FatPokerBonus.Com

My affiliate, who I’ll simply call “my affiliate” was well read when it came to using the Internet to put a little change in our pockets. When I came up with the idea to start a website he started generating ideas on how to market it and even better how to make money off of it. That made the creation of our poker information site that much more fun, because I knew my Poker Affiliate would offer both of us a financial return in the future.
Sure enough when we stared Donkeys and Dragons Poker Dot Net, my affiliate already had us three advertisers. Even better they were content specific advertisers that focused on Texas Hold em Poker. All we had to do was send them traffic and/or customers and they’d pay us for the visitors. My affiliate was a busy, industrious man who didn’t stop there.
While he was out selling our site, I was responsible for the content which centered on poker’s bad plays that famous poker players made, bad players, and for a short while bad beats. The readership on our message board quickly let me and my affiliate know that bad beats were bad content. As I continued to build content that brought in interest and developed a following, my affiliate was able to approach other companies about advertising. If I really wanted to confuse you I’d tell you how my affiliate started us in affiliate marketing programs. I don’t want to confuse you but he did just that.
Now, when we steered traffic to sites and our readers spent money there or enrolled in an affiliate program site we got a piece of the money they spent. For a while that was very lucrative. Then it seemed like everybody had either found their way to those sites before, or were already familiar with the products, and the affiliate marketing programs started to dry up.
Now, the focus of Donkeys and Dragons shifted a little bit. In my haste to get rich quick, I put less emphasis on the quality of the content and we spent more effort trying to solicit future customers for our advertisers. This turned off many of our devoted following and instead of gaining market share we lost it. As the site’s popularity lessened so too did the new traffic.
One day, we had a very honest look at what we had become and we realized Donkeys and Dragons Poker was no longer a site featuring funny anecdotes and a community of like minded poker fans, instead it was simply a shill site, thin on content and heavy on advertising. We weren’t very original because much of what we had done was the same banners and branding on all the other sites. So we adjusted on the fly.
My affiliate took a back seat to me again. I upped the quality of the materials, featuring video clips, and better moderation on the message board, and focused on content. I brought back a sense of community and loyalty to the site. The readers, now happier with the content, came back to us, and things were good again.
Only problem is we weren’t making much money. The conundrum any popular site with an affiliate running affiliate programs invariably faces. Just how much do you sell and how much do you entertain. You can do a little of both, but if you do too much of either you aren’t making enough money to survive. Donkeys and Dragons Poker hopefully has found, now, a happy medium.
The readers don’t like to be thought of as products for a site to sell. They will follow your advice on a product if you’ve proven yourself to be knowledgeable and shown the integrity to turn some of the potential advertisers down but they won’t blindly click every link you put before them. We didn’t invent Huffington Post but as it stands Donkeys and Dragons is getting popular all over again and this time we won’t waste our market share by selling out–completely.

There are a number of options to play poker. There are online poker sites: fun at any time day or night with no dress code and no leaving the house. There are live casinos with poker rooms: fun with live people, again at any time, but you got to drive there and can’t play in your underwear. There are backroom bar poker games: fun with drunks and sometimes very lucrative, but you got to deal with drunks with little or no security. There are home games: fun with friends (depending on the friends you might be able to play in your underwear) but usually not very rewarding stakes.

As stated they are all “fun” but how can playing poker not be fun. Well, except when you are losing. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. There is one option not on the list. If you are lucky you can join a Poker club which combines all of these things.
I played in a poker club of my friend, visiting as an out of town guest, and I immediately wished I had the same thing locally. The poker club had the best of all poker options in one place. Like a casino they offered security, in fact, the club was probably more secure. It put a premium on protecting players money and players. The poker club made its money from monthly dues and didn’t rake the pots. The owners only played in tournaments, never cash games, and insisted that on the tables they played on, the players deal the hands. They didn’t want even the suspicion of their dealers shooting them better cards.

They had security cameras outside and inside the venue. The tapes were housed in room that could only be open with a key that was never on the premises. Would be thieves looking to cover their tracks would never be able to access the room, at least not before the cops arrived. The club took steps to make sure they were a legal business in the area, so had an alarm wired like a bank directly to the police.

Thieves would be foolish to rob it anyway, as the poker club, scanned checks or credit cards from the players and never had much cash on the premises. The only money thieves could steal was from the players themselves. The fact that one or two of the owners were always there with a shot-gun and an armed off-duty cop worked the door made it even less attractive to rob.

The poker club had a big enough customer base that there was almost always a game. They did have a dress code, so players looking for options to play in their underwear or in the nude, would have to stick to playing online. Actually, the club went a step further then just offering live play. They had a bank of computers that players could play poker on while waiting for a game. So, in the club you could play online poker too. Some players mostly play the computers.

They also allowed players to bring their own alcohol. They put it in a refrigerator and gave the players a ticket like a coat check. Wait-staff would bring the drinks to the players. Course once your beer ran out you couldn’t buy any more. They also had a limit on the number of drinks a player could “deposit” before a session. After I think 6 or 8 hours of play they were allowed to restock. So like a bar, you did have drunks you could exploit.

The club was also very responsible about calling cabs for their players when they had drank too much, so it was safe from a number of perspectives. Also, they were willing to spread and deal home games on a table as long as they were given notice and all the players were members of the club. Considering the pool tables, dart boards, shuffleboards, big screen TVs, couches, and video games you really couldn’t ask for a better poker club.

I can also recommend to play and practice your skills at a safe and high traffic poker site such as: https://www.bwin.com/texas-holdem-poker. See you there!

As a former blackjack player then it is striking to me just how many similarities there are between blackjack and poker. Money management is a huge factor in both games as is emotional control and believe it or not you can still tilt very badly in blackjack. Another factor that makes the two games strikingly similar although not immediately obvious to many is that they can both be played using a basic strategy. The basic strategy for any game is the strategy that you adopt that is correct when no other information is present or taken into consideration.

So in blackjack then it is the basic strategy of playing hands that you learn first and foremost and knowing this alone would place you ahead of many of the recreational players who do not know basic. But poker too has a basic strategy although it isn’t as clear cut as it is in poker. Another huge similarity is in how very good players only have a slight edge in terms of return on investment. The variance in both games is very severe and depending on which games you select in both games then the return on turnover can be higher or lower depending on the situation at hand.

One of the big differences though between the two games is in how much potential there is to play the game for profit online. In online blackjack then there is little potential to make profit except perhaps for bonus hustling but even then the online sites have really tightened up in this area too. But in online poker then the potential is certainly there and is enough for some players at the very highest level to earn well into seven figures a year.

This is simply not possible in blackjack whether you play live or online. This is why when people say to me if I recommend blackjack as a profit source then I simply say that I would be looking to put my time and effort into playing Online Texas Holdem poker for profit. Even though blackjack takes less time to learn, there is simply more profit potential in poker than blackjack and in fact depending on where you play then making money from blackjack is more than just difficult……it is downright impossible. So you either have to choose between a very difficult environment in which to make money or an impossible environment if you play blackjack.

I don’t know about you but I do not like that proposition much and was why blackjack became dated for me in 2001 and was why I stopped and switched to online poker. Also when you play online poker then you can play several tables at once and this is another factor as to why you can make more money playing poker. However though the role of position plays a huge part in both games and this is where the house edge really comes from in blackjack. In poker many players abuse their position simply because they never make the connection with blackjack in how important position really is.

There is a very strong tendency to be results orientated when you play Texas Hold’em poker but this is a big mistake for several reasons. At the end of the day, results in the short term can be a very poor indicator of skill. It is for this reason why players have turned pro thinking that they were beating the game while others have packed the game up in the belief that they were a losing player. It is quite possible for two players with identical skill sets to have totally different results over sample sizes that most players would deem impossible. I have seen players who have recorded unbelievable earn rates for 100,000 hands only to then break even over the next 100,000 hands.

It is wrong to concentrate on results in the short term because of two reasons. Firstly as stated then results in the short term can and are a very poor indicator of longer term success and also because short term results simply cannot be controlled. Let us imagine a poker player called “Rob” who set himself an absolutely impossible goal of never having a losing day playing online. Even if he multi-tables and gets a large number of hands in per hour, the variance is so severe in poker that he can never guarantee a winning day because he could never play enough hands to make sure that he never had a losing day.

So the short term volatility in poker means that short term results simply cannot be controlled and are almost chaotic in nature. Your main goal as a poker player is to concentrate on your decisions and try to make sure that they are as solid as possible. Forget about being right all the time, poker is a game of incomplete information at the end of the day. You are playing a game where your goal is to make good calculated decisions based on odds and probabilities. This is how financial day traders work and stock market specialists. They know that having winning trades all the time is impossible and they allow for losing.

As a poker player then you must do this as well. If you are making good decisions solidly and consistently then money will surely follow. If it doesn’t after doing this then this is a sure sign that you are in the wrong games and playing at a level that is too tough for you. So your motto when you play online or live for that matter is to concentrate on “decisions and not outcomes”. If you run a bluff against a player who called you down with top pair to take the pot then review your play. You review your play for one very important reason and this is because you need to get some kind of a fix on your decision making processes. If you are making bad decisions then you have something of a problem. You can make a lot of money in online poker making great decisions. You can also make good money making decent decisions but if you make bad decisions constantly then you are going to have trouble making poker pay.

You will have heard of the old saying about “attack being the best form of defence” in poker. This is a true but also a very misleading saying. Often it is better to attack than to simply passively defend and as Napoleon used to say “passivity leads to defeat”. But you cannot go blindly lashing out all over the place and to be first able to attack well then you must be able to defend. All successful attacks are based around solid defences; otherwise there is no strong springboard from which to launch the attack.

These principles are found in all fields including football. This is why coaches find it easier to coach defensive tactics than offensive and is also why it is becoming increasingly difficult for superior teams to record huge winning margins unlike in days gone by. This is exactly the same in poker because before you can start launching attacks all over the place then you need to be able to defend well.

So just what is good defence in poker? Well for want of a better word, it is simply to do with folding. When you fold then you are cutting your losses and this is a defensive play in poker. A fold is not geared to winning money but saving money which still adds to your bottom line at the end of the year. Your average poker player simply does not fold enough and so has a weak defence that isn’t watertight. You only have to look at the pre-flop hand statistics from a poker tracker program to show this.

It really doesn’t matter in poker if you are making brilliant plays all the time if you are making huge errors. It does not matter if you launch a successful multi-barrel bluff; these are tactics that are only successful as part of a well rounded game. If you think about this for a second, any fool can bluff in poker. You could teach a novice the rules of the game and if they were aggressive enough then they would win a very high number of pots.

But blind aggression is not a skill in the same way that passive play isn’t. An aggressive poker player is placing more money into the pot which isn’t always a good idea if your opponents are better than you are. So in poker you must first learn to defend and this means folding more than you otherwise feel comfortable doing. If you raise from the cut-off in limit hold’em with A-9 and you are three bet by the button and the flop comes K-10-4 and you lead out on the flop and get raised then fold.

Staying around for one more bet is not good defence. If your opponent has a king or a ten then you are drawing to only three outs and you may even be drawing almost dead. So get your defence right in poker before you even think about attacking your opponents relentlessly.

The fact of the matter is this, you do not need to be a great poker player to amass money playing poker! You do not need the game of a Phil Ivey or a Tom Dwan to make $50,000 a year of even $100,000 a year. This can be achieved simply by multi-tabling lower levels and being on a good rake deal and getting all the bonuses that you can get your hands on. But there is one overwhelming asset that you will need in order to get this money…..well two actually.

You will need to have a strong winning poker game and you must also have strong discipline. Every time I play low stakes No limit Texas Hold’em then I see horrible play all over the place. I often used to think that the games online had got tougher and they have but I still think that there is money to be made at no-limit play.

If you can maintain discipline and fold more than your opponents in full-ring then you will make money as long as you are not making huge post flop errors. No-limit hold’em is such a tough nut to crack and what confuses many players is that there are untold numbers of variations of how to play the game. This confuses the novice and intermediate players who mix up concepts from deep stack play with short stack play, cash game play and tournament play, limit poker from pot limit and no-limit and full-ring from short handed and short handed from heads up.

The list is long and it highlights that poker can be very difficult to crack when attacked from the wrong angle. The problem with the average person is that they do not put the necessary work in or they are not aware of what the necessary work is. Or you get other types who think that sophisticated and glitzy software packages will get them where they need to be. There is no doubt that trackers will improve your poker game but they simply cannot substitute for a good technique.

What they also cannot substitute for is a lack of discipline and you can have all of the coaching in the world but if your technique is poor and your discipline is non existent then you will not make money or you will not make money and be able to keep it. That is the key issue in poker, it isn’t difficult to win poker pots. Good cards will win pots and aggression will win pots but it is keeping the money that is the hard part. Many players lose discipline in other ways and the most common is being too aggressive or aggressive simply because you are either greedy or you want something to happen.

What tends to happen then is that the player loses money by being overly aggressive and gets himself into the hole for $50 when he should only have been down $10. So when he wins a $50 pot then he ends the session breaking even when he should have won $40. These differences separate players who play for a living from those that recycle money or lose.

What exactly is a card dependent strategy? Well it is as a series of poker plays that are made by certain types of hands in certain positions given the action at that point. Many stronger players criticise them for being too wooden. While this argument has some merit, it also has serious flaws as well. Once your level of poker sophistication is such that you can dispense with strategy charts then your game will be taken to the next level….or will it?

It is a proven fact that many players start to play worse and achieve poorer results after they acquired more knowledge and became theoretically better poker players. The knowledge that you amass as you go through your poker life is not always conducive to helping you to make money. What other reason can there be to describe what has become known as FPS or “fancy play syndrome”?

This is the act of playing fancy plays but the fact is that this type of behaviour originates in knowledge that has been picked up and then incorrectly applied. So we then reach a situation where having more knowledge becomes harmful and not helpful and so much for the old adage that, “knowledge is power”. I think that card dependent strategies solve these problems to a large extent because they provide the beginner or novice with a good solid track to run on.

In a way then this operates almost like a basic strategy chart and card counting system in blackjack. Here your play is being dictated by numbers which keeps the player on the right track as playing correctly and incorrectly are clearly defined. It is when there is room for individual creativity that problems can arise if this is mismanaged properly. So what is a card dependent strategy and what do those words mean? Well it is basically what it says, a card dependent strategy is basically a way of playing poker that is dependent on the cards you hold and nothing else.

An example would be if it had been folded to you on the button and you held a junk hand like J-6. Here a card dependent strategy would assess your play as a fold because of the strength of your hand. But a non card dependent strategy would be more flexible and take other factors into account. These could be to do with the relevant tightness of the blinds or your ability to outplay these people post flop. So in short then it is taking other factors into account that are not dependent on your playing cards…..hence the term “card dependent strategy”.

While it is clear that this is not the “optimal” way to play poker, the word “optimal” needs to be better defined here. Optimal play is a way of playing that correctly fits a players own level of ability at a given point in time. Also given the environment then card dependent strategies have other strategic uses as well and one such environment is when players multi-table. Here it is not possible to follow everything that is happening if you are playing several tables at once.

There is an old adage that it is better to know your weaknesses in life than to know your strengths. By sheer definition then you are more likely to veer towards your strengths if you can avoid your weaknesses. With regards to poker then there is a massive amount of ego and self delusion involved and the game contains many “alpha male” type characters. It does not matter who you speak with and what level they are on, a very large percentage of the male poker playing population perceive themselves to be better at Texas Hold’em than they really are.

I think that a large does of respect needs to be adhered to before you can start to make progress. You need to understand and accept that you will need all the outside help that you can get in Texas hold’em with regards to beating the game. You also need to be alert to the fact that as the stakes get higher then the player pools shrink. What this means is that the level of seriousness with regards the players increases as does their sophistication.

So if you are a part time or recreational player then what makes you think that you have the right to play with these people on a regular basis and to have an edge over them? As a poker writer, coach and a person who stakes players regularly then I am busy with doing many non poker playing related things. This is fine but the flip side to this is that your all round game begins to dull with time and you lose sharpness even if you acquire more and more poker knowledge.

You need to identify and accept that this level of sharpness has gone and the only way to get this back is to play constantly. If you cannot do that then what gives you the right to be able to compete successfully with very good players who do nothing but play poker all day long? At least accepting this can be a huge step towards a successful poker career where you identify your level and stay there and slowly accumulate money. I would rather play Texas Hold’em poker and make $50,000 a year than play on with the delusion that I could beat NL600 and recycle money and make nothing.

I always think that you are taking a massive step forward in your poker progression if you admit that you are not as good as you think you are. If more players approached poker in this way then there would be more winning poker players. Experienced players normally transcend through this stage but the amount of time that it takes to reach that stage differs from person to person. Isn’t it better to make $20 a day playing poker than to lose $100 trying to be something that you are not? Starting out playing tight solid poker is one such way to respect not just your own limitations but also the possible strengths of others as well.

Pot control is basically the concept of dovetailing the size of the pot with the strength of the hand that you currently have. One of the skills of no-limit Texas Holdem comes from identifying which hands can stand only one bet post flop, two bets, three bets or more. If you flop the nuts on a Js-4s-2s board with the As-Qs then your hand strength can obviously take as many bets as possible going into the middle.

Finding optimal value in this situation may involve checking or under betting your hand. Often though in aggressive poker games then the clear play is to bet as betting begins the process of escalating the pot to a level where your weaker opponents may stack off against you. In this example we open raise with the Qh-Qd from the cut-off and the button calls us.

Our raise was to $14 and both us and our opponent have $400 stacks. So the pot has $34 in it and the flop comes 10d-8c-5c and the action is on us. Now at this stage we can safely bet for value. We are out of position and our opponent is probably expecting us to bet nearly all of our range here in a continuation bet.

So aggressive strong players will likely not believe this bet at this stage and could call or even raise us here. A bet of around $25 seems about right and we are not surprised to see our opponent call making the pot $84. The turn card is the 2s and we still have the likely best hand and in this instance then our hand can certainly stand a second post flop bet.

Our opponent may still not respect our “double barrel” and could call again with a mediocre made hand like A-10 or even air looking to take the pot away on the river. We make a bet of $58 which also gets called making the pot $200. I think that our opponent has a hand like A-10 or maybe 9-9 or 7-7. If they had a set then they likely would have raised for value before now. It is still possible that they could have fresh air but the likely favourite is a weak made hand.

The river card is the 2h making a final board of 10d-8c-5c-2s-2h and here is where a lot of players check. While I do not think that checking is a bad play, our opponent will only bet with a powerful hand or fresh air. If they had a powerful hand like a flopped set then they would have likely raised before the river. It is possible that they could be looking to launch an elaborate bluff but purely based on probabilities and hand ranges then a mediocre made hand is the favourite.

So a value bet on the river is called for which also balances our range when we fire three barrels with air on future hands. We bet $120 which gets called and we take the pot against the A-8 of our opponent.

Tilt is illustrated as frustration in poker terms, and it has an adverse effect on regular play. Players usually get frustrated in “tilt” and get distracted, which, in turn, leads to the loss of their bankrolls. Cold cards, bad beats, and listening to other player’s personal issues are some of the reasons of tilting.
If you are dealt with cold cards, it doesn’t mean that you are out of the game. In fact, cold cards are part of the game, and one has to take it. A good player will not give up the hope and will try to dominate, either by bluffing or by implementing a few other strategies. Even a good player sometimes fails to win the pot, and, at times, one has to constantly look at his bankrolls before proceeding further. The best way to avoid tilt under these situations is to play sensibly and fold.

If you think about your personal issues while playing poker, then you’re screwing up yourself giving an edge to your opponents. Before you step into the poker room, you should forget all your personal issues to avoid tilt and play your regular game.
Bad beats are one of the main reasons for tilting. In my experience, I have come across many players who lose their temper and concentration after getting a bad beat. After all poker depends on 40 percent on luck and the rest is your experience and skill. It’s a regular process, and one who losses tilt, tends to blame his opponents. Instead of blaming opponents, players should think about loses, what happens when a player tilts. Learn how to control your emotions and manage to predict the early signs losing the game. If you have lost the game, try to take a break for some time, and make yourself comfortable before entering another room. Don’t just walk away if you have lost the game. Make sure that you are within your bankroll, and enter the poker room. This will definitely prevent you from tilting.

Tilt can badly affect your bankroll, in case you are playing aggressively. After all, poker is a mind game. It is a slow and steady game I would say, be calm and try to control your emotions, which may help you remain unpredictable to your opponents. Tilt can reveal that you have weak hands. Opponents will definitely try to take advantage of that situation. Be careful of your moves, they put a serious impact on your game play.