Get your hands on a slice of $10,000 every day at PartyPoker!

Starts: 00:00 CET, 1st May, 2013
Ends: 23:59 CET, 31st May, 2013

The $10K Daily Giveaway is here and you could win big every day! With four tournaments running daily Monday to Saturday and a huge $10,000 Giveaway every Sunday, you’ll have plenty of chances to win.

That’s not even the best bit – you can play for free or qualify for the big-money tournaments from just 1 point!

Here are the full details: 

You can register for all these tournaments from the ‘Tournaments > Freeroll’ section of the poker lobby in your account. Just look out for ‘Daily Giveaway’ in the names.

Read also

• Holdem: Flop Statistics
• Texas Holdem: Playing the Blinds

Sometimes boards will come down that hit your perceived range very hard and you will have a hand that has completely missed the flop, if you have a very marginal hand and you're against an opponent who is capable of barrelling as the board gets scarier for the range of hands you're representing by calling a flop continuation bet, you may want to raise the flop as a bluff.

Generally, a flop call, especially on a drawy board, represents a range with marginal strength because many players will give lots of action with a draw on such a board if they think they have good equity versus a calling range as well as some folding equity. Against players who continuation bet and barrel too often, but often enough that you will make mistakes on future streets, you may be best off choosing to raise the flop as a (semi)bluff.

March just got extra exciting, as CarbonPoker is proud to announce the $10,000 Chip King promotion, kicking off March 1st, 2013. Starting Sunday, March 10th there will be a freeroll every Sunday (10th, 17th, 24th, 31st) all month long just for players who opt-in to the Chip King promotion and have earned at least 50 VIP Points in the month. 

Schedule and Prize Pools

Each week the prize pool for the Chip King Freeroll will grow. The first week we'll award $1,000 in free cash, the second week, $1,500, the third, $2,500. And finally, on March 31st the top 50 VIP Points earners between March 1st and 29th who have opted into Chip King will be entered into an exclusive $5,000 tournament, with custom starting stacks based on VIP Points earned.

All Tournaments will be listed in the client 24hrs before the Sunday start time under: Tournament > Scheduled > Special

See also

• Health and Poker
• Common Bankroll Management Misconceptions

 When to get the money in:

• Against a player who is much better than you, you want to get all your chips into the pot as quickly as possible.
• Against a player who is much worse than you, you want to get all your chips into the pot as slowly as possible.

Let’s take a quick refresher course in statistics before we continue. If you flip a fair coin, since a coin has only two sides, the probability of flipping heads versus tails is one in two. If you flip the coin again, the probability of it coming up heads again is also one in two. Each coin flip is an independent event and as such is not affected by previous flips. What about the probability associated with coming up a winner on two or more consecutive rounds? Calculating the odds for multiple flips is simple and helpful in terms of understanding the probability of seeing strings of back-to-back events.

What is the probability of flipping two heads in a row? This is calculated by taking the one-in-two probability and multiplying it by itself, which turns out to be one in four. In this case, the combined probability of one in four means that in four consecutive two-flip sets only one of them will likely produce back-to-back heads. Since there are twice as many ways that two flips can turn out, the probability against success therefore becomes doubled. The two flips can yield a combination of headsheads, heads-tails, tails-heads, or tails-tails, and only one of the four two-flip sets meets our requirements. Okay, enough of the refresher course and on to its application to poker.
 

Read also

• The Importance of Emotion in Poker
• Health and Poker

One: keep track of your results. If you are honest with yourself, you will be driven to improve. Two: study, practice, and repeat. If you genuinely want to become and remain a winning poker player, these two things alone, done unwaveringly, will get you there.

Study.
You have already started to do this. You must study. You must engage your brain and constantly ask yourself, "What part of my game can I improve?" Reading a poker book once will not be enough. Read poker books several times. Think about what you have read. Question it. Learn it. Consume it.

Studying means that you are actively working on getting better away from the table. You are doing things while you are not playing that will make you better. Chess masters do not only play chess, they study. Football players study video of the opposition to learn their strengths and weaknesses. Hockey players shoot thousands of pucks at empty nets. Army generals spend countless hours studying intelligence reports. If you want to get better at anything, you must be a lifetime learner. You must study.

See also

• Tilt
• Holdem: Manipulating Your Opponents

As studies of individuals with a certain type of brain damage show, emotions are a large part of the decision making process. Even if we are consciously attempting to make rational decisions, our innate emotional responses to stimuli are likely more of a factor than we can imagine.

Our emotions can be harnessed by individuals with unscrupulous aims. Advertisers will influence us into buying their products by creating positive emotional associations with them. When did you last see a model in a catalogue frowning?

Emotions can bias our decisions at the table because our emotional response to luck will vary enormously, depending on whether we are the beneficiary or the benefactor of fortune. Losing a big pot that we were ahead in creates a surge of intense emotion, we might express thoughts such as, “how could this happen... to me... again?” This heightened emotional respons imprints the hand vividly in our memory; we will remember the hand for at least the rest of the poker session, and possibly for some time after.

See also

• Counting Outs in Texas Holdem
• Online Poker Seat Selection

Value-betting is one of the most important skills in poker. The term itself is a little bit tricky because we’re always thinking of value when we’re betting. The reason we bluff is because we believe it has more value than not bluffing. However, the term value-betting is reserved for betting when we believe we have the best hand. We’re trying to extract as much value as we can when we actually have the goods.

There are common misconceptions about value-betting I’d like to address. Often times I hear players say "I want worse hands to call." Or they say "I’m trying to not lose my customer." It’s important to realize that when we’re betting for value, we’re still executing the second key to good poker. The goal is to maximize value. Sometimes we maximize value by getting small, steady payouts and other times we maximize value by getting the infrequent, big payoff. Let’s use an extreme example to see this at work.

Hero: AJ

Villain:

Call up to $8 – A9, A2, AJ, AQ, KQ
Call all-in for $500 - KQ

Board: 258A7

See also

• General Poker Tips
• Commonest Mistakes That Poker Players Make

When the typical person thinks about poker, he or she likely doesn't grasp the fact that it takes countless hours of study and analysis in addition to time spent playing in order to truly become successful. Winning players count on this, as they have the greatest edge against those who underestimate the work involved.
 
That being said, when typical winning players think about poker, it's likely that they, too, don't even fully grasp what's necessary to play at their very best. Yes, they realize that it takes hard work and time to improve their game, but knowing what kind of work is needed is another thing entirely.
 
What if I told you that having a healthy lifestyle can increase the amount of neurons in the hippocampus? Would you immediately think, "Wow - that would help my poker game immensely!" and dedicate yourself to such a lifestyle? Probably not.
 
However, if I were to tell you that leading a healthy life could "upgrade" the memory center in the brain, allowing you to remember player tendencies for much longer - making you more money as a result - would that change things? I'm sure it would. Even though they don't sound the same thanks to ever-confusing scientific jargon, these two questions are saying the same thing. Applying the information specifically to poker players is the main element missing here.

See also

• Texas Holdem: Playing the Blinds
• Holdem: Positional Concepts - Your relative position

While there are a few slight variations played at some establishments, there are basically two kinds of Texas Hold’em that you can play: limit and no limit. No limit is the crazy version you typically see played on television. You know, the kind that first caught your attention and somehow made you think you’d like this game. No limit Hold’em is the kind where one whacky character will push his whole stack of chips into the middle of the table, announce, “All in,” and be called by another whacky character who also pushes his whole stack of chips into the pot until there is a pot of over a million dollars on the table.

Finally, no matter which wacky character wins the pot, everyone in the room will rise from their seat, hoot and holler a bit, turn to the person next to them and slap them on the back before letting out a collective deep breath. Then, everyone will sit back down, take another swig of beer, and the network will go to a commercial break. That is no limit Texas Hold’em, and not the kind of poker we’re talking about in this article.

See also

• Commonest Mistakes That Poker Players Make
• Tilt

There is no shortage of bad bankroll management advice. Some of it is clearly wrong, and some is subtly wrong because it applies in some contexts, but can easily be applied out of context. We’d like to address some of these common misconceptions.

Fixed number of buy-ins

It used to be that the common figure tossed around for no-limit cash games was 20 buy-ins. It’s easy to remember and compute. What’s wrong with that? It’s like guessing that everyone has a shoe size of 7. For some people, it’s a great fit. For some, it’s off by a little, and for some, it’s horribly wrong. Even for a particular person, like a growing child, if a size 7 shoe fits now, a size 7 shoe will probably not fit next year.
 
If you are a typical winning player, your winrate will drop as you move up. The rake becomes less of a factor, but that benefit is more than countered by the increased average strength of your opposition. In no-limit cash games, the overall aggression factor generally increases, which tends to increase your standard deviation. The result is that the number of buy-ins you need for a given level of safety will usually increase as you move up. Using a fixed number of buy-ins as you move up will lead to disaster.