09/13/13

Pick a Poker Room

There are a lot of gambling sites offering poker services on the web, so when you open your browser it could be a pretty complicated task to pick a poker room. You should consider things like freerolls, player volume, bonuses, deposit issues, safety issues and compatibility. If you use operative systems like Linux or Mac it will be pretty hard to find a decent gambling site as you will have narrowed choice.

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Bonus

I online gambling every poker room site has a bonus. Bonuses have a good side and a bad side. The good thing is that they almost always double or triple the amount of your initial deposit so you automatically make a fast profit. But the bad thing is that there are some rules and conditions that you need to follow so you can make withdrawals after using a bonus. Usually poker sites ask for a predetermined amount of hands played by a player who has redeemed a bonus before making any withdrawals. So before you pick a poker room you should really take good look of the bonus terms and conditions.

Freerolls

Freerolls are often a good thing. In this way you get to play tournaments for which you wouldn’t have enough money to buy-in. Poker rooms give freeroll tickets for various things like playing real money and collecting points that you can use in freeroll tournaments or even giving you freeroll pass tickets just for making a deposit.

Safety and Deposit Problems

Depositing some cash to your online poker account is not always the easiest of things. There are a great number of variables that affect how fast you will finish this process. Sometimes there are country restrictions, age restrictions, identity checking etc. You should real look up from existing customers how easy are the deposits made at a specific poker room.

Also you need to know by which authority is the poker room licensed and how do they keep a track of their money. Also there are some casinos that don’t treat their players fairly when generating odds and giving customer support.

Number of Players

You surely don’t want to enter a poker room and wait a half an hour for a table. This is why you should pick a poker room with moderate number of players so there will be tournaments with sustainable pot size but also no waiting time. On other hand the tournament prizes are directly connected with the number of players of the poker room.

09/13/13

World Series of Poker History

The Beginnings

 World Series of Poker or WSOP is the most eminent group of poker tournaments held every year in Las Vegas. In most recent times it is sponsored by Caesars Entertainment ex Harrah’s Entertainment. The first tournament of this type was held back in 1970 and it was organized by Benny Binion. He invited seven poker players, only the best on the Globe at that time. The event was held at Horseshoe Casino and it had previously set time length. The winner was voted using a secret ballot.

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Popularity and prizes

Every year the organization takes 10% from all the buy-in amounts and the rest of it goes to the prize money for the World Series of Poker. There is also a winner bracelet which represents highest statue in the poker world. Since its beginnings the number of participant and their buy-in amounts increases on annual level. The start was slow and till 1982 there were only 52 poker players but in the 1980s a new format was introduced – satellite tournaments. They enable relatively unknown poker players to win their way into the big stage. In only five years the number of players reached 2,100 for the full series. Each year since then the World Series of Poker end with a $10,000 no-limit hold’em, called the Main Event with a good reason.

Besides the cash consideration and the bracelet, the winners’ picture is placed in the Gallery of Champions at Binion’s and this player is unofficially called World Champion for one year.  There are some currents in the poker world that have the opinion that no-limit hold ‘em is not the right way to determine who will be the champion poker player. There was a proposal made by Daniel Negreanu that the format of the Main Event should be changed to pot-limit hold ‘em, considering that in this game the players could truly manifest their full range of poker skills.

 

Games Played Throughout History

Some of the games played in the earlier years like H.O.R.S.E. and S.H.O.E. have returned in 2006 and 2007 respectively. Today you can count around 61 various events with all poker variations but it could be said that main types of poker played at World Series Of Poker are variants of Texas Hold ‘em. Current favorite games are Omaha hold ‘em, Texas hold ‘em and Seven-card stud alongside with their lowball variations. Usually throughout history all events were played in few days of June or July but in modern history the Main Event is postponed way until November. In 2012 it was played in October and the reason for that were USA Presidential Elections.

 

Biggest first place money prize

The highest amount won in the World Series of Poker history was won by poker professional Antonio Esfandiari in 2012 and it added up to $18.3 million which exceeded the $12.3 million won by Jamie Gold few years before that. The reason for this staggering amount was the record buy-in fee of 1 million for all 48 seats. It was organized by Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberté who actually made a big fundraising event from the WSOP giving the Casinos 11% in fundraisers.

09/13/13

World Poker Tour

Short History

The World Poker Tour is a combination of international poker tournaments and television series about the final game of every tournament. The WPT had its beginnings in the US and was created by Steven Lipscomb, respected TV producer. The first series of tournaments were played in 2003. In 2009 this series presented something already present in the WSOP, a bracelet to each winner.

World Poker Tour was organized by WPT Enterprise until November 2009 when PartyGaming took control.

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TV Concept

The World Poker Tour show is added to the broadcasting of WSOP and represents one of the main reasons for the increasing poker popularity and presence in regular US households. That’s why great amount of the sponsorship for this tour comes from online poker sites and casinos. Since PartyGaming took over the show they have introduced second series named by the company itself which focuses on the European market.

 

World Poker Tour Products and Awards

Because of the great media presence the World Poker Tour always tries to present new products to achieve even wider recognition and reach various demographic groups. Also trough this way of conducting business WPT enlarges its incomes because they heavily increase the number of potential players. Product line includes: ClubWPT, WPT Ladies, WPT Walk of Fame and Player of The Year award.

ClubWPT is powered with customer subscription fees. The concept is that any member of the ClubWPT can pay a fee every month that will enable him to be a part of tournaments with awards greater than $100,000 in cash and receive various prizes each month.

Set of tournaments under the name WPT Ladies was introduced in 2008. The buy-ins were not so lucrative and were ranging from $300 to $1,500. This was not a big success for the brand so because of that there are no events currently scheduled.

WPT Walk of Fame is probably the Grammy of the poker world and awards public personas that have either played the game well and are great poker players or just promoted poker trough the media. The ceremony was held only two times, most recent in 2004 at the Commerce Casino. Inductees include Gus Hansen, Doyle Brunson and James Garner among others.

The player that wins the WPT World Championship at the end of the season is not automatically declared as the Player of the Year. Instead WPT does that by using a simple point system for each tournament:

  • Winner: 1000 points
  • Runner-up: 700 points
  • 3rd place: 600 points
  • 4th place: 500 points
  • 5th place: 400 points
  • 6th place: 300 points
  • 7th place: 200 points

 

Carlos Mortensen is the proud owner of the highest winning tournament. He was paid $3,970,415 for his win at the WPT World Championship that ended season 5.

09/13/13

Types of Tournaments

What is a Poker Tournament? 

Before we review which types of poker tournaments exist, we need to know what is considered to be a poker tournament.

This is a tournament where poker is played between two or more competitors. When there are only two players this is called a “heads-up” tournament. The maximum amount of players that can enter is not defined so you can find tournaments with few thousand players on hundreds of tables.

The winner of a tournament or a particular round is the person who wins every single chip on the table. Other players are placed by their time of elimination. The blinds are usually raised as the tournament progresses. Winners can’t cash in their chips as there is a predetermined prize for the winner and very often for the top three players.

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Types of Poker Tournaments

There is great number of different types of tournaments. The most widely used are the Freezeout, Rebuy, Shootout and Mixed Max tournaments.

The Freezeout format is one of most used tournament type. Here all players that have enrolled in the tournament create a dynamic pool. When a player is eliminated and looses all of his chips the table where he played shrinks. To have same number of players on each table and not to go in constant table shrinking, players are moved from table to table. The overall number of tables decays and at the end there is only one left, called the Final Table. The winner of this last table is also the tournament winner. This type is used mainly for sit and go tournaments.

The Rebuy format is in some manner a variation of the Freezeout with that difference that here players can “rebuy” themselves in the tournament after losing all of their chips or a large percentage of them. When this “rebuy” period, usually one or two hours, finishes the tournament is proceeds as a simple knockout.

Another interesting and widely used poker tournament type is the Shootout format. A previously set number of players, in most cases 2-10, play against each other on a table. Preferably the number of tables in the tournament is not more than 10. Each winner of every single table proceeds to the Final Table. The Shootout Tournament is used mainly for large heads-up multi-table tournaments.

More modern type of tournament is the Mixed Max format. This makes the tournament a crisscross between a classic Knockout and Shootout format. Recent examples for this kind of play include the 2012 World Series of Poker, where in 3 different days there were nine-handed, six-handed and heads-up tables.

Other type of tournaments include: Fifty50, Steps, Satellites, Flighted, Bounty, Progressive Knockouts, Deep Stacks, 6-Max and 4-Max, Zoom, Turbo, Time Tourneys, Color Scheme etc.

09/13/13

Poker Hand Rankings

Why do You Need to Know Poker Hand Rankings?

The basic principle of Poker is that each player is dealt a hand of five cards, the number of cards dealt varies with different poker variants but it’s always predetermined with game rules. At the end of one round the hands of each active player are compared and either the highest-ranking or lowest-ranking, again depends of the type of poker game played, wins that round.

There should be no confusion, although in some games the dealer gives more than five cards, a poker hand is considered to be the best combination of five cards that the player possesses.

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Poker Hands Rankings from High to Low

Here is a ranking of the basic Poker Hands that could be dealt, in descending order:

 

  • Royal flush          -  Ace-High straight flush
  • Straight flush     -  Five cards in sequence
  • Four of a kind    -  Four cards of one rank plus one card
  • Full house           -  Three cards of one rank and two cards of a different rank
  • Flush                     -  Five non sequence cards of the same suit
  • Straight                -  Five cards that are in order but from various suits
  • Three of a kind  -  Three matching cards
  • Two pair               -  Two matching cards x 2 times
  • One pair               -  Two matching cards only
  • High card             -   Five cards which are all different from each other

 

Some games are using the Joker as a bug or so called wild card. It usually represents an Ace and because of that a new Hand is introduced in that system – five of Aces. That is the best hand in that kind of a game. You should really learn the Poker Hand Ranking really good not only to avoid feuds but also to keep a better track of the game.