Home » Articles »

Hockey Pocker

June 21, 2006

The Pocker Hall of Fame received a Hockey Pocker from the Stanley Cup finals. The NHL will giveaway more at the no-limit Texas Holdem events at the WSOP.

1. Ariki, which means first-born chief in Maori, the native language of New Zealand. The event (heald at the Mardi Gras Casino), to be televised on NBC, is expected to exceed last year's Nielson ratings of over 25 million viewers a week. Over 50 million viewers are expected to see Joshua celebrate his tremendous victory at the final table. Joshua, playing in his first Fantasy Poker Challenge, is the son of the 2008 WSOP champion and pocker author, Matthew Hilger.
2. As a final note, try not to give tells about your own play to your opponents. There are two ways to do this. One way is to simply bet at the same speed throughout every hand. Another way is to randomly change the speed of your betting. For example, if the last card shown is a red card, you act after two seconds, and if it is a black card, you act after four seconds. This strategy will confuse your more observant opponents who are looking for tells and can't find any.
3. Thank the pocker gods for bad players! Bad beats are a good pocker player's best friend. Don't dwell on bad beats. This is part of the game and its important to take bad beats with the right attitude, which leads me to my last point. I used to do this all the time. It's late at night and all I wanted to do was go to bed even. When you think like this, you'll play a few more hands than you should and make bad calls. You can always get back to even tomorrow or the day after. I try to think of my results in terms of months.

I was involved in a hand at the New Zealand pocker championships a couple of years ago when I knew I was beat but was absolutely confident that it really didn't matter. We were in the first few levels of the championship when this hand came up. I raised under-the-gun with 33 with a standard size raise of about 3 times the big blind. It was folded around to the small blind who called. The flop came up 652 and the small blind bet out about half the size of the pot.

For the pocker player, satisfaction comes in knowing that you have outplayed your opponent. Unfortunately, many pocker players get themselves in trouble by bluffing too often. This is even truer on the Internet than in live games. Bluffing a lot is just not a profitable endeavor on the Internet, especially in the low-limit games where you frequently have hands go to showdowns.

At Poker Stars, betting could be correct since you will win over 50% of the time when your opponent calls with a weak pair. The reasoning however is different. You check if you believe your opponent was on a draw, and you bet if you are reasonably confident that your opponent will call with a weaker hand than a pair of kings. You need more than a 50% chance of winning when there is the risk that your opponent could raise with a better hand and you would call.