Lesson 2 - ON GREED

-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

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

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

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!