The Poker Blog

Lace up your running shoes and get ready to Race to the Main Event because Full Tilt Poker is offering you the chance to win one of 50 completely free seats at the world’s biggest poker tournament.

Full Tilt Poker’s exclusive Race to the Main Event began on Saturday, March 1st when they started holding daily Freeroll tournaments that will run through Sunday, June 22nd. By the time the race ends, 50 players will have won free seats at the 2008 WSOP* Main Event.

To claim your free $10,000 tournament entry, just look for one of their Main Event Race – Round 1 SNGs running around the clock. Win one of these SNGs and you’ll qualify to play in one the Main Event Race – Round 2 Freerolls running four times each day.

Take either first or second place in one of these daily Preliminary Freerolls to advance to the Main Event Race – Finals Freerolls held each Sunday at 16:30 ET (21:30 GMT). Reach the podium in one of these tournaments by placing first, second or third and they will reward your performance by giving you a completely free WSOP* Main Event entry worth $10,000.

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September 27 - October 4, 2008
Radisson Aruba Resort & Casino
Game On - 2008 Aruba Poker Classic Announced

Minutes after wrapping up the 2007 Aruba Poker Classic, Ultimate Poker’s email inbox became flooded with enquiries about next year’s Aruba Poker Classic. It was unanimous. Poker players for around the world, entertainment celebrities and the international media thought the 6th annual Aruba Poker Classic was one of the best poker tournaments of all time. Well, they’re about to outdo themselves.

The 2008 Aruba Poker Classic will kick off on September 27th, 2008 and run through October 4th. For the 7th year in a row, the tournament will be held at the luxurious Radisson Aruba Resort and Casino.

The Biggest News is the Prize Pool

With 750 players expected to descend on the island of Aruba, they’re estimating an unprecedented $4 Million prize pool. As if that isn’t exciting enough, they’re also guaranteeing a first place prize of $1 Million. That’s $200,000 more than what was won by Travis Rice, the poker player from Fort Worth, Texas who finished first in the 2007 Texas Hold’em tournament (for those without a calculator or basic math skills, Travis left Aruba with $800,000).

About the 2008 Aruba Poker Classic

The 2008 Aruba Poker Classic isn’t just any old land-based poker tournament on a gorgeous island paradise. It’s an unforgettable experience with your favorite UB players unlike anything you could ever imagine.

There isn’t a postcard large enough to write home about the experiences you’ll have at the 2008 Aruba Poker Classic.

Go head-to-head with Phil Hellmuth, Annie Duke, and some of the world’s best poker professionals in nonstop poker tournaments and cash games. Rub elbows with Hollywood celebrities at exclusive Aruba parties that make the wildest Las Vegas shindigs seem tame. Re-energize by soaking up the sun on the world’s best beach and get ready to do it all over again tomorrow.

Qualify Soon

Their tournaments team is putting together an incredible schedule to help you win your way to the 2008 Aruba Poker Classic. Online qualifiers were launched in January 2008. To win your way there for next to nothing, you’ll need the UltimateBet software so click on the banner below!

Is It A Bird? Is It A Plane?

No… It’s Super Saturday. Keep the Kryptonite away from the cards and you won’t need super powers to win your share of our $325K guaranteed prize pool every month from now on.

Just register now - and get ready to supersize your bankroll - as we invite you to settle down for a serious session of super poker. Lex Luthor would love it!

Start your day with our $25K Super Saturday Warm Up at 14.00 ET, before knuckling down for the Main Event, at 16:30 ET, where the prize pool is a guaranteed $250K.

If you’re still looking for more action – no problem. Our Super Saturday 2nd Chance tournaments starts at 20:30 ET and there’s $50K to play for. Book your seat today!

Centrebet Poker offers New Players 2 AWESOME START UP OFFERS:

1. First Deposit Bonus - 100% Match Deposit, up to $100

   When you make your First Deposit THEY WILL DOUBLE IT!

   Deposit $50 + They Match it with $50 = You end up with $100!
   Deposit $100 + They Match it with $100 = You end up with $200!

   To redeem your bonus all you need to do is play poker and earn CBETs. You’ll receive $5 for every 500 CBETs earned.

   For more on earning CBETs please click here

2. Centrebet’s $1,000 Guaranteed Prize New Player Freeroll Tournament

   Take on other new comers in their monthly New Players Only Tournament.
   There’s $1,000 on the table!

Paddy Power Poker are offering a great $600 bonus.

To avail of their whopping $600 sign up bonus all you have to do is download their poker software, use the promotion code PPP600 and you could be enjoying one of the best sign-up bonuses on the internet. It’s really easy!

They are giving you a huge 150% bonus on your first deposit, up to $600 − so if you deposit $400 you could receive up to $600 for FREE − how cool is that?

Every time you play for real money on their site you earn Paddy Points and the more you play, the more points you earn. For every 800 points you earn, part of your sign up bonus will be released in increments of $10:

And dont forget, with €3million up for grabs the Irish Open 2008 will be bigger and better than ever before. You can qualify online through paddypowerpoker.com for just $2.

By By Tony Guerrera

When asked about the philosophy I take to the tables, I recently put forth the following two aphorisms:

1.) Embrace the process, and have no attachment to outcomes
2.) In general, don’t generalize
I didn’t put focus and discipline on this list because they didn’t even cross my mind. I’ve always assumed that focus and discipline are part of who I am. But after a recent edition of Killer Poker Analysis (in which Todd Brunson emphasized the importance of focus and discipline) and a careful look at my own game, I realize that focus and discipline can never be taken for granted.

Since landing my deal for Killer Poker By The Numbers back in the fall of 2005, I’ve been a writing machine. Add coaching and some random consulting here and there, and well, 2006 and 2007 weren’t exactly spent playing a lot of poker. Now we’re in 2008. I’m still writing, coaching, and consulting, but I’m also putting in some serious online playing time.

My old stomping ground, Party Poker, is no longer a possibility for me. After some serious scouting, I decided to adopt Cake Poker as my new home. Their rakeback deal is excellent, and the competition on Cake is easier than average. I don’t know exactly why it’s easier, but one hunch of mine is that it’s because they don’t allow the use of player tracking software and heads-up displays (HUDs); the hoards of HUD-using multitablers on Poker Stars and Full Tilt aren’t at Cake.

Of course, this means that I myself can no longer be a HUD-using multitabler. Luckily for me, I was multitabling before HUDs. But in those days, I was playing 4 tables at most. The beginning of 2008 has been all about honing my 6-max no-limit hold’em multitabling chops to where I can play 8-10 tables without a HUD. 6-tabling seems quite comfortable. 8- and 10-tabling territory has been tough. Observing opponents when not involved in a hand is difficult, as is typing player notes (I’m currently working on a system of note-taking acronyms to help in this department). Fatigue is also a factor (both mentally and physically). And leaving tough games can be a hassle–especially when it comes to navigating through the lobby to find a new game to sit in.

Unfortunately, the difference between success and disaster is slight. If you have KK preflop, and you’re facing a preflop reraise from a very tight reraiser, is he on {AA, KK, AK} or {AA,KK}? Is a suspicious looking bet on the river coming from a known floater or a straightforward, hit-to-win player? The difference between my big wins and my big losses at Cake (well, big in terms of big blinds anyway) has been subtle, almost undetectable shifts in judgment. Focus and discipline are the keys to reigning in these shifts.

Tony Guerrera is the author of Killer Poker By The Numbers. Visit him online at http://www.killerpokerbythenumbers.com

This brand new tournament rewards our most loyal players by giving you the chance to win $20,000 every single month.

The rules are simple:

• The tournament will run once a month on every 2nd Saturday of the month
• Anyone who has played at Purple Lounge at real money tables within the previous month will automatically have a seat
• The more often you play at Purple Lounge in the previous month, the deeper your starting stack
• The deeper your starting stack, the more chance you have of winning $$$$

How do I get a deeper stack?

• Play between 1 and 5 days and start with 2000 chips
• Play between 6 and 10 days and start with 4000 chips
• Play between 11 and 20 days and start with 7000 chips
• Play more than 20 days will start the tournament with the maximum 10,000 chips

The definition of one days play is 2 hours at the tables e.g. playing 4 tables for 30 minutes only will not qualify.

The tournament will run every 2nd Saturday of the month – you can find it in the lobby under FREEROLLS.

Good Luck!

It’s all change at 32Red Poker in March. Starting on the 1st we’re amalgamating the Honeypot, Wise Guys and the Bullets Clubs into one super promotion called The Elevator – a clear, new way of rewarding player loyalty.

Based on the collection of Express Points – loyalty points similar to RedBacks and connected to raked hands – players start on the lobby floor and rise as they play all the way to the Penthouse and a guaranteed $200.

Attached to The Elevator is the Express Lift – a $20,000 prizepool linked to Elevator performance. Healthy slices of the prizepool become available when your referred players travel up and on to the 2nd floor, with the most generous chunks of all awarded to our Executive floor and Penthouse players.

By Tony Guerrera

Recently, I played in a home game with some friends of mine. If $.25-$.50 no-limit hold’em sounds like a friendly get together, think again. All the players were tough, and there was no max buy-in. $100, a 200 big blind stack, was typically the shortest stack at the table. Meanwhile, the largest stack was around $4,000. If that seems excessive for $.25-$.50 blinds, just believe me when I say that it wasn’t. What was excessive was the number of players at the table: 11!

These days, when I play online, I typically 8-table shorthanded no-limit hold’em cash games, meaning that I play something on the order of 600 hands per hour. That’s 10 hands per minute, or one hand every 6 seconds! And since I’m playing shorthanded, I’m not folding 85% of my hands preflop. When you’re used to such a high rate of action, it’s easy to let impatience creep in at a live table–especially an eleven-handed one where the number of hands per hour was probably somewhere in the 20-25 range.

The game was too slow for my taste, but that didn’t mean I got into a bored funk. Maybe it helped that all the players at the table were highly skilled; lots of interesting poker was happening. But the bottom line is that poker is a game that’s played even when you’re not in a hand. In fact, with all the thinking I do away from the table, I tend to think that it’s a game you play even when you’re not at a table!

I think having started out as a live player helps me a lot whenever I’m in a live game. But for those of you whose only experience is online, open yourself to the whole new world of information that awaits you live. Online, you get information from repeated situations happening within a short period of time, and from heads-up displays with all sorts of statistics. Live, you don’t necessarily have the same context density when it comes to betting patterns. But nonetheless, a wealth of information is at your disposal. It just presents itself in a different way.

When playing live, people’s words and physical actions might give something away–both when they’re in a hand and when they’re not in a hand. And you’re in a realm where it’s impossible to miss what an opponent does because you have to do something to do at five other tables; you don’t necessarily need betting patterns to repeat a whole bunch of times when you’re playing live.

You’ll wish that you could play more hands per hour. But the quality per hand is much higher live. And that’s what should compensate. Datamine and enjoy the show when you’re not in a hand, so that way you can pummel your opponents whenever you are in a hand.
Tony Guerrera is the author of Killer Poker By The Numbers. Visit him online at http://www.killerpokerbythenumbers.com