The Wiser Customer Weblog

I was at the final online poker table with seven instances of Phil Hellmuth. All of them had on the same casino online shirt, which had a picture of Phil Hellmuth on it wearing the same shirt with Phil Hellmuth on it. I mean I was at the table with many thousands of Phil Hellmuth at the same time, in variety of sizes, though each of them had mouths. Each of them, the ones made of cloth and flesh the same, could talk, could shout at me. Every time I touched my online poker chips as if to raise or even call his raise, he would open up his mouth from out which came the most horrendous of high pitched shrieking. The shrieking would make my head spin and when I looked again my cards would be folded. In this manner, Phil Hellmuth managed to take me all the way down to one chip. With my last chip, I changed my attitude. I began to raise with a vengeance on every pot, regardless of how Phil screamed into me, or how my chip was not actually a raise but a fraction of a call. I began accumulating chips in a violent fashion. Phil Hellmuth’s skin was turning purple. He cried onto the table and turned it into mush. Our chips sunk into the mush. It was a tie. Phil was forced by robots to shake my hand. “Idiot from Northern Europe,” he said, in a thousand voices, all of them the same.

Continued with another example, Making a math play in online poker can sometimes ease your mind in time of difficult decision. Keeping in mind, it’s probably not a great idea to gamble, even with appropriate odds, for all of your chips in a tournament when you can fold and pick a spot where you have a larger advantage, sometimes you have to just go by the math.

So, in this one hand, poker player A limped in early position, for 300. Player B raises to 600, player C reraises to 2000 and the blinds fold. Player B folds out of turn, leading Player A to decide to call and see a flop heads up. It came 555. Player C went all in for 3900 and Player A called, not being all-in himself. Player C had JJ for a full house, and Player A had AQ. The turn blanked and the ace rivered for Player A to win and take out Player C, who complained about a suckout.

Let’s look at the math. The odds breakdown is this…Player C is 71.6% to win after the flop, and Player A is 27.4% to win. Player A needs 2.6-1 in order to make an appropriate call.

The pot preflop was 150+300+600+4000 = 5050 Postflop the bet is 3900. 3900+5050 = 8950 It costs Player A 3900 to win 8950, which is a ratio of 2.3-1.

Player A was almost getting the right poker odds to make the call, decided to gamble for it, and hit his out. It wasn’t a suckout, but it was a tournament gamble. The Math proves this.

You will often hear online poker players in both cash game and tournaments talking about how they can’t wait to ‘double up.’ To double up in poker is when you get all your chips into the pot and are called by an opponent with an inferior hand, thus, in effect, doubling the amount of chips you have. Obviously then, doubling up is a good thing and something poker players are always clamoring for and about. Often it becomes a kind of mantra, or inside table joke, “Are you gonna double me up?” “What say you get me doubled up?”

In other occasions, if a online poker player is lucky enough or has a small enough stack, it is possible to triple up, quadruple up, quintuple up, and so on, though you never really hear people asking for that. Which leads me to believe that perhaps I should start asking for it. Who’s going to ’sextuple me up’? Ok, maybe there’s a reason you don’t hear that one.

One variation of the term ‘double up’ that you might often hear is ‘double through,’ as in ‘Rick doubled through Joey,’ which has its own whole slew of implied connotations, but also, in the long run, is considered a good thing for the recipient.

Playing real money online poker games can be fun and sometimes a rewarding experience. Limiting the amount of money can help you not break your bank for other games or life expenses. More and more online poker sites offer real money games or tournaments and the thrill of playing these can be addicting.

One thing to remember is that this is real money. It is not virtual, not play chips, but real money. And with real money, once you spend it it’s gone. Being careful with your real money for games makes a difference between having money for future use and being broke.

A way of avoiding going broke is to make money you put into your online account an amount you are only going to use for a tournament or a game. Once that money is spent you are done for the day or week, however you set it up. In doing this, you are helping to assure that you don’t over spend.

Another way is to save a little money when playing poker. If you win your online poker game, save that money and put it back into your account. Hence, you now have money to play games or poker tournaments. If you don’t have the money you can’t play and if you are broke, you may not even be able to get online to play poker to begin with.