The law of averages is useless with small samples. If your memory alone can keep track of your poker hands, it is a small sample size. If you work with the statistics of months of quantified luck (I call this profits and losses) you will eventually see an average.

For example, if your long-term stats show that you typically win $5 in an hour of play, and your most recent hour nets you $50, you can expect the next hour to be closer to $5 then to $50. This is called regression towards the mean. $5 is the mean, or average. If you think of the “law of averages” in terms of returning your hourly profits to $5/hour regardless of what ever hot or cold streak you just came off, then you’d be correct. It’s just that no one thinks of the law of averages like this.

As a rule, disregard the waves of fortune and misfortune from day to day and focus on playing good cards. Only detailed records can give you any insight on what to expect in the future.

Here is a great refresher on odds from the article:

Let’s have a quick refresher on what “odds” are. We all know what a probability is (or at least, we’re familiar with the term!). Odds can be seen as ratios of probabilities. Just as we use P(A) for the “probability of A,” we may talk about O(A), the “odds of A” (where A is some apparently sensible proposition).

In terms of probabilities, O(A) = P(A)/P(~A). So for example, if there is a 66% probability of rain tomorrow, then O(rain) = 0.66/(1-0.66), or more easily 66:33, which finally reduces to 2:1 (usually read “two to one in favour”). The “:” is basically just a division sign, so O(rain) can be stated as “2 to 1” or as simply “2.” Although odds can be expressed as ratios of probabilities, they are best understood on their own terms altogether. In this case, “odds of 2 to 1 in favour of rain tomorrow” means something like “days like this are followed by twice as many rainy days as non-rainy days, to the best of my knowledge.”

Odds are even more familiar from the racetrack, where a bookie might give “10 to 1 on Longshot, to win.” What this means is that if the bookie is selling stakes for $5 each, then a single $5 stake will get you (10+1)*$5 = $55 if you win (i.e., a gain of $50 plus your $5 stake back), while a loss will simply lose you your $5 stake. (Of course, in order to make money, the bookie must think that the realodds on Longshot are even longer than 10 to 1.)

I’ve already written about some of my favorite poker tunes, but I’ve learned that music can be more than diversion at the card table. In film, musical cues help the audience to feel how the director wants them to feel. You might think you are shedding a tear for the visual performance of the starlet’s death scene, but the accompanying violins have a very clear and intended affect. This same affect can be applied to poker.

I have a series of playlists. The first inspires aggression and a sense of urgency, made up of scores from chase scenes and mounting suspense. Think of tracks from the new Tron soundtrack or anything from the Bourne Trilogy, Batman Begins & Mission: Impossible.

The next playlist backs off the energy. I use this when I want to go back to the status quo, which for me is fairly tight play. Any “character building” movie music should work here. Anything you like, my playlist is mostly light John Williams.

Another playlist consists of entirely slow and happy music. I have a few Pixar scores here. I use this to take the edge off when I’m coming off a bad beat dangerously close to going on tilt.

Music can both sooth and waken the savage beast within, the trick is just finding what is right for you. If movie music isn’t your thing, so be it. Personally, I just find the connection to theatrical moments make the desired affect more prominent, not to mention the fact that lyrics distract me.

A relatively short-stacked player moves all-in, a second player calls and so do you. If this was a ring game, you and the remaining player in the pot with chips would do well to continue playing your respective games. However, if this was a tournament with a predetermined number of places “in the money,” the incentive to knock the short-stack out of the game is higher than the possibility of increasing your stack from the other player.

If the short stack has pocket jacks and you have pocket eights and the flop is 2 3 7, you might be inclined to raise thinking your hand is solid. The raise may make the other player fold with his AQ. The turn is a three and the river is an ace. You lose and double up the short stack. Now if you could take back the raise after the flop, the AQ would have stayed in the hand and picked up the higher pair on the river. You still wouldn’t win the hand, but the short-stack would be out of the tournament bringing you one step closer to placing in the money.

Of course, not everyone follows this advice, and from Mr. Short-stack’s point-of-view it probably isn’t fair, but it is good tournament strategy.

The exception to the rule? If you find yourself holding the nuts on the river, bet however you’d like.

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Coming to a cash game as a short stack is, as a rule, not a good idea. By doing this you are putting your fate a little less in your hands and more at the mercy of the poker gods. There is a law of poker that states that a player with infinite finances will always win the money off of a player with a finite bankroll given enough time. This stays true regardless of the players’ skill levels, but if the cash impaired player is the more skilled, it will likely take more time. This is true because of dumb luck. The law can be scaled back on a kind of sliding scale. I started with less than half of my opponent’s chip stack, which meant I required more luck to win, even if I was the better player.

As a side note, coming to the table on the cheap is also a strategy. Nearly all the on-line cash tables I frequent have a player or two who are playing short-stack with the intention of going all-in before the turn hits. When they double, triple, or quad up, they often cash out returning to their short stack status. I find these players are unsure how to play their hands past the flop, but as long as they have at least slightly above average luck  they make money. After all, you can’t be bluffed off a hand once you’re all-in. I imagine the profits last only for the short-run for these short-stackers, as most of it probably goes to the rake.

When you are on poker cruise control, you probably don’t have any clear tells. Tells haunt me most when I am in debatable situations. These situations come with the most frequency short-handed, when I’m betting with weaker starting hands than I would like. I’m not a computer, which means I need time to think about the best decision. Which means I hesitate.

The obvious solution to said problem is to simply not deliberate. However, there is a way to throw off you eagle-eyed competitors while still allowing yourself some headspace: misdirection. You need to put the breaks on your no-brainers. The next time you are faced with a clear call, don’t make it clear. Pretend to consider a fold, or a raise for the matter. Burn a little time off the clock. You aren’t acting for the benefit of that hand, but for future hands. The next time you truly must take a moment, your opponents will read you based on misinformation. And that is always a good thing.

He who hesitates cannot play in a real casino. Online blackjack is not comparable to the real game. This holds true for poker as well.

The number one identifier of your skill is money. It is, after all, how we keep score. Macro-consistency is everything. Marco meaning not micro. If you have a bad day, or an unprofitable week, it doesn’t necessarily meaning you are a bad player. You want to play long enough to look at the big picture. Do you average a strong profit? What’s you standard deviation? These are questions that can be, and need to be answered with good record keeping and a lengthy poker history.

There isn’t much to learn in the short run. Wins and loses are subject to some luck day to day, but you can still assess your play by looking at how you won or loss. When I correctly read my opponent on a straight draw and bet the pot at him on the turn, I played well, regardless if he calls and catches on the river. Inversely, if I catch trips on the river against an aggressive two-pair, I know I misplayed the hand even though the poker gods were kind to me. I’d go so far to say, as your play on the turn is concerned, luck is inversely related to skill.

Before you make the jump to big money games, also look at the caliber of your normal opponents. You may be winning not only on your own merit, but also due to the lack of skill or seriousness of the rest of the table. Although this is just what you want in poker, it can be hard when gauging your play relative to Gus Hanson. Be sure to go up against more than just the same five guys to experience more styles and see if your consistent winning pattern holds up.

That’s the long way of saying, if you are making money, go to the next level and make more of it. Give yourself a “raise.” You can always go back to the drawing board if  it doesn’t work out. Don’t rush, but don’t be afraid to play to your potential either.

The first step to making your own game is to choose the type of poker play. The most popular choices are stud games, draw games, or community card games. From there you can decide how many cards to use and how they are distributed. All that really matters is that you keep all the players on a fair, equal playing field.

The easiest way to mix-up any game is by adding wilds. This will seemingly elevate your average hand strength, but relative to the rest of the table, winning rates should stay about the same. The most popular cards to have as wilds are aces, deuces, One-Eyed Jacks, Suicidal Kings, and of course Jokers. You can also let the game play decide what cards are wild. For example, the river card could be wild or even one card could make another card wild as in Follow the Queen games. I’ve played games in which entire suits were made wild. but that may have been going to far.

To keep games active, I like to have multiple betting rounds. With games that the cards are slowly made available to the players, (like hold’em with the flop, turn and river) betting rounds are nicely built-in. You may design a game where this isn’t the case and the entirety of the player’s hand is known at the outset. If this is the case, I add betting rounds by having players roll-out their hands. If you don’t know this term, it is when you arrange your cards in the order you want to reveal them to the rest of the table and bet in between reveals. As you may have guessed, there is an extra layer of strategy involved with the roll-out.

The final step is important. Name your game. You can name it after the creator or its inspiration or anything you want. If it is a popular variation, people will want to play it again and it is no fun referring to it as “that game with the thing that Bob came up last week.”

If you have come up with any fun game variants of your own, leave them in the comments! I’m always up for trying new ways to play the game of poker.

Although lottery too is a way of gambling, people prefer thinking of the national lottery is a poor man’s wildest dreams come true.