Skip to Content

Rakeback Hammer Promotions

Rakeback Hammer Promotions

We are pleased to offer all of the following promotions this month at Rakeback Hammer. Simply sign up for a valid account at a participating poker room and you will automatically be enrolled.

Freerolls.

Freerolls provide you a FREE entry into a poker tournament with thousands of dollars on the line. See below for more information on each freeroll. All those who qualify will receive email notification including the date and time of the freeroll.

Poker Freerolls

Aggressive Poker Tournament Strategy

See also

Aggression is built into the basic strategy. If you follow it, you’ll have an attacking style of play.

In poker, if no one ever folded and every hand was a showdown, the best hand would always win. But this isn’t how the game is played. Because of the power of betting, it’s often the case that the hand that would have won is folded at some point.

In his excellent book The Theory of Poker, David Sklansky points out that every time you get your opponent to do something different from what he would have done had he seen your cards, you’ve gained. Aggressive betting and raising often convince your opponent that you have the best hand, which may or may not be true. These tactics increase the chances that your competition will make mistakes. The fact that most confrontations are heads-up, and that your style of play usually forces a decision based on seeing only two cards, makes accurate decision-making especially difficult for your opponents. Undoubtedly, some of the times that your opponent folds, he’ll have a better hand than you. Your aggressive betting drives him out. If he could see your cards, he’d make different decisions, such as calling more frequently. But if he doesn’t, according to Sklansky’s principle, you’ve accomplished your mission.

$10,000 Monthly Bonanza at Titan Poker

$10,000 Monthly Bonanza

On the last day of every month Titan Poker will stage the $10,000 Monthly Bonanza tournament.

The next tournament will run on January 31st, 2012 at 20:30 GMT.

So what are you waiting for? End the month off in style, with a big WIN!

You can buy-in directly for only 2,000 Points or you can win a $10,000 Monthly Bonanza token via the following qualifier tournaments:

  • 10K Bonanza FR Sat - Open to all players.
  • 10K Bonanza Points Sat -  Buy-in for only 10 Points with re-buy and add-on
  • 10K Bonanza Depositors Sat - Open to all depositors from the previous week

Choosing Your Seat

Read also

When you were playing online and preparing to sit down at a table with more than one open spot, hopefully you understood that one seat might be better than the others. Typically, the two most important considerations should have been:

  1. Knowledge of your opponents’ tendencies. It’s usually beneficial to have the more aggressive and unpredictable players to your right, and the more passive and predictable ones to your left. If you typically played at a given limit and took good notes on your opponents, then you probably recognized several of them every time you sat down, and you already had a good idea of their styles.
  2. The stack sizes. You’d rather have the larger stacks to your right and the smaller ones to your left. It’s more important to know what actions the larger stacks will take before you have to make a decision about your hand. Obviously this applies specifically to no-limit hold’em.

Balancing Overaggression, Bluffs and Tricky Moves in Shorthanded PLO

See also

This is one of the keys to successful shorthanded play. Some players are just too tricky for their own good, or have just one gear: the everbluffing and bullying loose-aggressive players. It is important to also change gears every once in a while by giving your opponents a break sometimes, by slowing down a little bit, or by playing a hand in a straightforward and obvious manner rather than the tricky manner that people might expect from you. By slowing down from time to time, you want to make sure that your bets and raises stay credible enough to warrant respect. And this is important: you want to steal more than your fair share of pots, but if you go after almost every pot you play people will start using this pattern of play against you.

The key is to always analyze the current state of mind that your opponent (s) may have. Probably, you will be multitabling and face some of your opponents in multiple games. So, you should have a good clue as to how they are running, and whether or not they may be on the verge of tilt. (For this reason, you should always try to keep open as many tables as possible, especially bigger games than yours that one of your opponents may be playing in. If he loses a big pot in the bigger game, good chance that he will suddenly get more active in your game - meaning you should try to steal less, bluff less and check-)call more to induce bluffs.)

Preflop Raise Sizing in Online Poker

See also

Sizing our preflop raises is very important. However, again, there is no optimal static strategy. If we take basic bet theory into consideration, we know that bigger bets tend to get less action (but action from stronger hands) and smaller bets tend to get more action (and from a wider range of hands). Does this mean we want to open-raise to 6bb with AK to get more folds? Not really. Ideally, we would size the bets for all of our hands the same way to ensure that our bet sizing doesn’t give off tells to our opponents. If we always used a “big bets equal big hands”, and “small bets equal weaker hands” approach in our sizing, it would be very obvious for anybody paying attention.

There are two major approaches to preflop open-raise sizing:

  • Raise 3x from every position
  • Raise 4x from early position (EP) / middle position (MP), and raise 3x from late position (LT)

The Bluff Raise in Pot Limit Omaha

See also

The semi-bluff raise is when you raise on the draw not necessarily to build the pot for value, but with the intent of taking down the pot without further action. This implies that you need to have some reasonable expectation that the bettor will actually fold, which means that the best candidates for a semi-bluff raise are the usual suspects: weak stabs, c-bets, or any other possible steal bets.

In low-SPR situations in which there are only two bets to play, the semi-bluff raise takes precedence over the float. In other words, if you choose to contest the pot at all, the default play is to shove.

But in mid- to high-SPR situations, the semi-bluff raise is more of an alternative to the float. And, much like the float, the weaker your draw, the more the play is dependent on your read of your opponent. In other words, you don’t need as strong a read on your opponent to raise with a 13-card nut wrap with a flush draw as you do to raise with a bare open-ended straight draw with a two-flush on the board.

Online Poker: Cash Games

See also

Since correct poker play is shaped, among other things, by the number of foes you face, you want to pick a version that suits your style and strengths. On the one hand, if patience is a problem for you, you’ll go nuts playing a full ring game, where patience is not just a virtue but vital. On the other hand, if you like to play the waiting game and you’re not comfortable frisking it up with the FNL crowd, you should steer clear of short handed games, where the tight, conservative style appropriate to full ring play is a recipe for slow death.

In a perfect world, of course, you’d have the skills, temperament and flexibility to play in both type games.

Manipulating Your Poker Image

Read also

A player's image is how he is perceived by his opponents. It's his perceived poker strategy and consists of a short-term and a long-term component. The long-term component, a player's perceived regular style of play, is what is shown in heads-up displays, while the short-term component is how a player has been playing the last few rounds.

At the lower stakes, many of the regulars play lots of tables (9+) at the same time. They will not notice or remember too many things about how you play, except for something obvious. But as you move to higher stakes, the regulars start paying more and more attention to their tables and the player pool gets smaller. That is you see the same regulars over and over, and most everyone will become familiar with your game. In other words, you will develop a long-term image with these regulars, and will also get an impression of how they play.

Reading Pocket Cards in Texas Hold'em

See also

At the time of the flop, you have two useful bits of information. First, you know how much other players who are still participating in the hand have bet before the flop. Second, you can approximate the majority of players' pre-flop starting hand criteria fairly accurately.

Pre-flop betting patterns used during a unique hand  - particularly, the timing of calls, raises, re-raises, and check-raises - communicate players' opinions about the relative strength of pocket card holdings. If you think carefully about a hand of Texas Hold'em, betting is the only action a player absolutely needs to perform in order to talk with other players. Within the limits of the game, betting says everything. Other sorts of communication at the table are unnecessary.

 

Syndicate content

Get Free $50+$100!



.