Whats a Nit ?

A nit is a tight-passive player, rock or weak-tight, who avoids large pots and often assumes a worst case scenario when making a decision. Players don't like to be called a nit...


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Tom "durrrr" dwan strikes again

Being Focused - by Full Tilt Pro Huckleberry Seed

In the world of Full Tilt Poker avatars there are no bad hair days.
Not the type of thought I want to be having at an FTOPS final table. I want my mind absorbing and processing just the right information the best it can to put my creative mind in position to "play Mozart" to the ears of my opponents who I deem capable of appreciating it. I want to be focused. In the moment. In the flow of the game. In the "Zone".
A great way to enhance one’s ability to focus in my opinion is fasting. On a 15 minute break early in a 500 player field NLH tournament at Foxwoods several years back, I walked to the food court, in a conversation with an old school player from my table. I procured a calorie laden sandwich. "Want anything?" I asked. "A hungry dog hunts best" the wise old man replied. I took the saying to heart. I didn't eat the sandwich or anything else the rest of the tournament. I played very well, especially near the end (it was a one day tournament that lasted 22 hours) and won the tournament.
David Williams didn't need a wise old poker player to teach him the value of fasting for poker focus – he figured it out on his own. I was not surprised after his tournament successes to hear him tell me that he would eat nothing during his tournaments and just drink a bit of tomato juice here and there throughout the tournament to ensure his brain was getting sufficient glucose to function at its best.
Yoga and meditation can also be great ways to clear your mind and get you ready to focus on the game. Weeding through a yoga class that was just starting on our way out of the gym after a hoops session, we decided to jump in. We then headed to the casino and after that night’s poker session, my friend Joe said he had never played with such clear-minded focus, and accredited that to yoga. David Hayden, a Seven-Card Stud poker pro, swears by yoga to improve your poker game, golf game and most aspects of your life.
Dan Harrington attributes much of his ability to stay focused down the stretch of a poker tournament to his competitive chess career before he became a poker player. A competitive chess match can be quite long, six or even eight hours sometimes. In chess, one mistake can cost you the game, just as in NLH where one mistake can cost you your whole stack.
If the mental toughness Dan developed that kept him from making blunders in chess was transferred over to poker, your skills and mental focus developed at other endeavors may too. Try to be aware of any mental focus related skills you have and see how they relate to poker. Perhaps you’re just not too mentally tough yet. If something bad happens at the poker table you usually crumple immediately, and after an hour or two your mind always starts to wander. Maybe you need to try standing on your head for an hour while staring at a dot on the wall (I did it for a bet once).
As for meditation, I was first introduced to the world of Zen Buddhism by well rounded intellectual Howard Lederer. I really think practicing various forms of meditation will greatly help your ability to focus at the poker table. After experimenting a bit with various forms of meditation you could try to make poker your form of meditation! Personally, I enjoy the writing of Vietnamese Buddhist monk poet and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, as well as contemporary spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle (author of the bestseller "The Power of Now") and I would like to thank them for improving the quality of my life as well as the focus of my poker game.
I think simple desire and motivation go hand in hand with focus. Young players who have a strong desire to win or compete or improve their game are super focused without realizing it and probably don’t know what it means to be unfocused. It just comes naturally when you want it badly enough.
Well let’s leave it at that before I say "focus" more times than Alan Iverson can say "talkin’ about practice". I hope my writing has lead you on the path to be more focused in your poker and in so doing find that place deep in the flow of the game where plays that amaze are made and the joy of the game is found.

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What is Rakeback ??

Online poker rooms make their money by automatically taking a cut of the players stake money, this is called the "rake". Typically the rake is 5% of every pot, you will often see it being taken and stacked at the top of the table during a game. Playing a few hundred hands a month soon accumulates a large amount of rake, and you could be paying tens of thousands of $$$ a year in rake.

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Sick 130k Tom "Durr" Dwan Bluff

Call cheap for the nuts

Its worth calling down with high(not even a pair) hands if there is a good chance, given the pot (see pot odds post), of you making a monster. The most common is a nut flush where you hold the ace (or king if the ace is on board) and often weaker players will call with ANY two suited cards in hope of a flush. If you hit your nut hand you will take all their money.

Good Luck

Playing Fifth Street in Seven-Card Stud - By Keith Sexton

Fifth Street is the big decision point in Seven-Card Stud because that’s the critical juncture in the hand when you have to put in your first big bet. While it’s nice to have a made hand at this point, you don’t always need one to put in a raise on Fifth Street. If you have a big draw, that can be enough to warrant raising your opponent. Some players don’t think like this, and I believe that’s a costly mistake.
Here’s an example of a situation where I believe raising with a draw is the correct play. Let’s say your opponent is showing an Ace, and you have a 7 of diamonds up and a 6 and 7 of spades in the hole, giving you a pair of 7s. You and your opponent are the only players involved in the hand, and he opens with a raise. You call.
On the turn your opponent catches an offsuit Jack and bets. You catch the 9 of spades. You have a pretty nice hand at this point. Not only do you have a pair of 7s, but you also have three cards to a flush and three cards to a straight so there are a lot of cards you can catch that will give you a big draw. You definitely want to call in this spot.
On Fifth Street your opponent catches a 6 so now he has an Ace, Jack, and 6 showing. You catch the deuce of spades, which is a very interesting card. You now have a pair of 7s and four spades to a flush, but your opponent is unaware of how strong you are because one of your 7s and two of your spades are hidden.
Your opponent leads out with a bet once again. Now here’s the question. Should you simply call or should you raise? Even if your opponent has two Aces, I would prefer to have two 7s and four spades in this situation so you should be aggressive and put in a raise. You should do this for a couple of reasons. First, even if he does have a pair of Aces, you’re still the favorite. You are about a 58 percent favorite to win the hand so you’re getting the best of it right now.
The other reason you should raise is that it will get you a free card if you fail to hit your draw. Let’s say you go ahead and raise on Fifth Street, and your opponent calls. Since he called your raise, you can be pretty certain he has a pair that can beat your 7s. Then on Sixth Street he catches a 4 and you catch the 3 of diamonds, a card that doesn’t help your hand at all.
If your opponent is a weak player, he is probably going to check it to you because he’s going to be scared of that raise you put in on Fifth Street. If he does in fact check, then you succeeded in accomplishing exactly what you set out to do. You got extra money into the pot on Fifth Street when you had the best of it, and now that you missed your draw and don’t have the best of it anymore you’re happy to get a free card. Now you have one more shot at drawing out on him.
This is a clear example of why it pays to be aggressive on Fifth Street in Seven-Card Stud. Some players would just call in this situation, but I think that’s a big mistake. Being aggressive and sticking in a raise has two clear advantages over simply calling. It will get more money into the pot those times you do make your hand, and it will get you a free card those times you don’t. The bottom line is that you need to be aggressive when playing Seven-Card Stud because it’s the aggressive player who usually wins.

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