What the heck are people thinking??

I have no idea what some people are thinking when they get their hands like K8 suited and push all in. I see it on the $10 tourney levels and especially in the Daily Dollar tournament, which is a one dollar buy in that has a guaranteed prize pool of $10k. One would think that with 1st place being $1599 people would want to play a little more realistically knowing they have a chance to make an absolute massive return on investment. This is not the case though. Every night anywhere from 8,000 to 11,000 people sign up for the tournament and half of them are gone within the first hour. Now don't get me wrong, most the time I don't mind this, but sometimes their horrible playing can come out on top and bad beat me killing my tournament chances. Luckily I folded preflop on this hand, but here is an example of some crazy fools. All of these guys in the hand go all in preflop, even though not one of them should have since it was only the 2nd hand of the tournament. AJ wins the tiny side pot and who wins the huge pot? K8 does even when they are completely dominated by KQ, that's just silly.

A little summer fun

This photograph has quite a bit of significance to me. First of all it was taken my first summer back from college when all my friends and I were able to get together for a beach volleyball tournament one last time. Unfortunately we didn't think to take a picture the first day with everyone who was in the tourney; this one shows the teams who made it to the semifinals. I'm also very proud of this photo for the fact that I was able to organize, advertise, and set up the entire thing on my own. It wasn't just a crappy thrown together one either, it actually turned out to be extremely successful and everyone enjoyed it to the fullest, in fact I'm having somewhere between 5 or 6 more this summer and registration is already open for one that will take place on May 29th and 30th.

Cracking the Online Rush Poker Game

Recently I was asked about some strategies I use to play poker online as opposed to playing live.

It is correct to assume that online poker is different than the live game. When playing online some feel a great disadvantage due to the loss of visual cues and being able to "read" the other players, while others love the fact that people cannot see them because they themselves may be a very emotional or easily read person. The fact of the matter is that even though you lose some visual cues online there are still "tells." It is just human nature for people to fall into patterns and while sitting in a normal cash game it is important for you to pay strict attention to everyone the entire time and catch all their different playing styles and techniques accordingly. At the same time though you want to continuously change up your own game so you yourself do not become victim to the trend.

Rush poker is very much different than typical cash games very briefly described above. In rush poker you can play a couple hundred hands in an hour as opposed to an average of about half that for a normal game in the same amount of time. The first image is rush poker followed by a normal cash game. In rush poker you're also continuously switching tables every time you fold so there really is no time to be able to take notes on players and make "reads." How do I combat this disadvantage? Well I like to embrace it. I play the most aggressive and most straight forward game possible. I play my big hands big and let all the "fish" taking their shot at the game pay me off. Pretty simple. I also like to play my good drawing hands like suited connectors, calling min raises when the flop is right and in the long run it really seems to pay off. If there are any more questions about the game or strategies let me know!