Poker Articles

While it can be tempting to believe that you know all that there is to know about poker and strategies for winning at it, in fact there is always more that even the more experienced player can stand to learn.

 It's a big leap from being a profitable recreational player, to becoming a professional and earning your living on the tables. And it's not a leap that I recommend for everyone.

Former poker player Tom Page is now the owner of a successful startup company developing a job matching application. The app is the first of its kind on the market and also is the most widespread, while being constantly developed. But how did this progressive career start?

Page had been enrolled in a poker career in the best possible period: in 2004, he deposited $25 and turned it into $6,500 in a single month and made enough money in his career so that it should not be a concern for him anymore. As it happens, however, Page had never intended to remain a poker player forever, which he explains with a unique reason: “I see it as being worthless to society. You are not creating any value, and that isn’t important to everyone, but it’s important to me.”

A new poker utility software has been launched recently by PokerSnowie. PokerCoach is here to teach players the Game Theory Optimal (GTO) strategy by showing us our mistakes and to suggest moves that correspond with GTO strategy.

Snowie Games was established in 1998 and their first hit was BackgammonSnowie, a piece of software to coach backgammon players on a higher level. In June 2013, Snowie turned to a new field, poker, by launching the PokerSnowie brand. The first product developed by the new firm is PokerCoach, a utility tool to assist subscribing full ring, short-handed and heads-up players in acquiring the Hold’em cash game GTO strategy. The company officially describes the tool as “your world class, private poker coach”.

The dismissed rumours of Google purchasing bwin.party aside, it is worth taking a look at what online gaming owes to search engine and online industry giant Google.

When rumours emerged that Google might be about to purchase the shares of bwin.party, people started speculating as the search engine company had no previous known affiliation with online gambling whatsoever; in fact, they have recently applied very strict policies regarding real money gaming software distributed via their Play store for the mobile devices. While the news turned out to be false, it is indeed worth taking a look at Google’s role in the industry.

Antonio Esfandiari, Brian Rast, Sorel Mizzi and John Tabatabai visit Burning Man 2013 and post photos.

For the 27th time, the Burning Man festival was held this year in the Black Rock desert in Nevada, USA. The festival is nothing like the usual, multi-day parties, lacking organized concerts, food and liquor retailers and so on. The single purpose of Burning Man is radical self expression and self-sustainment.

The tens of thousands of participants build an entire city from scratch and live there without rules and restrictions, among surreal buildings and art pieces. Of course, there is party as well, only it is whatever participants are organizing.

Is it Phil Hellmuth’s rant, Ivan Freitez’ angle shooting or Humberto Brenes’ singing that really grinds your gears?

You might remember Mimi Luu, who put on a real show, tanking with pocket kings in the $5,300 Seminole Hard Rock Poker Open event and repeating “I can’t fold this” and “I don’t know what to do” in a high pitched voice. The lady instantly became a poker meme, commented on by Daniel Negreanu as “This woman easily cracks top 5 most annoying people in poker. This video has train wreck written all over it!”

Who do You think the most annoying poker person around is? Here is a compilation of ten of those who can really grind our gears, anyway:

Yeong-Ung Yang presents a short documentary on the bus-kkun community, to whom the casinos of the United States mean an alternative way of living.

For most people, Las Vegas, Atlantic City and the world of the casinos of the United States mean glamour, shining and wealth. All poker players dream of playing just once at the tables of one of the most renowned establishments and several live poker specialists make a living here, winning immense sums from wealthy tourists. It turns out, however, that it is not only poker players who make ends meet at the casinos...

While Phil Ivey had always been notorious for avoiding media attention as much as possible, he has just recently registered to Instagram and posted photos of his everyday life.

"Finally joined Instagram. Follow me. This is my chef and I #cabo #mexico"

Nine times WSOP champion Phil Ivey could not be farther from attention seekers in his approach towards media. Even though he enjoys occasional appearances in televised high stakes poker shows, he rarely gives interviews and it is not him who floods fans’ Facebook and Twitter news feeds, either.

Brandi Hawbaker has been quite successful in poker, but she was known more for her actions outside of the tables. According to some sources she had a troubled childhood, she ran away from home at the age of 13. According to Hawbaker, she travelled around the world for six years with a backpack, undertaking questionable jobs along the way to maintain herself. She returned to the United States in 2005 after spening a year in Guyana working as a project coordinator for a company. That's when she got involved in poker.

She finished 35th at the World Poker Tour Festa Al Lago Main Event, for which she won $20,000, that is when the infamous photo was taken of her covering her nipple with the logo of an online poker room. The photo put Hawbaker on the poker map. This meant the beginning of the end for the troubled young lady, who took part in the tournament on 20 October, 2006; just 18 months later she passed away.

The 888poker iPad App Fast-Tracks your Poker Game!

The focus of the 888poker iPad App is mobile poker gaming par excellence. Now players can enjoy top-notch poker games on their iPad.

iPad Poker gaming is experiencing a groundswell of support from players the world over. Top-tier mobile poker is the order of the day and 888poker has developed a software platform to enhance your enjoyment of iPad poker play.

In much of 2010, Viktor ’Isildur1’ Blom performed poorly to say the least at the online tables, unable to repeat his breakthrough results of 2009. I wouldn’t go as far as to state 2011 might be his comeback year, but he has been doing very convincingly in the past couple of days. He currently has over $600,000 in profit, won from the likes of Phil Galfond, Ashton Griffin and Mike Gordon.

Viktor 'Isildur1' Blom

As you probably know, Blom won the third SuperStar Showdown against Daniel ‘jungleman12’ Cates, last year’s biggest online high stakes winner. The 2500 hands heads-up game left Isildur1 with a profit of $51,196. Ever since, he is unstoppable: in just a matter of days, he earned over $600,000.

Although not as successful as Annie Duke or Liv Boeree yet, Taiwan-born 27-year-old Maria Ho is a renowned female poker player, boasting eight WSOP and two WPT in the money finishes. In 2007, she finished 38th in the WSOP Main Event, winning $237,865, which is her greatest achievement so far.

Maria Ho

Despite her youth, she is considered an experienced poker player and as such, it is little wonder she has a firm opinion about the scandal of this year’s WSOP Ladies Event: six male players, including Shaun Deeb and David ‘Blue Knight1’ Sesso, have entered the game, disregarding the organisers’ explicit request. They stated that poker is not something in which there is room for “segregation” as it suggests that women cannot possibly match men in terms of skill or knowledge, etc.

Many poker players use Moneybookers (MB) to transfer money to and from poker rooms, in addition to a variety of other financial transactions. Some are, however, afraid of creating a MB account, out of fear from hacker attacks, which I can understand. With the Security Token (ST), however, these attempts can be neutralized.

The token is a small gadget to enhance the security of your MB account. In essence, it “generates unique, one-time passwords to increase the security upon login to your Moneybookers account.” In every 32 seconds, it produces a new entry code which is to be given after the usual process when logging in. To see the code, you need to push the small button on the token, so that it is displayed for 10 seconds.

Texas Dolly keeps discussing interesting topics: after dealing on his blog with the nominees for the Poker Hall of Fame, now he asked the following (somewhat controversial) questions to his followers on Twitter: “Which poker player would you like to have sex with?” “Poker player u would like to kill?” “Which poker player would you most like to hang out with?”

Texas Dolly's followers voted the female players they would like to have sex with: Shannon Elizabeth, Vanessa Rousso and Jennifer Tilly