Quick Hitts

It was late and I was tired. I wanted to play some poker. But playing when you’re tired can be very expensive, so I opted for the cheapest games I could find.  I registered for two $1 Sit and Go’s, figuring I’d get $2.50 worth of entertainment out of them.  I put Pandora on my [...]

I was having a horrible month of bad beats at the sit-n-gos.  I play $2 and occasionally $5 SnGs (yes, I’m that good) but wasn’t even breaking even on them.  It was bad beat after bad beat.  Kings beat by sixes.  Kings beat by an A7 offsuit – not by the ace, but by their [...]

Lately I’ve been doing spectacularly lousy at poker.  My bankroll was down to 20% of what I started with.  I was paying $2.00 Sit-n-Gos, and I was losing them more often than not.  I was getting disgusted and bored and tired of the whole thing. Full Tilt announced Matrix Tournaments, which give you four sit-n-gos [...]

Watching pros play poker is often confusing. Some of their decisions seem strange, counterintuitive, and just plain wrong. This is especially true of Gus Hanson, who frequently makes plays that would seem clinically insane if it he didn’t consistently wins huge amounts of money. Watching him go all in with nothing in his hand and [...]

North Carolina police staged a military style raid to protect the pubic from….a poker game. After wasting taxpayers’ money with a ten month investigation, they burst into a home poker game and arrested 27 people, including an assistant prosecutor.  They confiscated all the money they could find, including, according to one report, cash that people [...]

Yesterday, Annie Duke testified to the House Committee on the Judiciary about playing poker on line: Why it should be legal, why the whining nannies lament about compulsive gambling is ridiculous, why the “for the chillllllllllldreeeeen” bleat is sensless, how poker is a game of skill, not luck, and quite a few other related issues. [...]

When you’ve won the pot without going to the showdown, how often should you show your hand? Approximately never. Poker is a game of incomplete information. The less people know about your playing style the better off you are. Every time you reveal a hand you didn’t have to you’re giving your opponents free information [...]