How To Make Money From Poker
If you want to make money from poker then there are a few steps you need to take. You don’t become a top professional poker player overnight. It takes a lot of hard work and dedication, just like any other profession.
First of all you obviously need to be completely familiar with the rules of the game so learn them off by heart and practice on the practice tables online for play money until you’ve learnt all the intricacies of the game.
When you feel you are ready, you can start playing at the real money tables. I always suggest starting off playing at the low-stakes tables in order to minimise your initial losses, but you should be aware that in many ways it can be harder playing at these tables because the play is so loose.
For example, it’s quite easy to bluff a good player, but bad players will often keep betting. Also the poker fish at the lower stakes tables can be very unpredictable and therefore difficult to read.
As you gain more and more experience you should see a gradual improvement in your play, but this alone will rarely get you to the top. To help you achieve this aim you should educate yourself as much as possible by reading poker tips and strategies from poker professionals. Whether it’s poker books or simply forums and websites, there’s plenty of good quality information out there if you’re prepared to look for it.
Try and learn from the best, ie those players who have reached the very top, so I’m thinking here of people like Phil Hellmuth, Doyle Brunson, Dan Harrington, David Sklansky, etc. This way you will learn some invaluable tips and strategies that will help improve your own game.
By gaining experience and constantly educating yourself you should improve over time and should hopefully start consistently making money from poker. The next step is to focus your efforts on only playing one type of game, and really try and master that particular game. This is much easier than dabbling in different forms of poker and playing different variants of the game all the time.
Of course not everyone will become a poker pro by following these simple steps outlined in this article, but by gaining experience and learning as much as you can about the game, including top tips and strategies used by the professional players, you are giving yourself every chance of becoming a good enough player to make a regular income from playing poker.
James Woolley is a regular poker player and the author of a poker blog which is a complete guide to internet poker, and contains the very latest poker tips and strategies to help you become a better poker player:
http://internet-poker-guide.co.uk
Betting: High Street Versus Online
Betting has changed beyond recognition in recent years. No longer does the punter have to glance over his shoulder before an ignominious entry into a seedy, back-street shop, passing through a plastic dangly curtain, window screened against curious eyes, to join shady characters, peering through the smoke, eyeing pinned up back pages from the tabloids in a furtive effort to decipher the winner of the next horse or greyhound race.
Failed slips crunched underfoot. Scratch a prediction on a scrap of paper and queue anxiously at the window; come on, come on, hurry up and serve me before the race starts. In those days in-shop televisions were banned to discourage us from entering these places of sin and thus falling by the wayside.
No chairs or other luxuries were allowed and always, the same scratchy trackside voice declared our fate through a speaker on the wall. This was a guilt ridden world where women were unheard of and the sensitive turned up their collars and pulled down their hats to find anonymity.
And then suddenly it all changed. With the advent of online sports betting an informed world was opened up for us to conduct our betting in the civilised and comfortable surroundings of our own homes while providing instant access to statistics, inside stories, previous results, gossip and anything else that reinforces the conviction that one result is more likely than another. Friends can even join us to merge ideas, prophecies and share the excitement of it all.
But it’s not just about horses and hounds these days. A sporting muscle can barely be flexed anywhere on the planet without online betting sites offering odds on the outcome of its effort. The results of football, tennis, golf, athletics, Gaelic football and bog-snorkelling events – well, maybe not bog-snorkelling – or any other sporting activity, almost anywhere in the world, can be gambled on with the ease of the click of a button.
Beyond sporting events you can predict the winner of Big Brother, the Booker prize or the next President of the United States. If casino gambling is your cup of tea then any number of poker, backgammon and other such games are in abundance online.
In those seemingly pre-historic times it was only the winner who was the target of our attention. Nowadays we can mull over who will score the most runs, which bowler will get the most wickets or the first wicket, will Owen be the first to score, how many goals will Rooney get, in which position Hamilton will finish or in which round Calghesi will be declared the winner.
Gone now are the days when your betting has to be planned. No more trips out in the rain with nowhere to park the car. Now the merest whim to place a bet can be satisfied in moments on any one of hundreds of sites vying for your attention.
Many offer free bets as an inducement and, if you wonder where to start. Betting websites will guide you to the right place. Then all you need is your own shrewd good judgement and a little touch of luck to help you on your way.
Shaun Parker has been involved with betting for several years now. For more information visit http://www.freebettingonline.co.uk
Honesty in Horse Racing Examined
The newcomer to racing often is surprised not only to find it is considered a sport but also that it is supervised more meticulously than any other sport. In fact, racing rules are probably more stringent than the regulations governing any other sport.
This quest for honesty does not stem entirely from the tracks spirit of good will and good fellowship toward the little $2 bettor. A track these days is a gold mine and with millions at stake, operators, indeed, would be foolish to wink at any dealings that might kill the goose that is laying the golden eggs.
Before the horse steps out of his stall on race day, he is subjected to more examinations than a 60-year-old man applying for a $200,000 life insurance policy. The track officials want to be sure not only that he is himself and not a horse of another color but also that he has had nothing stronger for breakfast than water and oats. Paddock judges again inspect the horse before the race to make certain he is the same horse described on his social security card.
They don’t want Speedy Jim to flash across the finish line at good odds when the horse actually entered was old Hoof Beats. Since no way has been found as yet to take a horse’s hoof prints, the tracks have done the next best thing – they have tattooed the horse’s identification into his lips so that even the most absent-minded owner now has no excuse for trying to palm off one horse as another creature.
Men and cameras are trained on the horses constantly until they are back in the barn again. Patrol judges keep lonely vigils around the track to see that every horse and rider conducts himself as becomes the sport of kings and two-dollar bettors. Placing judges are given mechanical help through cameras that photograph the finish. And saliva and urine tests after the race betray if by chance the horse stopped along the back stretch and got his second wind from a drugstore.
Hope burns just as high in the chests of the boys who like to look for short cuts as it does in the two-buck bettor. With such tremendous sums at stake, now and then something not recommended by Hoyle does slip past. But only in the movies do shadowy characters meet behind the stables to fix a race. At a real track, trying to fix a race would involve dealing with so many owners, trainers, jockeys, stable hands, track officials and others that the fixers would need the key to Fort Knox to pay off. And then they might find that the party most concerned – the horse – failed to run according to script.
For the thoroughbred is just about the most temperamental bit of flesh on earth. A race horse is subject to more whims and moods than a big businessman with an ulcer and shattered nerves. When an owner has “one of those days” he can stay in bed and wait for the sun to come up again. The horse, with no choice about whether he races or not, is apt to make his protest by sulking or by running a dull or erratic race.
If the horse should rise and shine on race day, filled with the zest of good living, he may change his mind at the post. The saddle girth may be too tight or too loose. The jockey may sit too far up on the horse or he may not sit up far enough. The horse may shy slightly just as the starting gates open and that may cost him so many yardages he can never make it up.
Once the horse flashes first across the finish line, he still can lose. He may have bumped or crowded other horses and thus be disqualified. His jockey may have committed an unsportsmanlike act and again, the horse’s number is taken down.
Thus you can see that the sport of kings is subject to so many rules and regulations, the participants just have to stay honest.
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Can You Profit From Poker Sign Up Bonuses?
The popularity of online poker in the last five years or so has meant that more and more poker sites are starting up all the time, and they are all competing for your business in this fiercely competitive environment. The main incentive that most of them offer is off course a sign up bonus. This is great for you, but are they as profitable as they sound?
A mistake a lot of new players make is they see a large sign up bonus offer like ‘free $600 sign up bonus!’ and interpret this as meaning that all you have to do is open an account and you will receive a nice fat $600 in your account.
Unfortunately it’s not as easy as this. With offers like this, of course they’re not scamming you, they will give you the $600, but there are generally conditions to this offer. For instance you may have to match this offer with your initial deposit, so you would have to put $600 into your account yourself when opening an account, or you would have to generate $600 for the poker room in rake before they will give you the money.
If online poker rooms threw vast sums of money at every customer that joined they would soon be out of business so they have got to protect their own interests as well. After all their goal is to lure you in with an attractive offer, and then profit from your business in future months and years through you playing at their site and generating lots of rake and paying lots of entry fees to tournaments.
The worst type of customer for them are the people who open an account, take their bonus, and never play at their site again, which is why a lot of sign up bonuses have conditions attached to them.
So if you hear about people saying that they make loads of money going around signing up to various different poker rooms just for the sign up bonus, and think you could do the same, then be aware that it’s not that easy.
Yes you definitely can make profits doing this but you have to be a very competent poker player in the first place to be able to pocket the sign up bonuses without being out of pocket yourself. For example, a lot of sites will require you to generate a certain amount of rake or play a certain number of hands to clear the bonus. If this is the case then you will obviously need to be at break even point at worst in order to claim the maximum bonus available.
So always read the terms and conditions when you sign up to a poker room just for the sign up bonus because poker rooms aren’t in the business of giving away free money. There are nearly always conditions attached, but if you are a good solid poker player then these bonuses are relatively easy to clear.
James Woolley is a regular poker player and the author of a poker blog which is a complete guide to internet poker, and contains the very latest poker tips and strategies to help you become a better poker player:
http://internet-poker-guide.co.uk