Pokerstars Million Dollar Challenge

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208

Hands You Want To Play … But Shouldn’t

Phil Gordon

December 22nd, 2009

Even the best poker players in the world make mistakes, and when these mistakes are not corrected, they can develop into "leaks" that can easily sink your game. There are two leaks in particular that I see all the time with regard to Hold ’em starting hands that people play but would be better off folding.
The first of these two leaks involves playing easily dominated hands. Domination in Texas Hold ’em is death, so you must make an effort to fold potentially dominated hands pre-flop if another player has voluntarily entered the pot.
This concept spins off of David Sklansky’s "Gap Principle", which essentially says that the range of hands you’re willing to raise with should be wider than the range of hands you’re willing to call with.
For instance, if everyone folds to me and I have K-Q off-suit on the button, I’m going to raise. It’s likely the best hand, and I give myself a chance to steal the blinds. However, if a middle position player raises before the flop, I’m going to throw that K-Q away quickly. That K-Q is very easily dominated by the hands my opponent is likely to raise with in middle position, such as A-K, pocket Kings, pocket Aces, pocket Queens, and A-Q. These are hands that K-Q will have a very difficult time beating, and if we both flop a pair, I could be in severe trouble and lose my entire stack.
To further illustrate this point, here’s a mathematical look at why a theoretically powerful hand, if dominated, is worse than playing random rags. Say my opponent raises in first position with A-K and it folds around to me on the button with 7-2 off-suit, the worst hand in poker. If I call there, I’m about a 65-35 underdog.
Now let’s say I have A-Q on the button facing that same raise from A-K. Now my hand is about a 75-25 underdog, which is significantly worse than if I had 7-2.
It’s not easy to fold A-Q to a single raise pre-flop, but if the raise is coming from early position and you have reason to believe your opponent has a premium hand, A-Q could easily be dominated. More to the point, that next tier of starting hands—K-Q, Q-J, Q-10, K-10, K-J—those are hands you should just throw away if your opponent opens the pot for a raise.
The other leak involving starting hands that I see frequently is overvaluing suited hands. I see players with A-5 suited or 8-7 suited and they play the hands because they think they might flop a flush. In reality, when you’re suited you will only flop a flush about one out of 121 times. That’s about 0.84 percent of the time. It does not happen very often. And even when it does happen, you’re not likely to win a big pot.
If you take a hand like A-5 suited and compare it to A-5 off-suit, in reality, against the range of hands your opponent might be playing, it only adds about two to three percent to your expectation of making the best hand.
So don’t be fooled by being suited. Just because the hand is suited does not mean that it is playable. The ranks of the cards are much more important than whether or not your hand is suited.
When making your pre-flop decisions, if you can resist the urge to play hands that are likely dominated and resist the urge to play mediocre suited cards, I think you’ll find yourself playing a more profitable brand of poker in the long run.

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Karmakrazy13 Poker Tournament Part 5

Karmakrazy13 Poker Tournament Part 4

Poker Players Give Back

Poker Players Give Back

Annie Duke showed that professional poker players have heart when it comes to raising money for charity. In last season's Celebrity Apprentice which she won - okay, she finished second to Joan Rivers - Annie raised about $500,000 in charitable contributions from the poker world. Way to go, Annie!

In that same spirit, I hosted and/or emceed four charity tournaments in a single week last month. In Montreal for an event benefiting the Starlight Foundation, we raised over $250,000 for children in need. Then, in Manhattan, I helped emcee Roy "The Oracle" Winston's charity event on Wall Street. The next night, at an event in Philadelphia, we raised $1 million in one night for the Children's Hospital.

Finally, I was joined by twenty other pro poker players and a slew of big-name celebrities for a weekend of poker and golf in Phoenix to benefit the Fallen Officers Foundation. We raised about $500,000 for this organization that supports families of officers killed in the line of duty www.holdemforheroes.com.

Antonio "The Magician" Esfandiari won the main event in Phoenix and fellow poker pro Jeff Madsen finished second. Then came the so-called Winners Tournament where the top two finishers in each of the four charity events and I squared off for a $10,000 seat at the 2010 World Series of Poker Main Event.

Blinds were $100/$200 when I opened for $600 with 6-6 from early position. Jeff Madsen, sitting directly to my left, called with A-A.

The flop came 7-7-6. Bingo! I checked and so did Jeff.

A deuce hit on the turn and I bet $800. Madsen called.

A ten popped off on the river and I tossed in $1,200. Jeff studied the situation. Even though he recognized that I only had $2,200 left, he just called.

I told Jeff that he played the hand masterfully, managing to lose only the absolute minimum.

Let's break this hand down.

My opening $600 raise was standard however Madsen's smooth pre-flop call with pocket aces was a very advanced play. He was attempting to trap one of the players behind him - including me.

I like Jeff's play, especially because the table was filled with aggressive players. Jeff reasonably expected that one player would reraise or at least overplay his hand after the flop.

My check on the flop was just okay. A bet might have been better as everyone seems to expect a continuation bet these days. As it turns out, my check probably revealed some of my strength to Jeff.

Madsen's check behind me on the flop was solid. He checked for the same reason I did on the flop; he was trying to trap. His check was designed both to signal weakness and tempt me to bet on the turn with a weak hand, or even bluff.

On the turn, I like my smallish $800 bet. I was trying to make it easy for Jeff to call with a hand like A-Q, or even give him a chance to attempt a bluff.

His smooth call on the turn was a good play. He probably thought he had the best hand and that I may have been bluffing.

My $1,200 bet on the river was decent. How could I know that he had an overpair and that he'd only call with A-A? My bet was designed to get maximum value for my full house.

Madsen's smooth call on the river was great but I'd never recommend that sort of play unless you've got an unbelievable read on your opponent. Obviously, Madsen had that kind of read on me.

An all-in raise was the standard move for a player in Jeff's position, especially considering that I only had $2,200 remaining. I definitely prefer the all-in move unless you possess Jeff Madsen-like reading skills!

-Phil Hellmuth

207

What Not To Do With a Short Stack

Erick Lindgren

December 8th, 2009

When you’re on the extreme short stack in a tournament, there isn’t always a “right” decision to make. You’ll find yourself in a lot of marginal spots, such as holding an A-9 off-suit in early position or maybe holding a small pair when someone in front of you has already raised. With those hands, it’s never clear whether the better move is to shove and cross your fingers or just fold and wait for a better spot.
There are, however, some very “wrong” decisions to make when you’re on the extreme short stack, and I saw one of them on display in a tournament I played on Full Tilt Poker a short time ago.
We were at the final table of a tournament with six players remaining, the blinds were 50K/100K with a 10K ante and I was the chip leader with more than 8,000,000 in chips. The average stack was about 3,000,000, and the player directly to my right was the shortest stack by far with 811,000.
When you have eight big blinds, which in this case wasn’t even enough chips for four revolutions around the table, the logic is simple: You only enter a pot voluntarily if you have cards that you’re willing to go all the way with pre-flop.
On this hand, the short stack entered the pot for a raise to 250,000 under the gun. The fact that he didn’t just move all in suggested he was being a little bit tricky. He could have had a monster, or he could have just been trying to make it look like he had a monster. A lot of players will make that play with a hand like J-10 suited, hoping other players might call but not re-raise, allowing them to see a flop. But it’s not a play I endorse. When you’re down to eight big blinds, you should be playing all-in-or-fold poker.
In any case, I picked up a strong hand, A-Q off-suit. I just went ahead and moved in my stack, figuring if someone behind me has a bigger hand, so be it, but I wanted to isolate and try to eliminate the short stack.
And this was when my opponent made an even worse play than raising small under the gun: He folded to my re-raise.
There was 1,270,000 in the pot and it would have cost him 561,000 to call. Folding was simply the wrong play. He should have called with any two cards. He had already committed too much money to the pot to fold his hand. If he was getting cute with a medium suited connector, then he was only about a 60-40 underdog. If he was playing a weak ace, then technically he wasn’t getting the right odds to call, but he would need to know for a fact that he’s dominated in order to correctly lay his hand down.
And it’s important to note that I was the big stack and I’d been very active. He didn’t necessarily have to give me credit for a premium hand.
By folding, my opponent left himself with only 561,000 in chips, less than six big blinds, and the big blind was going to be on him the next hand. He was going to be forced to take a stand, but he would be doing so for a lot less money than would have been the case on the previous hand. Instead of trying his luck against me for a pot of more than 1.8-million, a double-up on the next hand would only increase his stack to 1.2-million.
The lesson is simple: When you’re extremely short-stacked, raising and then folding pre-flop shouldn’t be an option. Either a hand is good enough to play for all of your chips, or you throw it into the muck. The worst thing you can do is attempt something in between those two extremes.

Deal Me In with Daniel Negreanu

Deal Me In with Daniel Negreanu

Here’s another excerpt from my new book, Deal Me In, written by my friend and perennial fan-favorite poker professional, Daniel Negreanu. I hope you enjoy it:

I can remember going to the mall in Toronto with my brother and parents and just staring at people. I guess all kids do that, but there was more to it for me than just staring at things that were new to me. I was, at just five years old, trying to figure people out. I was a people watcher then and I’m a people watcher to this day.

I still do that sort of thing when I go to the mall. I can’t help myself, I’ve always been intrigued by people and want to know what makes them tick. It just so happens that doing that kind of thing is excellent training for the poker table.

My affinity for people, numbers, and competition eventually brought me into poker. I’d never played the game as a kid; my first taste of poker was through my buddies at the pool hall. One night after a snooker tournament, I got invited to a house game. They were playing all kinds of crazy wild card games like Kings and Little Ones, Follow the Queen, In Between and 7/27.  

It didn’t take long before I lost my $10 and ended up chilling on the couch, just hanging out. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing.  

There was one guy in the game, an Asian kid named John Seto, who seemed to win almost every night. I’d watch him and he’d just sit there the whole night and maybe play four or five hands and that’s it.

I thought, how can you win if you don’t play?

Well, I learned my first valuable lesson from Seto: Don’t play if you don’t have the best of it. Be patient and wait for good hands.

When I turned twenty-one, there was only one place I wanted to be: Las Vegas. I’d planned on going there in 1996 to become the youngest ever WSOP champion. My first problem was that I didn’t have the $10,000 buy-in so I played in a super-satellite.

The satellite gave away eleven seats to the Main Event, and with 13 players left, I was looking good. A player went all-in, then I went all-in with pocket aces, and then another player called with A-K.

A-A against J-J and A-K! I was on my way to the Big Dance!

Nope, the first card I saw was a jack. I was devastated. Playing in the WSOP just wasn’t going to happen for me. Huck Seed won it that year and I couldn’t even bear to watch. I wanted to be in the event, not a spectator.

By late-2003, I had it all figured out. I realized not only that I should have more money but that I needed to get my priorities in order and stop being a screw-up.

The timing was pretty good. In 2004 I tore up the tournament scene, putting together a year that will be tough to duplicate. At the WSOP, I won my third bracelet and Player of the Year honors. Immediately after, I won the $10,000 buy-in event at the Sands against one of the toughest fields I’d ever faced. Later in the year, I won the $10,000 WPT event at the Borgata, and then did it again in December, winning the $15,000 WPT event at the Bellagio.

I’d like to be remembered as a guy who put the best interests of the game before my own and as a guy who obviously had a lot of fun at the poker table.

The rest of Daniel Negreanu's story, plus many others, are in Deal Me In, the new book by Phil Hellmuth, available at www.pokerbrat.com.

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The Youtube Poker Challenge Part 5

Add Starting Hands to Your Repertoire

Add Starting Hands to Your Repertoire

by Daniel Negreanu

You have to play more hands than usual to be successful in tournament poker. While a conservative approach can help you squeak into the money, the only way to win is to mix it up and get involved with a wider range of starting hands.

So, the question is, which hands should I add to my repertoire?

Well, the truth is that you should add hands that you feel comfortable playing because it’s likely you’ll make confident decisions with them after the flop.

 

A lot of players will add hands like Ac-8d in steal position when they try to attack the blinds.  Now, I’m not completely opposed to playing these types of hands, but only in certain situations. The problem is that ace-rag hands are extremely difficult to play after the flop. The decisions you’ll face with them become much more complex. 

 

Consider these problems if you do get called with an ace-rag hand:

•  If an ace comes on the flop, you’ll have to worry about your weak kicker.
• You probably won’t get called by a player with a weaker ace-high hand. And, if the flop were     to come A-7-2 and an opponent does call, he’s probably got you beat.
• Face it; most flops just aren’t going to help anyway.
• Your ace-rag hand can put you in a tricky situation where you make a bad call, merely hoping that your opponent is running a bluff. 

Another set of starting hands that can be added include such combos as K-5 suited or Q-7 suited but these hands have problems of their own.

 

Say you get lucky and make your flush with the suited K-5 or Q-7. It would be almost impossible to avoid losing a huge stack of chips to any opponent who hung on to his ace -- a commonly made play -- and ultimately made the nut flush.

 

Of course, you’d have kicker trouble with the suited K-5, too. With a flop of K-7-2, for example, you’d have to figure that any opponent who also has a king will have you outkicked.

Hands like A-8 and K-7 do fairly well hot and cold meaning that if there is no further betting, they’d win a decent amount of the time. But when you factor in betting, these hands have a tendency to lose large pots and win small ones, and that’s not a good combination.

 

That being said, when playing on a short stack or in a fast-paced tournament where you’re often forced to move all-in, you can reasonably add these hands to your repertoire.

 

In deep-stack tournaments, though, these hands are simply more trouble than they’re worth. The best hands to add in these tourneys are suited connectorsbecause they have the potential to make both straights and flushes.

 

Say you choose to play a hand like 5c-6c and get to see the flop. You probably won’t have to worry about your kicker if your sixes pair on the flop and that’s a good thing. If you do make your flush, great, but be wary of big pots with reraises because it’s quite possible that your opponent made a bigger flush.

 

Make your straight, though, and you’ve hit pay dirt! That hand will win a very high percentage of the time. And because it’s so well disguised, you’ll stand to win a monster pot against any player with a hand like pocket aces or better.  

 

But regardless of the non-traditional starting hands you decide to add to your play list, react to any reraise in the same way by laying down your hand.

 

© 2009 Card Shark Media.  All rights reserved.

Online Poker Video Tutorial Strategy for Winning Money

Peter Eastgate - 2008 Main Event WSOP Champion

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Peter Eastgate - 2008 Main Event WSOP Champion

Two weeks after the conclusion of the WSOP Main Event and Las Vegas is still buzzing with poker excitement. For me, though, it's been several hectic weeks of travel to host a couple of important charity poker tournaments. I started in Montreal for the Starlight Foundation, then to Philadelphia for the Children's Hospital, and finally made it to Phoenix for my own charity tournament, Hold'em for Heroes.

In today's column, we turn back the clock and learn about last year's Main Event champion, Danish pro Peter Eastgate, as excerpted from my just-released book, Deal Me In:

I went to college for just half a year, studying economics at Aarhus University in Denmark. While there, I started playing poker with friends in live games. One friend told me about playing online and I found that I really enjoyed it.

One aspect of online play that I enjoyed most was playing multiple tables at once. I could fold two hands but still be involved in plenty of action at two other tables. Sometimes I'd play as many as seven tables at a time but most of the time just four or five.

When you're playing multiple tables, you can learn the game very quickly because you're exposed to many different hands and situations in a short period of time.

I first realized that I could make enough money playing poker for it to become my career in the summer of 2006. By then, I started beating medium-stakes games regularly and made about $300,000 by the end of that year.

I qualified for the 2008 World Series of Poker Main Event via the Ladbrokes Poker website. Early in the tournament, I encountered hundreds of amateurs who all dreamed of playing in the WSOP Main Event. For them, it was like a fairy tale. One thing I immediately noticed was that the tournament attracted many bad players strictly because they wanted to be part of the event; they knew they had no shot to win but they entered anyway.

I hadn't made much of a mark in live tournament play prior to the WSOP Main Event. In fact, before the WSOP, my greatest accomplishment had been making the final table at the 2007 Irish Poker Open where I finished ninth.

At the Main Event, one factor that played a role in my success was that because I had not played in many live tournaments, and was not a known entity around Las Vegas, some players might have overlooked me or looked past me. Not that I think anyone showed me a lack of respect but I don't believe that many players thought I was a real threat to win.

When I play poker, I'm known for staying calm and collected at all times – at least on the outside. Inside, however, I'm really feeling the tension. I played a little below average for the first three or four days and went all-in only twice. After that, though, I never had my entire stack threatened. There were moments when players had me covered but I was mentally prepared for them to make a move or to try to knock me out.

At the final table, I went heads-up against Russian pro Ivan Demidov. I had never played against him but I had watched him play on Day 5 and Day 7.I knew a little about how he played. I knew he was capable of some very misleading moves. In fact, he did try some tricky things, but unfortunately for him, I had a number of very strong hands that I would never fold.

I ending up winning the tournament and earned about $9 million. I also became the youngest WSOP Main Event champion in history, breaking the 20-year record that had been held by Phil Hellmuth.

The Youtube Poker Challenge Part 4

The Youtube Poker Challenge Part 3

Karmakrazy13 Welcome Video

The Youtube Poker Challenge Part 2

206

Managing Your Poker Bankroll

Steve Zolotow

December 1st, 2009

People always ask, “How much do I need to play in a certain stake game?” The usual answer to all poker questions is, “It depends.” But in this case, it is the wrong question. The question really should be, “Given my temperament and current financial situation, how much can I risk in a game?”
Let’s examine these components. First is your temperament. Years ago, Mike Caro distinguished between two types of players – plodders and adventurers. I like to put poker players into three categories. First are the plodders. They are extremely risk adverse and would rather play for pennies than take a chance of going broke. Next are the normal players. The normal players are willing to take moderate risk if they think they have a reasonable advantage. Lastly there are the plungers. They love to take extreme risk. They are the poker equivalents of mountaineers who want to reach the top of Mount Everest. The risk in question is, of course, losing a large percentage of your bankroll or, in the worst case, going broke.
There are many gradations of each of these types, and many players may go from plodders when winning to plungers when losing. Likewise, external circumstances may change a player. Losing a job, getting married, having a kid, etc. make some players eager to avoid risk and others desperate to win a fortune.
The second component to examine is your financial situation, specifically your bankroll. Some people have jobs, businesses or other outside sources of income. Some do not. I am going to divide bankroll types into three categories – small, medium and large. A small bankroll is an amount you could get in a month or less from working, from your business or from your investments. For some people this may be a few hundred and for others a few hundred thousand. A medium bankroll should take about six months to accumulate. A large bankroll takes at least a year. If you have no outside sources of income, treat your bankroll as large. Losing a small bankroll is distracting, losing a medium one is disturbing and losing a big one is disastrous.
Your temperament should not change from session to session. It is possible that you might want to adjust your risk threshold a little higher for great games and a little lower for bad ones. Before starting any session of any game, determine what your bankroll is and then refer to the chart below. This chart gives my opinion of the correct percentage of your bankroll to risk in any game. Use the appropriate percentage to calculate the amount you can risk.

	Plodder	Normal	Plunger
Small	10%	15%	30%
Medium	5%	10%	20%
Large	3%	5%	10%

If you lose that amount, I’d advise you to quit for the day. If you don’t want to quit, make sure you re-calculate the amount you can lose starting from your diminished bankroll. As long as you continually recalculate the amount you can risk, you will never go broke. If you are playing in games where you have the worst of it, you will eventually end up with such a small bankroll that it is meaningless. But in general, you will be able to risk larger amounts (not larger percentages) as your winnings accumulate, and you will be forced to play smaller when you are losing.
Why can you take more risk with a small bankroll? Because it is easier to get it back. As your bankroll gets larger, it becomes harder to replace it and going broke becomes more disastrous. It is much easier to rebuild a bankroll of five thousand then to rebuild one of five million. (Yes, there are players who have built up a bankroll of five million or more, and then gone broke or even into debt.) While these guidelines are customized to provide bankroll management strategies for a variety of temperaments and bankroll sizes, they will enable a winning player to avoid disasters and steadily increase his bankroll.

The Youtube Poker Challenge Part 1

The youtube poker challenge

11$ start = 10x 1.10 45 mans

11$ below play 1.10$ 45 mans

11$-32.50$ play 3.25$ 45 mans

32.50$-65.00$ play 6.50$ 45 mans

65.00$-120.00$ play 12$ 45 mans

200$
Step 1:
I cannot take the bankroll below $11 with any buy in except for $1.10.

Step 2: When the bankroll reaches $14.25, I can play $3.25 SNGs.

Step 3: When the bankroll reaches $39, I can play $6.50 SNGs. If a $6.50 takes you below $33, go back to Step 2.

Step 4: When the bankroll reaches $76, I can play $11 SNGs. If an $11 takes you below $65, go back to Step 3.