Online Poker

Annie Duke is $500,000 richer after winning the 2010 NBC Heads-Up Championship and becoming the first female winner of the tournament in it's six year history. The invite-only tournament had an extremely strong 64-man field that boasted no fewer that 13 former World Series of Poker Main Event winners including Greg Raymer, Johnny Chan, Chris Moneymaker and Peter Eastgate.

Duke, sister of Howard Lederer, has only ever made it through the first round once in five previous attempts and even joked in an article she wrote before the championshipsthat it was about time she had a good run in this particular event. Things started well for her as she defeated her good friend Andy Bloch in the opening round, setting up a match against the 2007 NBC Heads-Up Champion, Paul Wasicka.

She rode her luck on more than one occasion during this match up, first cracking Wasicka's Jacks with Eight-five of diamonds before hitting a straight on the river with Ace-ten to beat Wasicka's pocket aces! Lady Luck was certainly on Duke's side.

After Wasicka came the scalp of 2007 WSOP Main Event winner Jerry Yang before 2008 November Nine member, Dennis Phillips came undone at the feet of the mother of four setting up a best of three finale against eight-time WSOP bracelet winner, Erik Seidel.

Seidel entered the final match as a big favourite but he lost the opening bout when he was all-in with eight-six of spades on a K-J-7 board with two spades on it. Duke held Ace-King for top pair top kicker, which held to give her the lead.

The match was levelled in the next game when Duke committed all her chips with King-five against the eight-seven of Seidel. A flop of 9-6-4 gave Seidel an open-ended straight draw, which hit when a five arrived on the turn. Duke could still have won if a heart fell on the river but it was a black nine meaning whoever won the last game would claim the title.

Duke claimed victory, and the $500,000 first prize when her pair of nines stayed ahead of Seidel's Ace-two, leaving her opponent to pick up the $250,000 consolation prize. The win cements Duke's second position in the women's all-time money rankings, putting some ground between her and third placed Annette Obrestad. Duke now has over $4,200,000 in live tournament winnings.

Every aspect of poker can be broken down into mathematical terms be it how often you should raise, how many buy-ins you should have in your bankroll and indeed, how often you should expect to see a specific hand. This does not mean you have to be a mathematical genius to be successful but it does mean you need to commit to memory, a number of statistics that will help you make decisions every time you play a hand.

It is possible to work out the odds and probabilities of any poker game and texas hold em poker is no different and is in fact, one of the easier games to remember figures for. The first thing you should be aware of is how often you should expect to see a certain hand. If it is a specific pair such as Aces then you will only see them, on average, once in every 221 hands dealt, which means the probability you will be dealt Aces or Kings is 110-1.

You should receive any pair around 6% of the time, giving a probability of 16-1 and you will flop a set around 11% of the time, or a probability of around 7.5-1. So you can see that you do not actually get good hands very often and even if you are dealt a premium pair, you will not often flop a set.

Reading the chat boxes when playing online poker, you often see players complaining that the flop seems to be always paired or has come down with three of the same suit on it. This is just variance as the flop will contain a pair around 17% of the time whilst it will be three-flushed just 5.2% of the time. The odds of the flop coming down three-of-a-kind is a long shot at 424-1 but it does happen.

It should not be surprising that the hand rankings reflect how rarely each particular hand is expected to be shown. Having a high card is 1-1 whilst a pair is 1.37-1 to make an appearance by the river. Three-of-a-kind jumps to 46-1 and a flush rises to 508-1. Having quads is extremely rare with the odds of a player holding them being 4,164-1 but the daddy of them all is a Royal Flush which has almost unbelievable odds of 649,740-1. Do not expect to see too many of those in your poker career!

If you follow poker news and results as well as play the game you will know of at least a handful of players who used to win big a couple of years ago but then either went bust, are now playing much lower stakes or have never progressed as well as they should have done.

One of the main reasons for this is they failed to continue learning about the game and as a result the rest of the playing field caught up with them. Poker is a game where you have to be continuously learning and when you think you have learned everything there is to know, you have to look for something else to tweak and change. Even Doyle Brunson who has been playing for over 50 years says he learns something new every day at the poker tables.

With many serious players now using poker training tutorials in either e-books or on videos from training sites, the games are becoming tougher and moves and plays that used to only be seen at the highest stakes available, are now being replicated much further down the food chain.

Strategy and theory moves in a downward direction, from the high-stakes down to the micros, this is the way it has always been but in today's climate it happens much faster and on a grander scale. Even as close as two years ago people did not three-bet preflop unless they had a premium hand but fast forward to the present day and you have players at the micro-stakes re-isolating with a wide range of hands and moves such as floating are common place throughout the stakes.

In order to be successful at poker you need to keep one step ahead of the players at your stakes and that means putting in a lot of effort into learning everything there is to learn about the game you play. Join a training site or two, enlist the services of a respected coach, try to play a hand completely different to how you would normally to see the outcome, anything as long as you do not grow complacent with how things are. You may be a winning player now but that status is not guranteed.

One way to get a good insight into how good or poor one of your opponents is to get into, or listen to them discuss hands and situations they have found themselves in and how they dealt with them. On the surface a poker hand is a very simple thing but the best players think in much deeper detail as there are actually many factors to consider and how and what your opponents consider will go some way to indicating their skill levels.

An example of this in practice comes from when I used to play pub poker in a pub where I lived for two years. Some of the customers had seen me playing online poker and some had seen the game on TV and wanted to start playing small tournaments in the bar area.

Each of the players were very poor, with little or no understanding of pot odds, probability of future cards and one did not even know hand rankings. Whilst all were bad players, mainly due to the fact they were playing for fun, one of them regularly attempted to talk about hands with me.

This player was trying to improve his game by talking about hands, which is a good thing, but he was set in his ways and still thought about poker as a pure gamble so he will never become successful at the game. In one particular discussion he revealed a number of glaring leaks in his game that would show just how weak of a player he really was.

He told me about a hand where he had a pair of aces and made a large raise and was called by one player. The flop was something like Tc9c8c and he went all-in and was called by a flush and lost. Now this very simple explanation of the hand showed a number of things. Firstly, he had no concept of stack sizes as he never mentioned his or his opponent's so therefore did not think they were relevant.

He also failed to mention how much he raised, but he did say a large raise so one would assume he likes to bet big with big pairs and smaller with lesser hands. This is a common mistake and you should really bet the same amount with every hand you raise with so that you disguise its strength easier.

Also, there was no mention of position in the hand, a vital factor in any hand and finally he obviously had no concept of flop texture or bet sizing as he committed his entire stack on an extremely drawy board with nothing but an overpair. He had a reputation as being one of the better players in the pub, mainly due to always reading poker magazines and books, but just a simple chat revealed he was as bad, if not worse, than the rest of the players.

Competition for business is extremely competitive in the online poker world and as a result there are some  top poker promotions to be had for those willing to search for them.

Most come in the form of a first deposit bonus for new customers or a reload bonus for existing players. Whilst both can be very helpful when building a bankroll, you must be make sure you follow a few simple steps in order to get the best from any sort of bonus.

The majority of sites offer a 100% match bonus that releases in one lump sum. Whilst it may be tempting to deposit the maximum allowed so you potentially receive a large bonus, you should first check the terms and conditions of the bonus in question. Every bonus I have ever cleared has come with a time limit of between 30-120 days so you do not want to sign up for the maximum amount if you have no chance in clearing it all in the allotted time.

The same runs true for the clearance requirements as I have fallen foul of these in the past. I started clearing bonuses when I was a new player at the lowest stakes available and it is very difficult to clear bonuses at the micro-stakes, especially if you only have 30-45 days to do so. Most sites will release your bonus once you have played either a set number of raked hands or have generated a certain amount of points. Ensure you will be able to generate enough points or hands at the stakes you plan to play.

Once you have decided on the amount of bonus you are going to attempt to clear then the one thing you should do is to treat the bonus as exactly that, a bonus and just play your usual game. I know of many players who chase bonuses and drastically alter the way they play just so they generate points to clear the bonus. This can often lead to you needing to clear the full amount just to simply break even, which is not an ideal scenario.