Some more insight on JG’s note onreading hands. Reading Hands
This advice is crap against bad players. It is very very good advice for playing against good players. The bad players are to unpredictable and trying to figure them out will not be very easy.
CF
If you havent ever read this site, its the king of all poker sites. It is to poker players what Hornfans.com is to UT fans. The quality of posts has degenerated over the past couple years as more and more idiots spew their nonsens, but look for gems from experts such as Mike Caro, (to a lesser extent) Gary Carson, Sklansky & Malmuth:
Fro had a post last week about poker books and I have one of my own to add to the list: Inside the Poker Mind by John Feeney. I am reading this book now and am surprised at just how good and relevant it is. The book is specifically about behavior and psychology in poker and has a lot of very relevant and “gee whiz” insights.
It’s a rather advanced book and assumes that the reader already knows quite a bit about general terminology and strategy and has ample experience playing casino poker, so I have to say that it should probably be way down on Fro’s list of what to read first. Similarly, if you’re more concerned with playing occasional beer poker with your buddies and aren’t interested in playing regularly in cardrooms, it probably won’t be of much help, either. Nonetheless, if you play in casinos or cardrooms and want to get better and improve your game I highly recommend that you read it eventually – you’ll learn a lot.
About as easy as it gets
Example from last night:
Don Murphy is in early position and raises before the flop. Five players call his raise (that itself is an entirely different topic for a different day). The flop comes with 3 spades, King high. Murphy looks at his cards and checks. Everyone checks. Turn is blank. Murphy looks at his cards and bets. Everyone calls his bet. River is blank. Murphy looks at his cards and bets the big bet. Three people call. One guy shows down 84s for a (very low) flush. Everyone else mucks. Murphy throws his cards at the dealer and unleashes one of his very creative curses.
Question: What did Murphy have?
Post your analysis of the hand to feedback – if you know Murphy (or even if you don’t), this is a very easy example of how to read a hand.
Will they also show “classic” lottery drawings?
A new TV cable channel devoted entirely to gambling and gaming was announced yesterday.
I always find these specialty channels to be too specialized for my liking (New York Yankees TV comes to mind), but the Golf Channel apparently does very well nowadays, as do other channels that are narrowly focused on certain topics.
Anyway, we’ve all read the stories about how the WPT and WSOP are bringing in huge ratings for the Travel Channel and ESPN, respectively, not to mention all of the popular virtual infomercials that run on the Travel Channel and Discovery Channel at other times (”Secrets of Vegas Buffets”, “Showgirls Backstage” etc etc), so I doubt this business plan is hopeless and I am sure DirecTV will pick it up eventually and I’ll be able to see for myself.
My favorite one:
A man walked by a table in a hotel and noticed three men and a dog playing cards. The dog was playing with extraordinary performance.
“This is a very smart dog.”, the man commented.
“Not so smart,” said one of the players. “every time he gets a good hand he wags his tail.”
