Quickly becoming a popular way of playing, online poker like texas hold’em has its advantages and disadvantages. The reasoning behind the popularity is the ability to stay at home and still enjoy the game, rather than going out to a casino sitting a smoke filled room with all the noise that goes with it. Some like that atmosphere some don’t.

Disadvantages include the inability to read your opponents. In live poker, you are sitting directly with your opponents; if you’re good at reading people you have the opportunity to do so. Online poker on the other hand, you cannot, it’s simply you versus a player who can literally be on the other side of the world. How can you read a persons actions through a screen? You can’t!

It is the belief nowadays, that online poker games such as Texas pokeri is a game of chance rather than skill. In my opinion it always was a game of chance. Unless you count cards, or do constant mathematical computations, you cannot control or use your skill to make the dealer deal whatever you want to you. You could though, watch the cards and the folds, know what’s there and isn’t anymore. Hold’em pokeri doesn’t offer you that opportunity. The computer dealer will shuffle when it wants to impossible to count cards.

Online poker has the advantage of giving you the ability to quit easily by simply getting up and shutting off the computer. Whereas live poker, you have to get up, walk through the casino and resist all the temptations of the slot machines and other tables. Either way you go the temptation still exists, however, one is easier than the other to resist.

In a traditional game of face-to-face poker, tells are defined as any noticeable habit, physical reaction, or behavior that gives other players clues about what kind of hand you have. Because online players do not have the advantage of actually seeing their opponents they must rely on the other player’s actions to give away their hands.

While not always the most reliable tell, the stall is something that you should watch to determine betting patterns. The stall is defined as a player taking a long time to make their decision. With more and more players playing numerous games at the same time and experienced players doing it to throe you off (a reverse tell), the stall has become a less reliable tell.

Read more »

There are two ways in a poker game that you can end up having to put in the higher amount of money before the game has even begun. Traditionally, the person sitting to the left of the dealer is the ‘small blind’ and the person to the left of the small blind is the ‘big blind’. These are the two people who put money (or chips) into the pot before the game even begins. Suppose that you are playing a $10-$20 game.

Towards the beginning of the game, the $10 is the ‘big blind’ and as the game goes on, the ‘big blind’ will move up to $20. So here’s how it works at the beginning of each hand: the person to the left of the dealer has to put in the ‘small blind’, which is half of the big blind. If the big blind is currently $10, then the small blind is currently five dollars.

Read more »

Playing Powerball is a very popular pastime for many people these days—and you can forget the notion that only poor people play Powerball. People from all walks of life fork over their money to have a chance to hit it big. In fact, some research shows that the average Powerball player is employed and is in the middle class.

Those least likely to play are those who are poor or those who are wealthy. With potential earnings of millions of dollars it is no wonder that Powerball has become so popular. Did you know that if you play Powerball Powerplay, you could multiply your winnings? That is, if you strike it rich.

Read more »

Imagine you open your inbox and find an extremely convincing e-mail announcing your big lottery win!  You excitedly open the e-mail, and fill out the few simple “verification” questions, that will of course identify that you are indeed the rightful winner and will speed the process of you collecting your winnings. 

Is this the best day of your life?  Hardly; unfortunately you have just been scammed and there are many repercussions for giving someone your vital personal information. These types of lottery scams are now becoming commonplace and it is important to know how to identify them and protect yourself. 

Read more »

A value bet is a bet that you make when you have a so-so hand, not a stellar hand, but not a weak hand either. If you have a marginal chance of winning, you’ll want to make value bets so that the amount of money in the pot gets increased so that if you win, it’s more. You want to draw the game out, not make everyone fold and leave you with the little bit that’s in the pot.

When you make a value bet, you are trying to get players who have the same type of hand as you do to enter more money into the pot before you win it or before the game goes to competition. A value bet raises the value of the pot and hopefully your winnings in the end. On the other hand, it is also possible that you do value bets and that you do succeed at raising the value of the pot, but then somebody else ends up being the winner of the pot.

Read more »

Playing poker online, like everything else that you do online, affects the security of your computer, and by extension, you yourself. Every time a person connects to the Internet, they are sharing information with hackers who know how to connect into their information that is flying all over the Internet.

For things such as email and MySpace, that doesn’t constitute so much of a security problem. Sure, someone might steal your password and proceed to send out spam from your email account or hijack your MySpace account and send out multiple bulletins to all of your friends about ringtones, but, all things said and done, this type of hijacking is quite minimal compared to what can happen when playing poker online.

Read more »

Razz is one of the several variations of stud poker that are commonly played today. Stud poker is generally defined as a game in which a combination of face up and face down cards are dealt to each player in multiple betting rounds. While there are some rules that are consistent throughout all stud poker games, some details are modified depending on the variation of stud that is being played. The most common form of stud poker is seven-card stud and Razz is a version of that.

In Razz poker, there are between two and eight players. Each player is dealt a total of seven cards. Three of the cards are dealt face down and the other four are face up. The goal of seven-card stud is to make the worst or lowest five card hand you can, using any combination of the seven cards.

Read more »

Though private or home games of poker can have any rules that they wish, at a casino, the rules governing the ranking of hands is always consistent. Poker is usually played with a 52-card deck. The ranking of those individual cards from highest to lowest is ace, king, queen, jack, ten, nine, eight, and seven, and so on down to two, which is often referred to as deuce. There is no ranking amongst suits; this means that a jack of hearts is equal to a jack of diamonds.

A poker hand will be comprised of five cards. Poker hands are ranked and categorized. In this article the different hands are listed from highest to lowest, meaning a higher category will beat any hand falling in a category beneath it.

Read more »

Unfortunately, there are a lot of dishonest people in the world, and if you look at just the poker world, you will find an even higher percentage of cheaters there than in the ‘real’ world. The fact of the matter is that poker players know that they can cheat, in most cases, and get away with it. Since that is the case, the pull to earn even more money at the poker table influences their decisions.

Even a person who’s generally honest in real life might be the biggest poker cheater on the planet. So that you can spot all of these cheating poker players, read the methods of cheating below. Once you’re familiar with the methods, you’ll be much better able to spot them happening when you’re there at the table.

Read more »