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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

Balancing Overaggression, Bluffs and Tricky Moves in Shorthanded PLO

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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.)

€12,000 Freeroll Series at PokerHeaven

€12,000 Freeroll Series

It’s almost 2012. The year of the London Olympics, the Football European Championships in Poland & Ukraine, and much, much more. In celebration of this, we thought we’d offer you the chance to win some free money in PokerHeaven €12,000 Freeroll series.

Each day throughout December, PokerHeaven will be running 3 Freerolls with the top 10 players from each Freeroll qualifying to the €12,000 Freeroll on January 12th 2012 at 19:30GMT.

It is not possible to buy in directly to this main event, and qualification will only be available through the Daily Satellites.

Preflop Raise Sizing in Online Poker

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

 

Early Stage of Sitngos: Limping vs. Raising

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Any time you are first to enter the pot you will have the option of folding, calling or raising. Assuming you find a hand you consider playable, however, you should only be open-limping in early position, or in late position if other players have limped in front of you. This is because the closer you are to the button and the blinds the more valuable it is to you to try and force the other players out with a raise to gain position and try to pick up the blinds uncontested, particularly as they increase in size.

Limping in mid- or late position when other players have already limped is acceptable, however, as you will already be getting inviting pot odds as well as the security of good position and the reduced likelihood of anyone raising behind you. In fact, with a marginal hand in mid-or late position you should be more inclined to limp after other players than raise than you would in a cash game or tournament in order to avoid creating large pots where you are only a marginal favourite.

Poker Money Management

Poker players know about the importance of intelligently establishing and managing their bankroll. Serious poker players put a lot of thought into this seemingly basic requisite of the game. As a general topic, it's often referred to as money management. The really tough hombres - professional poker players - think about this stuff on an entirely different level, because they are actually making their living at the game. For the beginning or casual player, however, your bankroll can be defined simply as the amount of money that you have available to wager at any given time.

In a broad sense, these are the funds you use to play any and all poker games offered by the online cardroom - cash game or tournament. It's essentially the amount of cash currently in your real-money player account. In a more specific sense, though, your bankroll can also mean the amount of chips you bring to the table for a particular cash game - your starting chips. (The bankroll concept in this case doesn't really apply to tournaments, because everyone starts with the same amount of chips.) The chips that you bring to a cash game may or may not be equal to the total amount of money in your account.

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