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Pocket Aces Lose Sometimes So How To Play Them?

Pocket Aces are obviously the best pair to be dealt pre-flop, but more than one in five times they are going to get cracked, and knowing how to bet your hand to make sure that you maximise the pot without risking a stack of chips boils down to a series of considerations.

The first is the dynamics of the table. If you are playing with amongst ultra-tight players and you go all-in, the most likely occurrence is that you will pick up a couple of blinds and no more. If your table is exceptionally loose, two or three players may call your bet – in which case there could be as much as a 60% chance that somebody will catch the community cards to nail your pocket rockets. If you are playing either extreme of these styles, the best advice is to raise by just two or three times the blind and react to what comes out on the flop. Even on an averagely weighted table, going all-in immediately is not advised.

Try raising by five times the big blind and practise your continuation betting techniques once you have seen the flop. If another player re-raises you, and you have no option but to shove, the odds against just one player are always in your favour, so four times out of five you will beat him – just be prepared for the disappointment if it is not one of those four times.

Playing from position is equally important. If you are UTG or in early/mid position, going all-in with AA is asking for somebody behind you to come in and match your bet, and although shoving first is usually recommended, when you hold the best cards let somebody from behind you call the shots – at least pre-flop.

The recommended raise from early or mid position is just the size of the pot, and although that may be quite small, you will have further rounds of betting to encourage a greater contribution from your opponents. Once you are in a later position, you can raise by a much higher figure (subject to all the other factors being discussed), or maybe the pot itself has grown substantially in which case matching it is sufficient. Alternatively make a 5x or 6x blind raise and see what response it draws.

The third consideration is relative chip stacks. If you are playing on a ring game, an aggressive loose player with a mighty stack of chips in front of them may have no hesitation about matching your all-in bet – and if you feel this is the case, you might as well make it! In tournament play, a short-stacked player may be the one to push in front of you, in which event raise the bet to the max in order to dissuade anybody else from joining in and reducing your odds of winning.

There are a series of situations where the type of players you have on a table, your position on it and the size of your stack will influence your decision regarding the size of the bet you should make. Provided you aware that for each player in the pot, your odds of success drop by 20%, you will be able to gauge whether your aces are as valuable as you would like to think they are.

Luckyace Rakeback Bonuses

Rakeback is one of the most under-utilised bonuses available to online poker players, primarily due to the limited number of sites on which it is available or the qualifications some poker rooms enforce before you can benefit from it. If you are not already subscribing to a poker room that offers rakeback, you should consider making a change to a site offering this scheme, as the additional income may just be the lift you need to take you a rung further up the ladder to poker success.

The rake on a hand is set by the poker rooms to cover their operating costs, and they offer a portion of it back to regular players to encourage them to remain loyal to the site. On individual games, you may think that it does not amount to whole load of money, but over a period of time it could accumulate into quite a tidy sum.

If you were a player who purely focused on the $1/$2 ring games, the average rake on a hand with a pot value of $25 may be less than a dollar, and the percentage rakeback on that, shared between nine players is going to worth around 3 cents to you. However, if you play eighty hands in an hour, that three cents becomes $2.40 and then play for three hours a day, five days a week – that three cents has multiplied its way up to $36.00, or over $150.00 per month.

Rakeback is not the only incentive offered by poker web sites to enchant clients. Poker players are aware of all the marketing that goes on to attract their initial deposits, but once you are “in”, you need to think about what other benefits there are to belonging to a particular poker site. In this respect, we suggest that readers investigate the opportunities offered by Lucky Ace Poker.

As well as allowing all clients to participate in a rakeback scheme when they first join up, the Lucky Ace Poker Bonus instantly credits you with 25% bonus of your sign-up deposit, and the rest is easy to work through if you play fairly regularly.

Lucky Ace Poker is part of the 888.com gaming network, which is one of the most user-friendly and bonus orientated networks on the web. As well as offering rakeback and initial bonus payments, the site also has a regular daily challenge series (with up to $50.000 prize fund for a $2 buy-in!), an incredible beginners freeroll series worth up to $5.000 and bespoke events such as the current rake race, giving the winner an entry to a WSOP event including flights and accommodation in Las Vegas.

One bonus that you should not have to take advantage of is the occasional “reload bonus”. The play of the Lucky Ace Poker web site is incredibly loose, as the majority of its clients have migrated there from the affiliated casino and sports betting sites. Many ring tables are good for sitting on quietly and just playing solid ABC poker in order to have a very profitable experience.

Furthermore, by registering with Lucky Ace Poker as a reader of [this web site] you will get fast-track VIP status, with even better offers, and faster bonus redemption. If your regular web site is not providing all of this to you, don´t you think it might be time for a change?
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How and When to Best use Player Online Poker Points

Most online poker rooms now offer a player bonus scheme whereby you collect points by playing cash games at their tables, which you can then use to enter qualifiers to larger competitions. Some of these tournaments can be quite lucrative, for example a few player points could set you on your way to a weekly six-figure prize on the larger sites, plus save you a fair bit of money in entry stakes if you are a regular tournament player. It is worth exploring the lobby of your favourite poker room(s) to discover just how many of these tournaments there are, and where they can lead to.

The choice that has to be made with these effectively free satellites is what level do you go in at? Some of the really low entry level games can often be full of new players gaining experience and lead to a cheap step into a higher qualifier. The next stage is somewhat harder, but if you are a capable “multi-tabler” you can play through several low value games simultaneously and generate plenty of entries to the final tournaments.

The overall worth of using the low entry method has to be evaluated over the average length of time that it takes to qualify for the next stage or final competition, your chances of collecting in the final and what money you could have generated playing your regular game instead of entering a qualifier. To calculate this, and as part of successful bankroll management, you should have a record – either hourly, daily or weekly – of how much money you are winning generally. If daily or weekly, you should divide that by the number of hours you spend playing poker to arrive at an hourly rate. So, even if you only win an average of $50 per week, and you spend 10 hours a week playing poker, you know that your hourly “rate” is $5.

If it takes two hours to play through a points qualifier rewarding you with a satellite entry worth $2, you know to avoid it, as you could have earned $10 playing on a ring game, paid the $2 to enter at the higher level and be $8 in pocket. Conversely, if you have saved up a substantial number of points, sufficient to enter a satellite that will feed through to a game with (say) a $100 buy in, then it is in your best interests to get involved. One further point to consider is whether the final tournament is one that you are able to physically play in. Does it occur when you are at work or have other commitments, or is it scheduled for the middle of the night, when you will not be at your best to gain the maximum from the opportunity.

Overall, only you can tell whether entering a specific game is worth the time and effort. By regularly entering low value qualifiers, you exhaust your points supply and remove the opportunity for entering a game with higher perceived value. As long as you are aware of the program available on your site, you will be able to decide the best course of action for your level of play.

Online Poker Freeroll Information

If you register with enough online poker rooms, there is the opportunity to play in over 40 freerolls each hour. Some sites may require that you have made a deposit with them, other games may be limited to players of a certain nationality and many could be qualifiers for a larger tournament, but nonetheless, you could feasibly be playing poker all day, every day, for free.

Some of the rewards that you would get for playing are fairly lucrative too. Whereas many smaller networks will have competitions with a (say) $50 prize fund shared amongst the top twenty finishers, the leading sites offer much larger opportunities. Pokerstars and Full Tilt Poker have qualifiers running throughout the day for weekend freeroll finals that have $2.000 and $1.000 prize funds respectively. Both run country specific leagues with a daily cash freeroll, plus additional prizes at the conclusion of each month for the league leaders, and occasionally they also run freeroll competitions for tournaments which they have sponsored.

There is a comprehensive range of standards on display in these games, as you will find beginners honing their skills, freeloaders taking advantage of the potential to win some cash and value-hunters looking for a gateway into a buy-in competition. Consequently, there is a mixture of very loose, very tight and very competent play to be observed. Some players will be multi-tabling freerolls, and others hoping that the next game is the one that will bankroll their future poker careers.

The smaller freerolls are much easier to obtain prize money in, as the sites on which they are hosted generally contain players of a lower calibre and are not so well subscribed to. For new players, these are the best ones to enter, as they are free to compete in and offer valuable experience for when it comes to larger, cash tournaments.

With the odd exception, the games are provided by the poker rooms to attract players to their site. Only the highest valued ones are genuinely worth playing it terms of the time spent in front of your computer screen, and then you are likely to have seen off over 5000 players twice to win $300. Imagine how much you would have won if you had achieved that feat and staked $1 each time! In fact, the largest regular freeroll is the Pokerstars daily qualifier to their $90.000 guaranteed game, which is a $50 NL Texas Hold´em Game regularly attracting 2000 players. The qualifier only offers 7 seats to the final event and yet every day 40.000 aspirants register for this freeroll.

The key to using freerolls successfully is to avoid getting into an early battle with inexperienced players. Treat a freeroll as you would any other paid-for tournament, and keep it tight at the beginning, building up your aggressiveness during the competition. With skill, discipline and a little good fortune, you should regularly be qualifying for those weekly finals and take a little prize money out of each.

The Art of Folding

When playing poker, either online or live, knowing when to fold your hand is one of the key elements that will increase your wealth. For as many times as you fold your hand, only to see the card drawn on the river that would have completed the flush or straight, there will be many times more when it was the correct decision to make.

Professional poker players will conform that folding in poker is neither a sign of weakness nor an indication that you are a gutless player. Indeed the opposite can be true, as it takes bravery and experience to acknowledge that the right option is to fold, and many new players often follow one of two paths – either folding too soon, or being so committed in a hand that they feel obliged to go all the way to the river. Through application and discipline it is possible to learn the right time to fold and save your stack for another opportunity, without regretting that you threw your cards in too early.

For guidelines about when to fold and when to call/bet, you need to consider your position within the dynamics of the table. In NL and PL games you have to discern whether the people you are playing with are tight or loose, and how many outs you have. In FL poker, you may be able to proceed a little further to catch the right card, but if you are able to calculate your odds of winning and the value of your hand against the pot, you are more likely to avoid a potentially suicidal chase to the river.

Only experience can teach you the correct calls. If you keep changing your strategies, and making yourself hard to read, other players may not be too sure about betting into you, and this will allow you to get into winning positions more economically. One function that you should avoid using online is the pre-set “Check/Fold” button, as frequent use of this facility is advertising to the rest of the table that when you do not fold, you are holding something of value.

The important consideration is how will making a risky call affect your chip stack. In cash games, a win is always welcome, but will losing a bad call take you out of a game that hitherto you have been performing well in? The same applies to tournament play where the “He who folds and runs away, lives to fold another day!”

Ultimately, rely on common sense and gut feelings, understand the odds of winning and learn when to fold through experience.

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