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Online Casino Pocker

December 9, 2005

You're last to act with a Q-J. The flop was 10-9-4 of mixed suits and you're facing three opponents. The player who is first to act bets, and is called by the others. Can you raise? Sure! If the turn card is not the king or eight you're looking for, the fact that you raised may enable you to see the next card for free, as long as the bettor and subsequent callers each check.

The predictable swings are extremely volatile compared to the amount of money you can win. You might be a player who averages winning one big bet per hour in a $20 - $40 game -- that's $40 per hour; not bad work if you can get it -- but your variance per hour might be close to $200 per hour -- or more. In fact, the better a player you are, the higher your variance might be.

1. Even if you are an experienced home game player, you will find the pace of casino pocker substantially swifter than the home game variety. You probably should figure on losing money the first few times you play in a casino, if for no other reason than your own unfamiliarity with the pace of the game and a few formalized procedures, rules, and points of etiquette that are new to you.
2. Wanting to play pocker at Commerce, I arrived about four hours before I was to meet Daniel. Because of their tournaments, nearly every table at Commerce was full, and the room looked like a feeding frenzy of pocker players. They had moved the $20-$40 games out of their usual location in the top section for the duration, and were spreading only $30-$60 games and above in that locale.
3. The vast array of influencing factors make it impossible to construct a set of charts dealing with every possible contingency -- never mind the difficulties in dealing with each possible contingency in combination with every other possible influence -- and come up with a tactical solution representing the "best play" for each possible situation one might encounter in a free pocker.

This is not a question that's asked frequently, but when you consider how many hands you should play before the pocker flop, it's in important one. In a nine-handed game with randomly distributed cards, approximately eleven percent of the starting hands should favor you. That's simple, isn't it? Divide one by nine and you get 0.11, or eleven percent. Keep that guideline in mind, but remember: It's just a guideline, not an answer. It doesn't mean you should play eleven percent of your hands.

In the 1997 World Series of Pocker, Stu Ungar had been dominating the final table. He was chip leader from the start, and rather than nursing his lead while his opponents eliminated themselves, Ungar attacked early and often. Once he raised on seven successive hands in a row. Pocker bluffing? Of course he was. But none of his opponents wanted to risk early elimination to find out for sure.

That's one of the benefits of bluffing at free online pocker. Not only will you be able to steal a pot every now and then, but a failed bluff or two will serve as potent advertising. As a result, a player who bluffs every now and then can expect to make more money on his good hands too. Imagine that you're playing hold'em and you raised before the flop with Kh Qh, and two other players call.