.  What prohibition brought us was tommy guns and Al Capone.  Before prohibition, the population was deliverd a safe and regulated product.  During prohibition, demand was still the same and now people were delivered an unregulated prodcut brewed out of backyard stills that were often unsafe.  It brought violence and more problems than it solved and we should have learned our lesson from that.
 
If we allow the goverment to erode our freedom and censor what we do with our own free time and our own disposable income in the privacy of our own homes, what is next?  Is the government going to tell the banks to monitor our online shopping too?  If we want to buy that third pair of shoes online that week is the bank going to deny our ability to transfer money onto ShopBop.com?  Censorship is dangerous ground to tread.  We have proven that in the past.  Remeber when Mark Twain was banned from some libraries in the country?
 
The current administration has created an atmosphere of fear.  And they have used that fear to further and further erode our personal freedoms and degrade the spirit of our Constitution.  Benjamin Franklin warned that in times of heightened fear we must not give in to a government who claims that to keep the population safe that its people must give up certain personal freedom.  Franklin knew that that only led to a more unsafe population where the people were in danger from its own government rather than an outside threat.  It is why The Constituation is so clear on right to privacy.  I believe our Founding Fathers knew what they were talking about. 
 
As for what I am doing about it, as soon as the bill was passed I went on a media tour for the PPA, http://www.pokerplayersalliance.org/  They are doing amazing work lobbying the lawmakers on Capitol Hill and I think they are really making a difference.  If you want your voice to be heard on this issue, please join that organization.  And let your voice be heard with your vote in the next election.
 
xo
annie

Two quick OHL questions for you—

1) Is there any decent software for this game? I know you can play it online at a couple of sites, but what about poker programs you can simply load onto your machine without having to go on the Internet, etc.?

2) Would you say OHL is the most complex form of poker (that is, among the dozen or so “popular” forms played in casinos these days)? I’ve heard a lot of people say this and would like to know your thoughts.

Thanks so much, Jordan

Hi Jordan,

Wilson Software makes a good Omaha high-low split program. I’m sure you can find it if you hunt for it online. As for whether it’s the most complex form of poker, I wouldn’t say that. It may be one of the most complicated, but a lot of your decisions are really easy, because it’s very much a game of “best hand wins.” Still, it’s never a bad idea to expand your repertoire of poker games you can play and master, so definitely go ahead and check it out. One thing: Around here, we refer to it as Omaha/8, short for Omaha high-low split, eight or better for low.

Im sure your life is swamped, but I would appreciate any advice you may be able to offer. 

I have one question. What would you recommend a poker player do if they find themselves losing a lot of tournaments with hands that are favored around 80/20. I have had people tell me, don’t call all your chips even if you know your in great position, but to find another way to win chips like stealing, bluffing, etc. or to play weaker hands to give me more chances to win hands to better protect getting knocked out. I didn’t agree with this and would like your comments.

I wish you the best of luck to you and your family in the future. Keep playing great poker!

Best Regards,

Jeremy

Jeremy – If you’re really losing hands when you have 4-1 odds in your favor, then you’re just running bad and there’s nothing you can do but weather the storm. But I wonder if that’s really the case. Only you know you, of course, but sometimes players overestimate how much ahead they are in various situations, and how often they get their money in with the best of it. The important thing is to be honest about your results, and not rely on “anecdotal evidence.” Also, you’re right about having other tools, such as bluffing and stealing, at your disposal. Remember, every time you bet, you can win two ways, by having the best hand or having the other guy fold. When you call, you only have one way to win!

xo
annie