WHACK!

After the butterflies have taken off you find it difficult to recover. Your heater has given you a false sense of worth. You cannot remember what your original game looked like because it is totally unrecognisable to you. You feel like you are at the top of the fireman’s pole that has been smeared with grease. In a desperate attempt to try to get that heat back you play more hands and you take more chances. Before you know it you are in a serious pit of despair and you have lost a lot of money.

So be on your guard and understand what overconfidence looks like to you. Winning poker tournaments http://poker.betfair.com/en/tournaments/ is as much about keeping your mind in check as it is the cards in your hand When you see it to start to seep in make sure you stamp it out immediately. There is a very fine line between confidence and arrogance and in poker it can take you a long time to recover from a bout of either.

In Chaos theory each event affects the next event until the events eventually go out of control. So in a nutshell chaos theory is the theory of controlling the uncontrollable. So if you could control the uncontrollable wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing?

If you want to become a successful poker player then you need to learn to control chaos? How can you control the uncontrollable we hear you shout from the rafters? If you understand that chaos starts from one initial event then you can control chaos by controlling that initial event.

In poker the initial event after securing your place at the table and counting your poker sign up bonus is selecting a hand to play with. So if you are a tight player with a tight starting range you have a greater chance to control chaos than a loose-aggressive player does. This is why loose-aggressive players are often called Captain Chaos!

If you start by using hands that are of high ranking then you reduce the likelihood that you are going to go out of control. Likewise if you start playing with poor hands then every action thereafter just branches out into more and more unpredictable events and therefore chaos.

So can you control chaos in poker? To a large degree you can. Just stick to good strong starting hands and Captain Chaos will be a name of the dista

It combines bookmaking skills as well because you will be constantly taking and laying odds all the time in no limit hold’em. These days I play on sites like www.pokerstars.co.uk for the volume of action and I am amazed at how many mistakes I see even at levels as high as NL100 which is $0.50-$1.00.

Also there is one other very important factor as well and that is to do with the fact that hold’em is a two card game. While you may be wondering what on earth I am talking about here then let me explain. The fact that hold’em is only played with two starting cards instead of four like in Omaha means that hitting the flop is much more difficult. All of the players know this and so each player then knows that the other is unlikely to have connected. So it then becomes much easier to launch big bluffs and re-bluffs in this form of poker unlike in say limit or PLO.

This fact of the game can make it very difficult for some aggressive types once they reach a certain level of sophistication. I have known many players who simply spewed buy-in after buy-in away by being too aggressive in the wrong set of circumstances. One slight moment of indiscipline is really all it takes in no limit hold’em and your stack is history. So for me then there is really no comparison. I have played every form of poker known to man but no limit hold’em is the most difficult to master…….luckily it can also be the most financially rewarding as well.

Some people do fall into the trap of misinterpreting what aggression actually is. Aggressive behaviour does not have to involve shouting or trying to demean your opponent. Aggressive behaviour is all about gaining certain strategic advantages at different points throughout the action. Although playing aggressively doesn’t mean being a jerk, it doesn’t mean acting like a fairy either.

If you have ever watched the movie Rounders there was an excellent example of aggression and passivity in action. Matt Damon was watching his lawyer friend playing in a local home game. Everyone was checking down the action and you got the feeling that this friendly way of playing in this local game had become the norm. Damon told his friend to start raising and as he did so everyone meekly folded and moved out of the way. As the action went down Damon’s friend’s holdings became irrelevant. It this case, Damon’s knowledge of the ranges of hands of his friends opponents allowed him to show aggression – by raising – to win the hand.

In games where everyone is deploying the same tactic you need to be the Napoleon of the Betfair poker world. Pick your spots and attack aggressively but also know when it is necessary to retreat and gather in your forces.

It is easy to make moves on opponents when you have a good hand like a pair of queens but what about if you are card dead and the best hand you have received in the past hour is ten-six offsuit? Being card dead can be extremely frustrating indeed but you can also use it and your image to your advantage by making what is known as a “squeeze play.” An example of a squeeze in action would be for a Player A to raise preflop, Player B flat-calls that raise and then Player C puts in a further raise. Player C has made the squeeze.

The play works on the principle that Player A could be opening a wide range of hands and Player B has elected to call and not re-raise so they are unlikely to hold a premium hand either so Player C’s raise, which looks extremely strong as it is coming over two players, is likely to get a fold from both Player A and B and the rest of the table.

One of the most famous squeeze plays seen in Texas Holdem poker came at the final table of the 2004 World Series of Poker Main Event and was performed by Dan Harrington. In the hand Josh Arieh opened the betting to 225,000 from early position and a couple of folds later Greg Raymer flat-calls with Ac2c. From the button Harrington looks down at 6h2d, a hand that almost everyone would fold, but he makes it 1,200,000 to play, showing extreme strength on his part, so much strength that David Williams folded AsQc in the big blind and both active players eventually folded.

Harrington’s squeeze, which in this case was essentially a bluff, was more effective due to the his image of being a tight player and the fact that the raise was significant enough to look like anyone who called him would have to play for their entire stacks. Thanks to the televised coverage of this hand the squeeze play is not as effective as it once was but it is still a powerful move to make from time to time, even more so when you hold a premium hand and your opponents read you for making a squeeze but you in fact sat there with pocket kings!