Treasure Poker

Point per Day 6 - World Cup Poker Special

2010-04-27T10:10:00.000-07:00

Proven to be the "most popular poker points race series in online poker" RedKings.com launch the latest version of their now hugely successful online poker points race on 3rd May 2010.

This 6th edition called ‘Point per Day 6 - World Cup Poker Special’ will again pay out Thousands in cash on reaching the specified requirements but differs in that there is now an extra $5000 to be won in a hands race for smaller players and another Points Chase additionally rewarding online poker grinders and winning players with prizes all themed on the upcoming World Cup football extravaganza in June.

Commented Jeff Simons, RedKings.com Online Poker Promotions Manager, “Making the Point per Day requirement plus winning cash in the poker hands race plus earning even more fantastic prizes because of the extra poker points chase makes this the most spectacular promotion of its kind and the biggest we have ever run”.
The RedKings.com Point per Day structure requires poker Players to choose the level of RedKings poker points they know they can generate each day and then make sure they get them. The choice is between 25, 50, 250, or 500 points daily and for each day you hit the requirement you earn 1 Race Point. It’s Race points that win the prizes.

For those players who choose either 25 or 50 points a day RedKings will sweeten the pot with an extra $5000 paid out to the players who play the most hands during the course of the Point per Day promotion.

For the grinders and higher level players RedKings have also added an extra points chase with the winners being able to chose from 42’ and 50’ Flat screen TV’s, a $2000 Home Cinema system and a top of the range Lap top perfect for streaming the Football in the event they have to be away from a TV during the World Cup. These can be won in addition to their winnings for Race points.
Starting on the 3rd May and running through to 30th May 2010 players will be able to check their standings daily at the RedKings.com website.

Added Simons, “Each time we hold these Online Poker Races we get a large turnout from all levels of our player database and a significant number of new players join to take advantage of the cash and prizes on offer. Because of the huge success we have had with the points per day concept so far we have made this latest version even more attractive. If you make the requirements in May not only will we give you cash but now you can also win more for just playing the most hands and have a chance to get a TV or an Football shirt of your choice. We urge all new players thinking about playing at RedKings.com to come and check it out”

RedKings Poker is one of the Online Poker success stories of the past 4 years. Known for its innovative promotions, continuously running Sit’n’Go’s and Online Poker Tournament Guarantees of over $16,000,000 per month, RedKings.com has become the first choice for many Online Poker players throughout Europe, Canada and Asia.

Choose to play at RedKings.com today.

Swedish Player Sven Ragnar Astrom Wins WPT Venice

2009-05-19T08:27:00.000-07:00

397 poker players competed for more than $2 million in prize money at the first-ever World Poker Tour® tournament in Italy.

Last week, 397 players participated in the first ever World Poker Tour® event in Italy — WPT Venice™, powered by bwin. The €4,000 tournament kicked off May 6 at Casino di Venezia, with a diverse international playing field, including poker pros Carlos Mortensen, Vanessa Rousso, Chad Brown, Surinder Sunar, Steve Sung, Patrick Bruel, Max “the Italian Pirate” Pescatori and WPT Season VII Player of the Year, Betrand “Elky” Grospellier.

After five days of play, 22-year old Ragnar Astrom took home more than
$542,000, a $25,000 seat in the WPT World Championship in Las Vegas, and an official WPT bracelet on Sunday when he defeated fellow Swede, Martin Jacobson.
Jacobson received $325,000 as runner-up, and Frenchman Vincent Pasdeloup placed third to win $217,000, having reached the final table after qualifying for WPT Venice as a freeroll qualifier on bwin.

“This was our first event with World Poker Tour, and we are delighted with how well things worked out,” said Manfred Bodner, Co-CEO of bwin. “The combination of the online and offline player experience coupled with the information systems and being able to offer bets on the tournament adds a whole new dimension to both sides.”

“We are thrilled that our first event in Italy was a success and well-received by the players,” said Steve Lipscomb, WPT CEO and Founder. “We are pleased with the high player and pro turnout and also with the unique elements that bwin brought to the table for this event. We hope to continue this level of success as we expand further into Italy, the rest of Europe and into other continents.”

In addition to holding the event in the oldest casino in the world, bwin developed and introduced a Live Tournament Information System, which provided real-time streaming information such as leaderboards and bust-out updates throughout the tournament. bwin also created “Tournament Achievements,” which awarded players who reached certain milestones, such as certain chip levels, first player to knock out an opponent, and the “Bubble Buster” award.

The May 10 final table was videostreamed live, and bets on the final table were offered on www.bwin.com, including overall winner bets, country bets and head-to-head bets.

Photos and videos from the WPT Venice, can be found at bwin website.

Sitting at the virtual poker table: results from first ever epidemiological study of actual internet poker gaming behavior, in press

2009-04-24T01:32:00.000-07:00

The results from the first ever epidemiological analysis of the actual gaming behavior evidenced by a large sample of 3,445 online poker players over the span of 2 years are about to be published. The study was conducted by the Division on Addictions, Cambridge Health Alliance, a Harvard Medical School teaching affiliate. This collaboration reflects the longstanding partnership with bwin, the world’s leading online gaming provider.

The partnership between bwin and the Division on Addictions was established in 2005 to provide a scientific basis for the assessment of conspicuous gaming behavior and its consequences for responsible gaming. Two key findings beginning to emerge from the research initiative are:

1) The myth of online gaming as a powerful seductive force has been empirically refuted. Online gaming has no greater problem potential than offline gaming.

2) Responsible gaming measures show effect.

The current research, which analyzes the behavior of Internet poker players over the course of two years, is the world’s largest longitudinal and the first ever epidemiological study of its kind.

Individuals exhibit rational behavior
“In this research we provide additional evidence in support of our previous research showing that most subscribers who gamble on the Internet do so moderately. In fact, correlation analyses indicated that as Percent Lost increased, Duration, Total Gambling Sessions, and Total Amount Wagered all decreased, suggesting that individuals moderated their behavior based on their wins and their losses – exhibiting “rational” betting behavior.” says Howard Shaffer, PH.D., Associate Professor, Harvard Medical School, Director, Division on Addictions, The Cambridge Health Alliance, a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School.

· The average age of the cohort (sample) was 27.9 years and almost 95% were male. The typical poker player was an active poker player for a median duration of six and a half months and participated in a median of one poker session every three days. The median Euros per session gambled was €13 and the median cost of playing poker was €1.80 per session.

· The gaming behaviors of the most involved poker players show that this group, representing 5% of all players, was active for a duration of 18.5 months and participated in ten sessions per week.

· This 5% subgroup had a smaller percentage lost than the sample majority, suggesting that skill is a factor in poker play and that players are able to improve their performance compared with chance.

· When examining the most involved poker players who devoted more time and money to this activity, the study found that like the rest of the sample, they reduced Euros per session and reduced Total Wagered as Percent Loss increased.

“In our intention to replace speculation with scientific evidence, this study takes us a big step closer towards understanding the behavior of online poker players.
Ultimately we are interested in developing algorithms capable of identifying behavioral patterns or identifying risk patterns associated with disordered gaming.” says Manfred Bodner, Co-CEO of bwin.
For further information about the study please visit www.divisiononaddictions.org

10 poker tips & tricks

2008-08-22T12:39:00.000-07:00

In this post I want to share a few poker tips, on which I have lately built up a successful strategy at online poker tables.

1) How much you care your money - Everyone likes to win of course, but the important thing is that you don't go mad if unluckily you lose. DON'T TILT!

2) How much you care your hands - All we hope to win with a good hand. But pay attention to the board, calculate odds and throw away those wild cowboys if necessary.

3) Spend time in training - You are an athlete and you must train. The more you train, the more the experience you get, the more the chance your play improves.

4) Read books - Well actually it's part of training.

5) Keep track of your session results - It will help to control your profit/loss status and, at the same time, to evaluate if the poker strategy or specific technique you are adopting is better than another one.

6) Patience - Patience is perhaps the best skill, and for sure the most important, of a professional player. Not just patience to wait the right hand for winning the pot, but also patience to accept losses as a part of life, finding inside yourself the ability to use them at your advantage. Expect to experience several losses at poker tables and remember that, often, losses come before huge gains.

7) Don't play too many hands and don't exceed your prefixed budget - Choose a number of hands you are willing to play before you start your poker session and break as often as necessary to regain energy in your play. Many pro have their opinion on this. For example Annie Duke suggests to use the 30 bet Rule, that means never lose more than 30 big bets in a game. By limiting your losses to 30 big bets, you are effectively minimizing the time you spend playing poorly, maximizing the amount of time you spend playing your premium game.

8) When the ship starts to sink, don't wait, jump! - It's an axiom for many traders in finance. Make this sentence yours as well.

9) (NOT FOR ALL) Play sometimes what I call unrational poker or, in other words, when playing 7-2 is the good thing to do - Sometimes it may be very fruitful, especially if your opponents are particularly emotional.

10) ... and always it is true that if you can't spot the easy target at your first half hour at the table, then you are the easy target.

Poker Odds

2008-08-16T01:30:00.000-07:00

In this article we are going to show how mathematics and numbers are closely linked to gambling and casino table games in general.
Many scientists and mathematicians have dedicated part of their studies to explain the inner mechanisms of such games and how mathematics is able to foresee and help to win a bet or a pot.

Already on 1663 Girolamo Cardano, a Renaissance learned of Pavia, Italy, keen on table games and gambling, published the treatise “De Ludo Aleae”, about dice game, which started the history of probabilities in gambling. After him, other eminent scientists, masters of probability theories like Pascal, Fermat, Huygens and Bernoulli, have been fascinated by the world of gambling.

Others came over years, who sharpened classic theories into modern theories (Montecarlo method) and axioms (Kolmogorov).

But what may probabilities theories teach you in practice?
Let's start with a simple example.
Let's say you are playing at roulette and the ball stops 20/30 consecutive times on the red box. Anyone would say: "Well, it's time to bet on black!" Wrong! Probability tells you that any spin of the roulette is independent with respect of all the previous spins.

This and many other aspects have to be deeply understood by professional gamblers, playing any day with probabilities, trying to maximize their return, minimizing the risk.

For sure learning how to properly count your outs and non-outs, and figure out pot odds is a fundamental requirement of poker games, such as Texas Hold'em. Both if you are an experienced player and a novice "The Theory of Poker" by David Sklansky is something you should not miss. In this book Sklansky focuses on the math of poker, how to calculate odds, pot odds, reverse implied pot odds, etc. and psychology and how to combine all theese factors to make the correct decisions at the poker table.

Lesson 2 - ON GREED

2006-05-27T00:46:00.000-07:00

-If you stay too long you lose.

First of all because concentration is not infinite even though you don't perceive it and continue to feel strong; second because the other players, even unconsciously, start knowing your play. Don't hope for winning streaks to go on and on, don't stretch your luck.
Take your profit and get out even though you can't see the peak of the mountain you are climbing. Sometimes even only a further hand may be very dangerous.
A question arises at this point.
When getting out?
Our modest advice is:

-Decide in advance what are your upper and lower thresholds (i.e. a fixed budget) or playing time period (or/and the number of hands to play) and when you reach your limit get out.

One thing you should use is the 30 bet rule: “Don’t ever go off for more than 30 big bets in a poker game!"
Until you have played a lot of hours it is difficult for you to judge your level of skill compared to the other players at your table.
One thing the 30 bet rule does for you is limit your losses in games where you might be the sucker. Until you are able to accurately judge how you play compared to others in your game, loss limiting with the 30 bet rule effectively stops you from dumping off large sums of money in games you may not be able to beat. This is always a good strategy for bankroll health!
Even if you have enough experience and table hours to judge whether you are good, better or worse than the game you have chosen, loss limiting is still a good strategy. When we are losing it is difficult to accurately judge exactly how much losing affects our play. Even great champions will often be in a game they could generally beat soundly but because they are losing. They become a dog to the game and don't realize it. When you are losing, your table image erodes and table image is very important to how much money you can take out of a game.

Lesson 1 - ON RISK

2006-05-14T08:22:00.000-07:00

Poker is a natural fit with the inclinations, talents, and skills of many future entrepreneurs. A close reading of the odds, combined with the ability to out-psych the opposition, leads to capital accumulation in many fields, aside from the poker table.

Starting today we'll weekly post the tips that made us successful players.

-Worry is not a sickness but a sign of health. If you are not worried, you are not risking enough.

While risk and reward management might seem like an obvious skill for you to have - both in daily life as well as poker - gambling likes to bring out sides of ourselves that we usually don't witness; as we sometimes play with more passion that reason. You should always try and strike a compromise between the two, and never allow things to get out of control. Good poker players should be willing to take a big risk if the reward is high enough, but ONLY if the expected return is higher than the risk. Playing poker is a kind of balancing act, and awesome poker players are the ones who can balance things with the most skill. All this leads to a second sentence:

-Always play for meaningful stakes

Online Poker Cheating

2006-04-04T14:02:00.000-07:00

Here we report an interesting post published on the poker.com blog by Kris:

"Why would anyone cheat? Some would say it's human nature to try and gain unfair advantage, but I'd like to hope that human nature would be to do what you think is right, not wrong. Greed is not human nature. I think greed is a product of an individual's environment and is the main driving force behind anyone that cheats at any game or contest involving money.

Personally I despise the very notion of cheating. I've never been able to really cheat at anything, even as a joke or when playing a friendly game. My basketball team-mates still smack me over the head sometimes when I help a referee out by owning up to a foul or sending a ball out of bounds. I just can't help myself - I can't cheat - ever!

Recently there's been a few instances of players cheating in online poker tournaments that have been made very public (not at Poker.com). The players busted have made statements trying to explain why they did what they did, even attempting to justify their actions. There is no justification for cheating in my eyes. These players would have known all along that what they were doing was not only against the rules, but just plain wrong. If you can work out how to play poker online, then you also have the same instinctual knowledge of what is right and wrong, just like the rest of us.

Two things amazed me about the recent cheating that was exposed.

1. How did they get away with it for so long?
Poker.com is a relatively new room, perhaps with better backend technology than some of the more established sites, but this never would have happened on our system. It would have been identified the first time the player tried their little tricks and we would have known about it. On one particular site (the internet's biggest) the player cheated in a ridiculous number of tournaments. How much of this is really happening there?

2. Why did one site give the player some of their money back?
Let this be a warning to any potential cheats. If you do this at Poker.com, you won't be getting a cent of your balance. It will all be returned to the players you played against and any remaining balance will be donated to charity. Why would a site give back any money to a player who has admitted to cheating not only your site, but also who has won other money from your loyal and fair players. If you detected them cheating via one method using online detection, what is to say that they were not using other currently undetectable or offline methods to cheat or collude against more of your players on other occassions? If someone has admitted to cheating, then you know they have no moral standards, so why assume that their other games were fair? Our terms and condtions are written to discourage potential cheating and if any cheats are caught I will be making sure that all funds are forfeited. In the old west, you would have been shot, so your money being given to a charity is a pretty good alternative I would think.

Anyway, just my take on cheating. I just don't know how people could do it and live with themselves, let alone try to stick up for themselves and rationalise what they did... The internet makes some people crazy and they lose their sense of right and wrong in search of a quick buck. Don't let it happen to you."

Meditate people, Meditate!

Poker School

2006-04-04T13:17:00.000-07:00

I like to start this blog with a sentence Max Gunther applied to his book on trading The Zurick Axioms:
"Everyone wants to win, of course. But not everybody wants to bet, and therein lies a difference of greatest magnitude".
If you want to get rich no matter how inexperienced you are in poker, you must learn neither to avoid risk nor court it foolhardily. Don't manage it and enjoy it!