We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us
“We have met the enemy and he is us,” is a 35-year old catch phrase injected by cartoonist Walt Kelly into the mouth of Pogo, a philosophical possum who lives in the Okefenokee Swamp and is the feature character of the comic strip that bore his name. People have so much reverence for Kelly that the town of Waycross, Georgia — located just north of the Okefenokee — holds an annual Pogofest each March. Although Walt Kelly is no longer living and the comic strip has passed into history, so many people love Pogo and Walt Kelly that the annual Pogofest serves as a gathering place for them all.

The Playing Zone
The concept of a “playing zone” is one that’s frequently alluded to by poker theorists, though more often in analyses regarding how specific hands were played, than in a broader, more conceptual context.

Staying Out of Your Own Way
When thinking about how to improve one’s poker game or doing a better job placing in tournaments - or even just sitting back to think about the game - most poker players as well as theorists who write about the game focus either tactical options and strategic responses to an opponent’s play. But sometimes the roadblocks, barriers, and thresholds we must overcome are not placed in our way by others, and they’re not in response to an action taken by an opponent. Sometimes, regardless of our intentions - or despite them - we create our problems all by ourselves.

Playing the Odds in Tournaments
I received a lot of favorable feedback about my recent column, 'Playing the Odds'. This piece expands on it by discussing the impact of odds in tournaments. Next issue we’ll look at implied odds.

Default Positioning: Bluffing
Default positioning often results in players calling too often while not folding or raising often enough. Although we talked about this last issue, it’s not the whole story. Many players have a default position where bluffing is concerned too. That’s because most people you meet around the table are looking to play their cards rather than throw them in the muck.

Default Positioning: Folding, Calling, Raising
In poker, as in life, we have default positions that help us put a lot of our decision making on autopilot so that we con concentrate on the really tough choices. We’re not unlike our computers. Every time I open Microsoft Internet Explorer, Hotsheet comes up. It’s my homepage and I don’t have to make any decisions or go through any gyrations to put it right up there on the screen in front of me. It’s my default choice, and I like it that way.

When Intuition is Dead Wrong
Whether you call it card sense or intuition, there’s more to hold’em than knowing the odds and how your opponents play. Poker intuition is like a sixth sense. But a lot of poker strategy is counterintuitive too. Like the song says, “It ain’t necessarily so.”

Playing Against a Maniac
While loose, aggressive games generate the most action, they can be frustrating too. A gaggle of players in each pot means more money when you win, but much of the time someone who shouldn’t be in the pot seems to catch a miraculous card and beat you. Sometimes it means there’s a maniac in the game. He’s the player who raises almost all the time, regardless of whether he has a hand or not. But he doesn’t win all the time, even if it sometimes seems that he does. More money is in play on every hand, and it’s going somewhere.

Playing the Odds
We can spare you the drudgery of doing arithmetic and playing poker at the same time. If memorizing this chart is not your thing, you can always multiply your outs by two, add two to that sum, and you’ll have a rough approximation of the chance that you’ll make your hand.

A Bet Saved is a Bet Won
It’s no secret that we poker players are an aggressive lot. We like to play. We want to win. We are eager. Given a chance to play a poker hand, most of us leap to the challenge. The good news is that most poker players seldom let opportunity pass them by. The bad news is that we frequently play too many hands, and play far too deeply into many of the hands we play.

Pay Attention to Your Kicker
With communal cards that belong to everybody, it’s not unusual for two hold’em players to have an identical hand except for the unpaired side card. It’s that side card, or kicker, which often spells the difference between winning and losing a pot.

Moving Up
Poker is one of the only occupations I know of where you don’t have to wait for the boss to give you a raise and a promotion; you can decide to promote yourself whenever you believe you can handle the new job. And the new job always involves playing in a tougher game against better opponents. You can win more money if you play in bigger games, but because the stakes are higher, the risks are greater too.

Ace-Rag
“How do you play ace-rag?” That’s a question you hear time after time. From beginners and skillful, time-tested tournament pros to big cash game players too — they all ask the same question. Sometimes it’s asked rhetorically, other times with a deadly serious desire to know with 100 percent certainty how to play this hand.

Jacks, Part I
No starting hand in Texas hold’em has more potential for grief than a pocket pair of jacks. Because poker is such a situationally dependent game, and “it depends” is the answer to a multitude of poker questions, pocket jacks can be thought of as the poster child for that phrase. They are a blessing and a curse, and what to do when you’re dealt a pair of jacks is not as easy as it first appears.

Jacks, Part II
Last issue, in Part 1 of this 2-part series, we examined the inherent strengths and weaknesses of a pair of jacks and learned how flop-dependent that hand really is. Now we’ll explore the best way to play that pocket pair in fixed limit games, no-limit cash games, and tournaments too.

Kojak
Kojak is the name poker players have given to the hold’em starting hand K-J. That’s probably because the “K” and the “J” look like a shorthand form of “Kojak,” but it might also have something to do with the fact that the late Telly Savalas — who played the tough, shaved-head-before-it-was-a-style-statement, Lt. Theo Kojak, who loved lollypops and the catch phrase, “Who loves ya, baby?" — was a skilled and dedicated poker player long before poker became the latest thing for the Hollywood set.

Backing Up
“Most of the time I call a bet on the river, I lose,” I was told by someone who decided to chat me up at a local casino and ask a few poker questions in the process. “I know I’m stubborn,” he said, “but I just don’t like to let go of a hand when I go that far with it. Besides, if my opponent bets and he’s bluffing, I’ve lost the entire pot if I fold, but it only costs me one additional bet to call his hand.”

Tales of the Vegas Virgins
I spent a month in Las Vegas earlier this year filming a TV show called Vegas Virgins. During my time there, I kept a detailed journal because I'd never been part of a television production before. I did it to keep a current and accurate record of what I did, and also to turn it into a lengthy article for a magazine. Fifth Street Magazine was interested in running the piece, but they folded before this got into print. So there I was, left with a 10,000-word article and no place to go with it. While all of the other articles on my web site were published elsewhere, Tales of the Vegas Virgins is making it's debut right here on my website. I hope you enjoy it.

Scoping Out A New Game
Sometimes you'll walk into a casino and find a choice of games available to you, and whenever you do, one your most important poker playing decisions will occur even before the first hand is dealt: You'll have to select a table. You have that same decision to make when you play online too, and it's even easier because there is usually more than one game at the betting limits you prefer.

It's important to spend some time checking over the game you're playing in when you first sit down. In fact, if you have a good vantage point, you should be clocking the game even before you are seated at the table. Fifteen to twenty minutes should be time enough to get a good handle on your opponents if you know what to look for.

Playing Against A Maniac
"How should I play when there's a maniac at the table?" Good question! We all know what a maniac is. He is overly aggressive, and that's putting it mildly. If "be selective but be aggressive" is poker's underlying mantra, the maniac is the guy who's half way there. He's aggressive, all right. But he missed out on the selective part of this lesson entirely.

Although even casual players realize that unmitigated aggression is a blueprint for losing money at least it will be in the long run a maniac's presence at the table really does affect one's choice of starting hands as well as other strategic decisions during the play of a hand. Moreover, maniacs seem to intimidate many players, and even though these players realize they'll make more money in the long run because of a maniac's presence in the game, many of them long for quieter games with less visceral impact.

Just Showing Up
One of my favorite expressions is the oft-quoted: "Ninety percent of success is just showing up." Do you want to guarantee that you'll succeed in life? Just show up. Go to school, study hard, get a degree, land a job, work hard, keep your shoulder to the wheel, and you've just about guaranteed yourself a nice, middle-class livelihood.

Just showing up works in poker too. Showing up means more than just getting up to play poker each and everyday. If you want to ensure that you become a winning player - and that's nothing to sneeze at, because even if you never go on to be a tournament legend or a TV star, you'll be better by far than the estimated ninety percent of poker players who are lifelong losing players - you have to keep working on your game.

Poker Hands You're Bound to Go Broke On
Sometimes there's nothing you can do absolutely nothing to avoid going broke in a poker tournament. It's just poker's nature, and while many players replay hands like these over and over in their heads, there's not much to be gained from it. Sometimes it's just destiny, and you're bound to lose all your chips, no two ways about it. This recently happened to me twice on the same day.

Counterintuitive Strategy
All great hold'em players have a feel for the game. Whether you call it card sense or intuition, it's clear there's more to hold'em than knowing the odds, and reading your opponents. While you can't see it, touch it, or bottle it, poker intuition is like a sixth sense. But it's not really exotic; it's more like poker-specific common sense. And it's not limited to poker, either. Crafty boxers are described as "ring-wise," and clever basketball players are said to possess great "court sense."

But in hold'em, there's a lot of strategy that's counterintuitive. Until recently I'd never thought much about this. Frankly, I don't think most other players have either. But once I became aware of this and the gates opened, a veritable flood of ideas poured in.

Are Women Luckier Poker Players than Men?
My wife, Deirdre, claims to be luckier than most people. She believes in the luck of the Irish, and because she was born way over in Ireland's west, in Sligo, to be precise. She believes herself luckier than most, and is fond of telling me that if she took poker as seriously as I do, that she'd be much luckier at the game than I am.

I agree with her, but not because of the luck of the Irish or anything as fanciful as that. It's because I try to take as much luck out of poker's equation as I can. And even if I am not able to relegate luck to the back row, where it rightly belongs, I will never be perceived to be as lucky as she is, for a variety of reasons. Some of these reasons relate directly to poker, while others relate only peripherally…

Playing Backwards
"Playing backwards" isn't something you see too much of in lower limit games, nor in very high limit games. Where you do tend to find this phenomenon is in mid-limit games, and it's generally practiced by good players, who are not yet great players, but think they know more than they really do. For some reason many good-but-not-great players go through a phase of checking the kinds of hands they really ought to have been betting, and betting when they should have checked or folded.

More About Betting Patterns
If you examine your own play, as well as that of your opponents, one pattern of particular interest is how often you or your opponent calls a bet on the river. Calling too frequently, only to find that the call was made with a losing hand, cries out for some corrective action if you're the one calling and losing most of the time.On the other hand, if your opponent is calling and losing most of the time, you can profitably increase your betting propensity on the river...

The Playing Zone
Visualizing a playing zone enables the analytical player to zoom in on how likely some cards are to help opponents, while understanding that others might not help at all. Suppose you’re playing $20-$40 hold’em with A-Q in the big blind and someone raises. You call, along with a few others. The flop is Qs-Jd-Tc. So…do you like your hand? You’ve flopped top pair with top kicker, and that combination wins plenty of hold’em confrontations. But there are dark clouds too. Those three cards that flopped were all in the playing zone – that area where many other active players are likely to have holdings.

Folding, Part I
It's not glamorous. It's not memorable, but it is our basic bread and butter play, and we do it more often than we do anything else. We fold. While we're used to reading about those big confrontations upon which reputations are made and myths are created, there's generally a lot of down time between watershed events. It's high time we created a better appreciation for the unglamorous act of laying your hand down, avoiding the fray for the time being, and saving your money for a better situation.

Folding, Part II
The single biggest mistake made by most poker players is that they call when they should have folded. After all, most recreational players come to play – not to lay down their hands –and many get involved in pots with weak, unplayable starting hands.

Domination
You'll find entire books on poker strategy based primarily on the concept of making hands that dominate those held by your opponent, and avoiding situations where yours in the hand being dominated. If this concept is new to you, here's how it works. If I'm holding A-10, and you have A-K, my hand is dominated. Miraculous straights and flushes that might accrue to A-10 notwithstanding, I have three outs and three outs only to win this pot.

A Cheat Sheet for First-Time Casino Poker Players
I lived on cheat sheets in high school and college. Maybe you did too. Cheat sheets were little three by five index cards crammed full of all manner of information needed for the next exam. These little study aids helped me get over. They got me into college, and into grad school too. You can use this same process to improve your poker, particularly if you are new to the game, or are about to make the jump from kitchen-table poker to the faster paced casino game.

Betting Patterns
Are there identifiable betting patterns you can spot in a poker game, and can you use this knowledge to gain an edge on the opposition as well as to improve your own game?  Awareness of betting patterns serves a number of purposes that run the gamut from tracking the playing styles of your adversaries to tracking down some parts of your own game that may need improvement. 

Why TV Poker Can Give Bad Advice

We'll all look back on 2003 as a watershed year for poker; the year it exploded in popularity. Some say it's the advent of the "lipstick camera" ¾ a tiny device that shows each participant's hand to the TV audience and allows viewers to think along with the pros who are up there on center stage competing for million dollar payoffs ¾ that accounts for poker's new found popularity. Others will tell you that poker is a game whose time has come. Be that as it may, the current fascination with poker is guaranteed to accomplish two things: First, it will send droves of new players into casinos and cardrooms everywhere, just aching to be dealt in. Second, if they learned their poker from watching TV, they learned wrong!

Pot Odds Made Easy

Figuring pot odds is a necessary part of any poker player's game. Without it, we don't have any way of knowing whether the odds against making our hand are offset by this fundamental relationship: How much will it cost to keep playing this hand and how much money am I likely to win if I catch the card I need? By understanding the relationship between the odds against making our hand and the money we figure to win if we get lucky, we can play skillful high percentage poker instead of treating the game like some form of gambling.

Because some players have difficulty with the concept of pot odds and others stumble over the practical task of calculating them in the heat of battle, it's time to demystify and sweep out whatever confusion still surrounds this subject. Best of all, no arithmetic is required at all because a handy chart is included to help new and experienced players alike.