To get better at online poker, or simply to make more money at it, you need to sit down and decide how you are going to do it. There are different possibilities, such as (1) finding your optimal stake level (given your current game), (2) finding your optimal online poker site (as not all sites are equal) or finding your optimal poker variation, to name a few.

For example number two, you need to survey poker sites and find one that best fits your style and skill. There are the easiest poker sites, and there are hardest poker sites. A site such as Pokerstars could be considered like one of the hardest as it attracts the best players given its traffic and the possibility to make a lot of money with the Supernova Elite VIP level. A site like Party Poker has a reputation to be easier, but it is certainly not one of the easiest online poker sites, because its large traffic also entices strong players to join. This points us to the evidence that easier sites must have less traffic. This way you see less shark-type regular players and more fish who got lost there and do not know what there are doing.

One of my poker buddy mentioned a poker room named PokerView. I did not know that one, do not blame me there are hundreds of poker sites and I do not know them all. So this site belongs to the Everleaf Gaming Network, which is one of the smaller networks. Small does not mean easier, but there is a good chance it is easier to make money there than at a bigger room. The only way to find out is to try so I went to the pokerview download page and installed the program on my computer. So I will report later how it goes.

The other points I mentioned are stake level and game variant. These are so-called low hanging fruits. You must test at what stake you make the most money, including how many tables you can handle. Leave your pride at the locker room, if you make more at NL50 than NL100, then stay at the lower stake until you get stronger and give another shot to NL100. Regarding poker variants as I said I am trying Omaha 8. Clearly in games other than Texas Holdem, the skill level is lower, so this is something to try. At the big sites you can play many other variants, and this will increase your overall skill level anyway.

One of the biggest problem areas for me has been finding the right balance for post-flop aggression. When I first started playing I was way too passive (due in no small part to the fact I really wasn’t sure what I was doing yet)…as I became more comfortable with O8 I began to become more and more aggressive and quickly crossed over into chip spewing land. I was still playing hold’em, trying to bully my opponents out of the pot which just doesn’t work in low limit O8.

I’m now in the process of reigning in my overall aggression and instead of firing chips wildly into the pot, I am looking for more tactical spots to apply some focused aggression (ex: finding good spots for promo raises, etc). I am starting to think and play like an O8 player (rather than a hold’em player) and my results have begun to show some promise (which is a nice change of pace). I have still got a lot to learn though, lol.

I am writing my goals for 2012, with the New Year weekend upon us I thought I would mention a few goals…

1. Become a better O8 player, this is kind of obvious. I’d like to be playing at the 10/20 & 15/30 level by mid yer or the end of summer.

2. Eat healthy and exercise more (lose at least 25 pounds). This one is obvious too, well needed and better late than never. I need to reduce my gravitational field, small objects have begun to orbit around me which is annoying as hell. A bigger mass has more gravitational power I guess.

3. Blog more. If for no other reason than to entertain myself, and hopefully my readers too. If you like online poker, then you might find something interesting to read as this is the topic of this blog.

The first blog frequented by yours truly, that of John Mossy, a senior member of my club poker and player met first in Las Vegas. John is a very good player, he has already made some great results in live events and whenever I have the opportunity to discuss with him, I have a great time. So, I advise you to do likewise.

Second blog in the spotlight for me is that of Holdem fan, met in parts a the EPT, very very good player live and online, author of a paid up at the WSOP, something not so common, at least in my circle of poker friends. Well, George has an hectic job and even less than me. But he is a great guy for the little I know, a draw poker fan and I do not exclude that variation from my interests.

Then come the blog of maniaco, a well known blogger, whom I also met through my poker clubs in the South. I recently discovered that of his posts are top notch, I do not know personally, but what little I saw of his blog, I like the tone. His regularly updated blog is very honest, unvarnished, full of humility and self-mockery. Maniaco last night during one of our many chats MSN, has been the source of the theory of the aquarium that I discovered and invented last night.

Maniaco is a very, very good player online, who makes regular final tables in MTT, who is doing quite well in cash games despite a lack of rigor in the management of his bankroll. But that’s not the point. So, he often reaches in the money at MTT large series (such GSOP, FTOPS WCOOP, etc. …), near the final table and chip leader and often in the top 10 then he collapses at the end of the tournament and leaves regularly at places of honor because he brings a great deal of personal satisfaction but not the expected monetary return.

Returning to the theory in the MTT, maniaco swims at full speed in the middle of other fish, leaving his fishing rod and catching fish to be hungry. He reaches the edge, ready to leave the aquarium up to the camp of the winners (or fishing). He is on his lip, happy, bananas, carefree, already thinking about what to do with his money, what will be his life on the other side. Now he has unrestricted access to fish. In his sweet dreams, he does not blunder, slip on the rim because he does not think of what he is doing, share in a 3-bet in tank battle with a monster like JT and finds out after a harsh confrontation he is against the aces, inevitably unfair, with the chip leader.

And then reality comes back, he slips to the bottom of the aquarium with other fish having one thing in mind: to go back to the ledge and finally get to learn from this aquarium. I know that with more discipline, better sense of timing, and the elimination of the spew attitude, maniaco becomes the shark that he should already be and will rub shoulders above the aquarium where fish like me continue living.

So it’s the river and I’ve been pushing my crappy hand into a massive fish throughout the hand. Finally on the river, I hit a good hand and then I check. I check? I check. I’ve got top and middle pair on a mildly scary board, and I’m against a fish. The fish bets, and I call. I call!?! This would have been a perfect opportunity to raise. But I call. I blame it on the fact that I was playing three tables. That’s the ticket! He also has two pairs but mine are stronger.

Reading hands isn’t easy, and when you’re wrong it can cost you big time.

When someone goes crazy on a flushy board with an ace it can be really easy to put them on a pair or a flush draw. It’s kind of hard to pot them on a straight draw. The turn action pushed me even further into the made hand on the flop camp. That meant that my set was good. Luckily for me the flush and four-straight came in on the river, causing me to second guess my turn evaluation. I lost to a turned straight.

Yeah, no one wants to hear about bad beats, but I found another one that I wanted to share. Who knew that quad queens was the hand of the week? Maybe there is such a thing as karma?

Everyone always finds the one in a million hand.

You always here about these amazing set-ups. AA vs. KK vs. QQ, which I’ve seen. Or any other of a number of chance occurences. Of course, any specific hand is a chance occuring, so most aren’t that interesting. This hand falls exactly into that category of intellectually curious but not that interesting overall.

JJ vs. JJ vs. 98 vs. 98, with a board of T7x. Overheard after the hand: “Imagine the action if a Jack fell on the turn!”

I hopped on a pokerstars $5./1 heads up table this morning just for giggles. I have never intentionally played heads up with anyone. Action. You bet you get action, if you like it slow play full ring, do not venture at the heads-up tables unless you really master poker to some extent.

I watched the table for about 5 minutes, and this guy was molesting some fish that would not raise – ever. I saw him raise once on the river. By then, villain had filled a runner runner str8. This seemed like a great table to join so I waited, but it did not take long for this guy to leave.

I took the fishes’ seat. I played for about 15 minutes. How is this game beatable? I was up $1.80. Villain was down $8. That leaves $6 for the rake. 15 cents per hand adds up. I like playing 200 hands an hour, and love that 85s is a raising hand, but seriously, how can you beat the rake?

Indeed the rake can be enormous when you play heads-up compared to other formats, as almost each time you play a hand, some rake will be taken and it really adds up fast. The short answer to remedy the rake is to move up in limits or get a nice bonus. That, or make sushi out of your opponents. Party Poker has a really bad rake structure. I can’t recall what it is, but i remember some people bellyaching about it. PokerStars, UB, and some other rooms have some forgiving rake structures (relatively speaking) for heads up. The heads-up tables at Cryptos actually have a faster rake structure than the 6-max or full ring tables. Shocking that they take so much rake but there are always players battling in heads-up matches.

Rake or not, you can still make money playing heads-up, and it is a great format to really master poker.

First every player must accept that luck is short-term, but knowing that the long term will undermine its work. However it is difficult to think of this vague concept that represents the “long term” when it comes to an horror that just happened, when we come to lose to the nightmare river card. Because 98% of bad beats occur at the river, which makes them even more cruel. So instead of complaining, let’s analyze the luck factor.

In the moment of distress commonly known as the bad beat, the player often passes through disgust, anger, misunderstanding, a feeling of injustice that is rarely accepted. There is no one to blame and the lack of a scapegoat can bring a player to believe that he is doomed, or that the Goddess of Luck has deserted him. The problem is that bad beat often lead to huge pots lost such as a 200 BB pot on a 2 outers. And it is not clear that luck will catch up at some point in the future.

No one can say with certainty what the word long term means. Does it mean one hundred thousand or one hundred millions hands for the luck factor to level out? Nobody knows for sure, and it is possible to run bad in 10, 20 or more live poker events. In addition, each tournament has a different prize, so even with equal luck two equally skilled players will not win the same amount of money. So some players will get more chance than others during their lifetime, and there is nothing they can do about it. Or is there? There are two important things to do to create your own luck.

Get the poker knowledge. Create a positive environment necessary for chance to grows, this is the power of positive thinking. It is necessary to have the ability to create it. Stop thinking you are an inveterate loser, because the more you lose, the more likely more bad beats situation will manifest themselves. Believe in your mastery of the game and in your lucky star. And use whatever incentives the rooms offer you, such as a PokerStars Bonus Code to get a 100% bonus.

Get poker experience: There is no beginner’s luck. Just that novice players tend to end up in incredible spots, where only luck can come to their help. As a result, we tend to believe that they attract good luck, whereas experienced players will be less subject to chance. Not true.

So if you take a bad beat from outer space worthy of the greatest miracles possible, remember one thing: if the chance was not part of poker, then this game would have no interest. You must accept to surrender your fate in the hands of Lady Luck. So yes it’s hard when you lose a 99.5% favorite shot, but get used to it. Do not forget that poker is just a game, and you could still be way less fortunate than playing online poker.

Good Luck.

Naturally, the idea for 24, the smash Fox hit he created with fellow Falcon Crest scribe Robert Cochran, came to him in the bathroom. “Like most poker players, I think about numbers. Just sort of in daydream style,” says Surnow. “A normal TV season is 22 episodes. So I was thinking, what if you jump it up to 24? 24 hours in a day, what if you did the entire season in one day? It was as simple as that.”

Around the same time that buzz was circulating around Hollywood about the return of Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer in 24, there was another craze slowly starting to take over Southern California block by block. It was Texas Hold ‘em, and a seasoned player like Surnow wasn’t about to let the popular game pass him by.

So he started playing with a motley crew of local characters. Before long, the cast of entrepreneurs, actors, producers, and poker players made up one of the biggest home games in the city. It wasn’t long before the world had gone Hold ‘em crazy. “It was almost before the World Poker Tour’s Travel Channel show came on. Which is kind of crazy,” Surnow remembers. “Hold ‘em was in the air. It was about to take over the country by storm. So we just started getting more and more guys interested in Hold ‘em poker hands once the Travel Channel thing came on.”

Since then, the weekly game has seen several iterations as well as appearances from millionaire venture capitalists, actors like Lou Diamond Phillips and Sean Astin (both of whom have appeared on 24), players like Kenna James and Annie Duke, producers like Jim Wilson (Dances with Wolves, The Bodyguard), and record producers like Paul Brown (Al Jarreau, George Benson).

The group even includes a wheelchair-bound Vietnam vet affectionately known as “Sarge.” It’s all straight out of an HBO original series. “It’s classic. Guys giving each other shit and no holds barred,” says Surnow. “Everyone’s a character.”.

With the success of 24, the resources at Surnow’s disposal overwhelmingly pointed towards putting together the ultimate home game. Before long, he was using the lot where 24 was shot to host games, enlisting the show’s catering for the event and even paying his crew overtime to put the games together.

He never received a confirmation from Fox Television to make the lot games kosher, but then again, he never really asked them for permission in the first place. “I have so much resources at my fingertips here in production. So we would lay out every Wednesday night and it became the greatest game. Within three months, it was bigger than U.S. Steel,” says Surnow, who laments how the popular home game eventually became too big, even for him. “The problem was it ceased to have the home game feel. It was just too many people in there. Everybody wanted to get into this game. We decided after about six months of that to take a step back.”

With a simpler home game established in Hollywood and no longer having to worry about phantom players inviting themselves over to empty everyone’s pockets, Surnow and his buddies were content to focus on important things. Like poker with Sarge and the boys, for example.

With one of the most competitive home games in Hollywood, the league has even managed to tabulate a points system online. At the end of the year, the top ten players in these standings compete in the ultimate home tournament, the winner being awarded a commemorative trophy shaped out of a toilet bowl. It’s all just a little more guy stuff, really. It’s the reason Surnow joined this home game in the first place.

Even if the emphasis is and always will be on the game of poker, it wouldn’t really be a Hollywood home game without the odd player throwing out television and film pitches mid-hand. For Joel Surnow, it’s just an extension of his everyday life (he gets pitched shows almost daily).

Always a player first, he’s more likely to pay attention to the table than random movie pitches. “It’s funny. It’s usually not me pitching ideas to people at the game. It’s guys pitching ideas to me. Guys at the game who all come from different walks of life and they all have stories. Some are better than others,” says Surnow. “I haven’t actually acted on anything, but you hear some really crazy stuff at poker games, especially as it gets late. Everybody feels like they have a story to tell.”

Online slot machines is one of the favorite topics of this blog, but other gambling games available
on the Internet will also get coverage. Video poker in particular is an online gambling game with
similarities to online slots machines.

One example of a popular slot machine is Jazz Time.

Jazz Time Slot Machine Description and Objective

Jazz Time is a 5-reel slot game.

To put money inside the machine, click on the chips in the lower right corner and press “Bet Max”. This will play the maximum bet (9 paylines and 45 coins), giving you the maximum chance to win and automatically spins the reels. If you’d like to play fewer lines or fewer coins per line, just select the lines you want by using the “Select Lines” and “Bet One” buttons. When you have the bet you’d like, just press “Spin”, and wait for a win.

Win by lining up instrument icons on any of the nine pay lines. Receive three pieces of a drum (a set of drumsticks, a snare, and a hi-hat) and watch them combine to give you a bonus win! Get three grand piano icons anywhere on your screen and enter the jam session bonus round, where you can get a jam session with all 4 instruments playing in harmony. Click on any instrument (Bass, Piano, Trumpet and Guitar). You win the coins for each instrument that plays the proper tune in harmony with the bass line rift. Once you miss, the bonus game is over and you keep the bonus that you have won thus far. The amount you win is dependent on the total amount of coins you have played, so the more coins you bet, the more you can win.

Except the bonus game winners, all games are played from left to right, i.e. you need to line up the icons starting from the leftmost wheel in order to win. To see what each combination pays, just click on the “Pay Table” button. Jazz Time can also be configured as a local progressive game, where a Bet Max (maximum bet) wager and hitting five “Microphones” on the pay line wins you the local progressive jackpot total, which appears just above the reels.

There is a growing presence in online casino games of the so-called progressive slot machines.

These machines are classified as progressive slot machines because of the progressive jackpots that can be earned by using a specific bet amount. It is the potential of winning a big jackpot, which differentiates progressive slot machines from regular slot machines.

The progressive jackpot is powered by the latest player. Each time a coin is placed in the specific slot for the progressive jackpot, a predetermined percentage of that bet will be added to the progressive jackpot itself.

The appeal is these progressive jackpots that always seem to swell larger and larger until they fall in the hands of one fortunate gambler. It is the promise of such stunning gains that can reach millions of dollars, which explains the success of progressive slot machines at all online casinos worldwide. And this despite the fact that the chances of being awarded such jackpot are close to the chances to win the lotto.

Technically speaking, there are three types of progressive slot machines. The three types are:

1. The stand alone slot machine. As its name implies, this slot machine has a progressive jackpot that is not connected with other machines of the same name. These machines enable to increase the payout from a classic slot machine, with the growing suspense to watch the amount of the jackpot rise steadily. The amounts of these progressive jackpots are lower than other progressive slot machines.

2. The in-house progressive slot machine. This slot machine offers a progressive jackpot amount which is powered by the bets made by all slot players from within one casino. In most cases it will also include all casinos belonging to one particular casino group. The amounts of these slot machines jackpots are higher than for an independent progressive slot machine, but far from the windfall gains of the best progressive slot machines.

3. The wide area progressive slots machines. They are able to change the life of a seasoned slot player forever. These machines have a progressive jackpot amount that is shared by all online casinos as part of the same game platform such as Playtech or Microgaming for example. Thus the amounts of these progressive jackpots can reach millions of dollars!

For those who are decidedly not fans of slot machines, there are also some other progressive jackpots for games like video poker, blackjack and Caribbean poker.

Some disadvantages exist with respect to progressive slot machines. First their payout is usually much lower than for the classic slot machines. Second to be qualified to win the progressive jackpot, you must place the specific amount of betting, which is often the most expensive.

But overall these new games are highly popular.

The trick is to know the best situations victory is possible with this kind of bluff inducing move. It is also important to have a good idea of who the poker players are, who are able to fall in such a trap.

One first scenario where you wish to be bluffed is when you have a fantastic hand. In this situation, several paths are possible for you. First, you can check from the flop to the river if you feel that your foe is prone to react to perceived weakness. You will content yourself with simply calling each of his bets. He will sometimes assume that you have a drawing hand if the board includes draws.

Secondly, you can make a min-raise, thus allowing him the room for a 4-bet. If your stacks are deep enough, performing the min raise will in some situations push him to send all of his remaining chips on the felt.

The opponents style is the most important aspect to consider. It is obvious that to induce an opponent to bluff, it is preferable for you than he is aggressive enough and able to go far enough with his continuation bets. To perform this move, you have to select your target carefully and to know who you are dealing with. Theoretically, the more your opponent is aggressive and a bluffer, the easier it will be to get your hand on all his chips.

Conversely, a very tight or very observant player will often stop betting after getting called the first time. You must therefore in this case find a different way to get all his chips in your own stack.

Inducing your opponent to bluff is hard in general and you must fully master this skill. Note that you should not float too often, as it will cost you in the long-run.

Inducing a bluff and prevailing in a major pot is one of the most enjoyable feeling you will ever get in poker. So learn this method for future fun playing poker. The pride will be all yours.