THE BIGGEST AND BEST ONLINE POKER BONUS

Becoming a Complete Poker Player

If you want to become a complete poker player, you need to learn how to play all the variations of the game. You should do this because it’s no good being the world’s best Hold ’em player when the biggest sucker in town only wants to play Seven-Card Stud. Ideally, you want to be able to play whatever game looks to be the most profitable on any given day.

When I first started playing poker, Five-Card Stud and Five-Card Draw were two of the most popular games, but now they’re both almost completely dead. They got replaced by Seven-Card Stud, which has also decreased in popularity. For a while No-Limit Hold ’em looked like it might be dying out because in the high-stakes cash games the tightest players always won, but it proved to be the perfect game for television so now it’s the most popular game. Because of how prevalent Hold ’em has become, I would advise beginning poker players to start out by learning its many variations, including Limit, No-Limit, cash games, and tournaments.

After Hold ’em, you should learn how to play Omaha, particularly Pot-Limit. Limit Omaha doesn’t work very well because deciding whether or not to call a bet on the river when a third flush card hits and you make a Queen-high flush isn’t a very big decision if you only have to call one bet and there are twelve in the pot. But if you’re playing Pot-Limit and your opponent bets the size of the pot on the river, whether you should call with your Queen-high flush or not becomes a much more difficult decision. In general, Pot-Limit games require a bit more skill than No-Limit games. Because you don’t have the all-in move to fall back on, you have to be equally capable of playing before the flop and after the flop.

Next you should learn the Hi/Lo games, particularly Stud Hi/Lo and Omaha Hi/Lo. Another good game is 2-7 Triple Draw, a tremendous action game that’s catching on very quickly. Like the best card games, it has a lot of mathematical elements to it, but there’s also a lot of card reading and bluffing involved. In 2-7, a drawing hand with one card to come is almost always an underdog to a hand that stands pat, so if you have a 9 and you can force your opponent to break his 9 you’ve gained a big advantage.

Beginning poker players are lucky nowadays because they can learn and practice all these games online. When I was starting out, most poker games were private games and you had to pay your dues just to get invited to play. If you were a winning player and you wanted to get invited back, you needed to show up on time, be nice to the suckers, and you couldn’t quit when you were winning a little bit. Even then, there might not be a place at the table for you the following week.

Contrast that with today’s world where you can play on your computer at home any time you want. Playing online offers an unprecedented level of convenience. Let’s say you’re about to go the movies and your girlfriend’s just gotten out of the shower but she’s taking forever to dry her hair. You can actually play an entire Sit & Go while you’re waiting for her. Sit & Gos can be very profitable. They’re also an ideal way to test out new strategies. By studying your hand history afterwards, you can see what worked and what didn’t. You can make notes about how you fared with a big stack and how you did with a short stack, and you can develop new ideas to try out in the future.

I still enjoy playing live because one of my skills is the ability to read people, but there are little tricks you can pick up that will help you gather information about your opponents when you’re playing online. If you’re playing at a single table and one of your opponents is multi-tabling, you can bring up all the tables he’s sitting at and watch how he plays. If he suffers a bad beat on another table, it could affect the way he plays a hand at your table, and you can take advantage of it.

For beginning players, online poker offers a convenient way of gaining a ton of experience in a very short period of time. If you choose to go this route, I suggest you take the time to learn all the games available to you so you’ll never have to pass up an opportunity to play against a big sucker just because he wants to play a game you’re unfamiliar with.

Steve Zolotow

Online Poker Rooms more often than not will offer a sign up bonus as an incentive for you to join their sites. For many experienced online players bonuses offer a genuine and dependable source of income. If played right, poker bonus codes, reload bonuses and sign up bonuses can be used to reap huge rewards but even if not, they’re sure to provide you with a bit of free cash to lay down at the tables.

What is a Bonus?

Most online poker sites offer two types of bonus, a sign up bonus and a reload bonus. In this article we are going to discuss sign up bonuses. Unlike reload bonuses sign up bonuses offer the cash on first creating your online account and making your first deposit rather than to existing customers. Typically the bonuses offered range from about $50 – $1000. Right now however Hollywood Poker is offering a 1000% bonus up to $5000. The amount of the bonus actually received will be dependant upon the amount of your initial deposit. For example, a $600 bonus (specified as 100% matched) will give you $600 for an initial $600 deposit. If you were to only deposit $300 the matching bonus would be 100% of your deposit or $300 rather than the advertised $600. The same bonus, specified as 50% matched would only give you $300 for a $600 initial deposit. On the other hand, some major sites offer absolutely huge bonuses. For example. Absolute Poker is currently offering 150% bonus up to $500. For every $100 you initially deposit you will receive $150! So, as you can see, by just breaking even in online poker rooms you can take home some additional free cash.

How does a player Qualify to Receive the Bonus?

Most bonuses require you to play a certain number of hands or rake a specific amount of money in order to qualify. Make sure you always know what this is before you start playing. It is worth bearing in mind that most larger bonuses are harder to clear, while some of the smaller ones are surprisingly easy to claim.

Why do Poker Sites Offer These Bonuses?

Most savvy bonus hunters play the required number of hands or rake the required amount of money and then repeat the process at another online poker site. However, for every one person who does this, there will always be considerably more people who keep on playing at the same room. So in the long run, offering a bonus, however big, is a worthwhile thing for poker sites to do. If you want to make dependable money from bonuses, the trick is knowing when to cash-out and move on to the next site.

Most experienced bonus hunters will try and play the number of required hands as soon as they can by playing at as many tables at once as possible. This is a great technique for an experienced player who can keep up with multiple tables and the quickest way to pick up and clear a sign up bonus. Many players feel more confident when playing with the safeguard of someone else’s, the poker sites, money, so you may find you perform better and more confidently when doing so.

Summary

If you are a half decent player, there is a lot of money to be made by playing with online bonuses. Make sure you know when to stop and always read the terms and conditions and you could find yourself making a surprising amount of money relatively easily. Here at YourPokerBonusGuide we have been taking advantage of online poker bonuses for some time. Why not try playing one bonus through every day and see how much you can make in a week! If the sites require a code they will say so, if not just use the link provided on our Poker Reviews/Bonus page.

Good luck!

 
Pre-Game Online Tells 

When most poker players think about tells, they visualize physical actions that occur at the table. For example, the way an opponent’s hands start shaking whenever he has the nuts or the way he handles his chips in certain situations. Online players don’t have this sort of information to work with, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t tells in online play. There’s actually a great deal of information that an observant player can pick up on, and much of it can be discovered before you even sit down at a table. I call these important first impressions “pre-game tells.”

One of the most important pre-game tells is the size of your opponent’s buy-in. Whenever I sit down at a table, the first thing I look at is how much my opponents have bought in for in relation to the maximum amount allowed at that table. Most advanced players tend to buy in for as close to the table maximum as possible. They prefer to have as many chips on the table as they can, which gives them plenty of ammunition for bullying their opponents, bluffing, and semi-bluffing. 

Weaker and inexperienced players are more inclined to buy in for a much smaller amount, often closer to the table minimum. By buying in short, weaker players are hoping to protect themselves from suffering a huge loss. What they don’t realize is that the more experienced players at the table are going to pick up on this sign of weakness. When I’m selecting a table, these are the types of players I’m looking to sit next to because they generally play scared.  Be careful, though, because there are players who buy in for less than the table maximum that are actually winning players. 

When you’re playing on Full Tilt Poker, you can also gauge how experienced your opponents are by simply looking around the table and observing if any of the players possess an Iron Man chip. This chip is awarded to players who play a certain amount of hands each day, in effect rewarding them for being grinders. Because these players play so often, they have spent many hours working on their games and they tend to be some of the better players on the site.  If you are able to earn an Iron Man chip yourself, you may consider removing the icon so you don’t advertise that you are a serious player. 

Another way to find more information about the players sitting at your table is to use Full Tilt Poker’s “Find a Player” feature. Simply click on the “Requests” tab in the lobby, select “Find a Player” and then type in your opponents’ screen names. By doing this, you can find out how many tables each of your opponents is sitting at, which can be an extremely telling bit of information. If one of your opponents is multi-tabling, playing at four or more tables at once, he will generally be a solid player, and quite often you will find that players who play this many tables at once are professionals. 

When you add all this information together, it can tell you a great deal about a certain player’s level of experience. If the player you’re interested in bought in for the maximum amount, is sporting an Iron Man chip next to his avatar and is playing at eight tables at once, all signs point towards him being a very solid player, which is something you should keep in mind when you are playing a pot against this player. If most of the table fits this description, you might even consider selecting a different table to play at. On the other hand, if a player bought in for half of the maximum buy-in, doesn’t have an Iron Man Chip, and is only playing at one table, chances are he’s an inexperienced player and you’ll probably want to play as many pots with him as you can. 

Because all of this information can be gleaned before you even play a single hand, you would be wise to use it when deciding which table you want to play at. Doing this will greatly increase your chances of having a winning session.

 Taylor Caby

The Suicidal End Bluff

Bluffing in Limit Hold ’em is nothing like bluffing in No-Limit Hold ’em. In a Limit game, you can rarely price an opponent out of the pot if he has any kind of a made hand or draw. Sometimes you’ll try a bluff on the river because your opponent can no longer chase, but even so, his pot odds are usually so overwhelming that he’ll call with a weak hand.

Although bluffing in Limit Hold ’em is difficult, all good players understand that they need to do it on occasion. But there happens to be one situation where bluffing is absolutely never advisable, which I like to call the “suicidal end bluff” and see it used all too often.

Here’s a classic example of a suicidal end bluff from a $15/$30 Limit Hold ’em game I was playing. The player in second position opened for a raise to $30. I was in third position with pocket Queens and re-raised to $45. The player to my left capped the betting by re-raising to $60. It folded around to the big blind, and he made the call for $45 more. That’s a big call to make – you should never be calling three more bets out of position unless you have a premium hand – so he had to have either a huge hand or he was a weak player making a big mistake. In any case, the original raiser called $30 more, I called $15 and we headed to the flop four-handed. 

The flop came 8h-6d-7h, a highly coordinated board. It wasn’t the greatest flop for Q-Q. If someone was totally out of line with 10-9, they flopped the nuts. If someone had the A-K of hearts, they were actually a favorite over my hand. And someone could have had a set of sixes, sevens or eights. But at the same time, I still had an over-pair to the board, so it certainly wasn’t the worst flop imaginable. 

The player in the big blind checked, the initial raiser checked, and I decided to bet out, putting $15 into a pot of $250. I knew I couldn’t get rid of any draws, but I wanted to maybe thin the field by getting rid of a player with just a random Ace or King. After I bet $15, the player behind me raised to $30 and then the big blind re-raised to $45. The player to my right folded, and the action was back on me. And here’s a key concept: because I could close the action and show strength, I capped it to $60, rather than just calling, as I would have done if there were additional raises available behind me. The player to my left folded, and the big blind called $15 more. 

So, now it was just me and the big blind – the player who called three extra bets pre-flop and check-raised the flop – going to the turn. 

The turn was a great card for me, the 3c. It didn’t complete any draws; any hand that was worse than mine on the flop was still worse than mine on the turn. My opponent checked, I bet $30 and he called. And I must admit that I had no idea what hand he could possibly have at this point. My best guess was that he had a draw, because a lot of people will play their draws aggressively on the flop and then slow down on the turn when they miss.

The river brought the 7d, pairing the board. If he held a seven, then he just made the best hand, but I couldn’t really think of a hand where he had a seven. He checked, which really made it clear he didn’t have a seven. If he had a seven, wouldn’t he bet there to guarantee I’d have to call behind him and not check behind him? Confident that I had the best hand, I bet my queens for $30 more into a pot of $460. And he surprised me by check-raising to $60. 

Naturally, it crossed my mind that he could have had A-7 or a full house, but this was a situation where, even if I suspected I was beat, I had to call $30 with the pot at $550. So I called, and what was his hand? Jh-9c.

His first mistake: calling $45 more from the big blind pre-flop with J-9 off-suit when other players had shown tremendous strength. His second mistake: semi-bluffing the flop and getting involved in a capped pot, which was way too aggressive with only an up-and-down straight draw.

But his biggest mistake came on the end. He’d totally whiffed and checked. I bet and he tried the check-raise bluff. With the strength that I’d shown, what hands could I possibly have had that I’d fold for $30 more there? He threw away $60 on the river, plain and simple. This was the very definition of the suicidal end bluff. 

In No-Limit Hold ‘em, a big bluff would have a chance of working in that spot. But in Limit Hold ’em, you have to recognize situations where a bluff just won’t work. Fold your hand, and save yourself a lot of money.

Adam Schoenfeld

Steaming is bad but pretending to steam isn’t

I’ve been playing poker for 23 years, and one thing I can say about my play with great pride is that I never steam. In fact, that’s true of a lot of pros. In general, the more experienced a player is, the less likely he or she is to have a steam factor.

But because your opponents might not realize that you don’t go on tilt, one of the most profitable plays in poker is the “fake steam.” If you’ve just taken a really bad beat, the other players at the table might expect you to enter the next pot with a weak hand or try to run a bluff because you’re not thinking clearly. And if you actually pick up a strong hand in this situation, you need to recognize how everyone else views you and play accordingly. 

Just recently, I was playing in a No-Limit Hold ’em tournament and fairly early on, I picked up pocket Kings. I went to war with them and, wouldn’t you know, I lost the pot to someone holding J-8.

On the very next hand, with blinds at 20/40 and my stack below average at about 2,700, I was in the big blind with pocket threes. Four players limped in, the small blind folded, and I checked. The flop came A-2-3, giving me middle set. I checked, everyone else checked too, and then the button put out a bet of 140 into a 220 pot. I took my time and smooth-called, and everyone else folded.

The turn was an inconsequential card, a ten. I checked again, and now the button bet 300 into a pot of 500. This is where I sprung into action with my fake-steam plan. I was confident my hand was good, since the only hands that could beat me were pocket Aces (which he would have raised with pre-flop), pocket tens (which he would have raised with pre-flop), or 4-5. If he flopped the nut straight, then that’s just unlucky for me, but realistically, I believed my hand was best. So what I did was push in a big raise, but not quite all of my chips. I raised to 1,900, leaving 625 behind. 

I was trying to get into his head and confuse him, because I knew he thought I was on tilt and he thought I didn’t have a real hand. I raised enough to make it look like I was trying to steal the pot, but by not pushing all in, I hoped it would give the impression that I wanted to save some chips in case he called my “bluff.”
 
Immediately, he re-raised me for my last 625 chips, I called, and it turned out he just had K-2. The only possible excuse for him thinking bottom pair was good in that spot was that he was sure I was steaming and stealing.

If he really knew me well, he would have known that I don’t steam. He would have known that I don’t let my emotions dictate my actions.

But not everyone you play against is going to understand how to read you, so if you can accurately interpret how they think you’re playing, you can use that to your advantage and take their chips.

Esther Rossi