Speaking of summer, is this taking the whole fish/shark poker analogy too far? Who cares? I am so getting this.

Although there are many games that come and go over the years, not all of them are successful when it comes to stability. Not every game will find its way into the homes of a number of generations, with the power to remain familiar to anybody that hears about them. Some games for children manage to achieve this status, and there are also a few adult games that have staying power, as well. One of them is poker. Although popular, it is frequently seen as boring. There are steps that can be taken to keep it interesting.

1. In order to keep players in the game or anybody that might be watching interested, it is never a bad idea to try to find a unique place to play. For instance, the kitchen table is a common setting for poker, but there is not much in the way of variety and stimulation. If somebody is up for it, the poker game can take place in the middle of a pool, or in a car, if possible. Taking the game out of its typical element makes it feel fresh and new, leaving people more alert.

2. If the idea above is not an option, the person that is putting together the gaming session can suggest that everybody is given a nickname. This will depend on the demographic involved and what everybody is comfortable with. They can come up with their own names or ask other players to create something suitable. A player could get inspiration from their favorite television show and ask to be named after a character, or they could simply come up with a nickname that is original. When the game is being played, all present should be encouraged to only use nicknames as often as they can.

3. Themes are widely used for other games and events, and poker should not be excluded from this possibility. The poker game can, for example, revolve around tropical islands; players would don fun shirts and sip special drinks. The poker game could revolve around certain eras in history, allowing players to dress as pilgrims, royalty, or whatever else they might like. When people are not wearing what they typically can be seen in, it is easier for them to get into a mood that allows them to have a good time and play their best. This is a possibility for poker that should be kept in mind.

It can be difficult to make certain games interesting. Some games, such as UK online bingo, are new phenomena. Even if they are popular and have remained in the public eye for generations, some individuals will not understand why, and may perhaps find them boring. Golf suffers from this problem, along with croquet and other games. However, with a bit of creativity and setting time aside for planning, everything can be made new again. With poker, it all comes done to doing something different and unexpected. Players should be encouraged to make it their own in some way; this can make poker players of any age get more out of it, besides an evening with friends.

Kevin Ko says:

The short answer is you just need to develop the discipline to move on from the emotional residue of a previous hand. You can’t change past events, the best you can do is learn from them and move on. Most people still suffer from feeling tilty during the same session but it’s rare for this to carry on throughout a wider period of time. This may be the sign of weak emotional control.

A more thorough, long answer involves a deep understanding of what tilt really is, the dangers of tilt, and having the sensibility to understand how it affects your career if you’re a long-term playing professional.

Subtle Tilt – Being even mildly distracted from playing your absolute A game. These factors can be external or internal. E.g. You’re bored and want to start playing looser than your typical range, a player at your table starts talking trash and makes you want to “target” him in particular, or recent losses have made your upset and you don’t think clearly throughout your subsequent hands.

Monkey Tilt – Full-blown monkey tilt is that sort of tilt where you simply blow up and start open-shoving hands, playing without any modicum of thought or logic, and are just intent on burning money in a hopeless attempt at making some money back. In traditional media, this is depicted as the guy who keeps chasing losses and ends up losing his house.

In most cases, subtle tilt is the precursor to monkey tilt, although for the most emotionally undisciplined, entering monkey tilt phase can happen instantly. The key then is to limit subtle tilt, which in itself is still dangerous. What’s nice though is that if you limit your subtle tilting, you won’t tilt that much overall and throughout your sessions. Performing at your A-game at all times is a subject for a different time, but it involves extreme focus, emotional stability (and maintaining it), and the clear headed-ness to reason that tilting from a hand is both irrational because your tilt won’t change the result of the hand, and detrimental because all it means is that for the next x amount of hands, you will be in a phase of subtle tilt or monkey tilt.

The reason why subtle tilt is dangerous is because while the effects and detrimental results are negligible at first, they add up over the course of “the long run”. Due to subtle tilt, you played hands awkwardly, your bet sizing was less than optimal, you played “fun” hands, you tried to chase a quick win before the end of your session, you didn’t quit in time, etc. you end up losing quite a bit in these marginal losses, but consider that most online professionals play hundreds of thousands to even millions of hands per year.

Without going into specific dollar amounts, in one of my nascent years as a professional player, I estimated my losses from subtle tilt, mostly due to not quitting early enough (as part of a stop-loss I used to mitigate tilt effects), to be about 20% of the amount I actually won that year. With poker being so hard already at higher levels, a 20% edge by simply making positive emotional and mental adjustments internally is an absolute gold mine.

Nelson Denoon weights in:

The root cause of any sort of tilting at the poker table is an inability to embrace the moment as it is, that is, regretting what may have happened a minute or more ago or worrying about what is going to happen an minute or more from now.

To overcome tilt, one must cultivate the ability to fully accept what is. To not do so is counterproductive since, no matter how much emotional discharge you apply to this moment, this moment still is.

So if you lose a huge pot that you really wanted to win and you lose it because some guy you dislike caught a one outer on the river, it will hurt. If you embrace the pain and the fact that he is raking in what you wish were your chips and that you are at that moment irreversibly (since the suchness of the moment is indisputable), then your tendency to latch on to regret or ride the wave of worry will subside. Moreover, even if it is understandable and logical, your self-hatred will not get the best of you.

Moreover, although this may be sinister, an effective way to induce tilt behavior in an opponent is to underscore, through words or gestures, that opponent’s past hands, thereby often triggering regret and worry about the future in him, that is, inducing tilt in your opponent.

I think:

Timon and Pumbaa said it best: hakuna matata.

I don’t think this is something you can ever fix completely, some people are just more prone to tilt than others. However, here are two quick tips.

1. Live and play in the present. Take the raw information of the past with you, but only if you can let the emotions of the past go. If a guy made a statistically bad move chasing to the river, count on him doing it again and you’ll profit off him more often then he will profit off you. Don’t dwell on each invidiual loss, think about the big picture.

2. Don’t take things personal. A bad beat isn’t a personal attack.

3. Keep in mind that sometimes you are the one who gets lucky too. We tend to remember the times we are screwed over and forget the times we were touched by the poker gods.

4. After a long run of bad beats, EVERYONE goes on tilt to some degree. Just quit playing for a while in this case. Start fresh a day, week, or month later–whatever works for you.

Anyone else use Quora? This is how I roll. Comment below and I’ll check out your answers.

If you have the time to set it all up, you will surely impress. Instructions here.

Hanson started off 2010 with a million dollar poker profit after just one month. (Maybe that should read WON month.) He continued to pad his account until he managed to lose nearly a million in the span of a week. In the first week of April, he played 8,00 hands online, including some $300-$600 Pot Limit Omaha Poker. It did not go well.

Morale of the story? You can’t win them all, but I have a feeling Gus will land on his feet.

Slowplaying

Touchscreen Poker

Are the “Learn to Play for Free” Poker Sites Good Learning Tools?

Choosing the Right Virtual Table

Do 80% of Poker Players Really use Preformance Enhancing Drugs?

Poker for Cash on the your Phone

1. The iPhone is introduced
2. Blackberry and Nokia are all like “aww, crap”
3. everyone and their red-headed stepchild release a failed iPhone clone
4. Google introduces Android
5. Blackberry and Nokia are all like “aww, crap”
6. Apple and Google continue to gain in the mobile market while everyone else struggle to hold on.

The buzz word in mobile as of late? “Apps.” There’s an app for nearly everything on iPhone, some of which I have reviewed. The only apps missing are those Apple has arbitrary laws against. One such law? No gambling. That’s why I have the Nevada of mobile operating systems; Android has no laws. And finally, it’s paid off.

Full Tilt Poker now has a beta version of its poker software on mobile. Strangely enough, it isn’t an app in the traditional sense. It is a web app. Unfortunately for Apple fan-boys, it is a no-go on the iPhone because it relies on the Steve-Jobs-denied Adobe Flash.

The Full Tilt experience runs as while as any poker game available in the Android Marketplace, which is to say, very well. The controls and customization are considerably stripped down from the PC version. The only missing component to the game play is chat, but really I can’t complain. I know one other Texas Hold’em game for Android that supports chat and sharing the limited screen real estate make the risk of missing the action too high now that actual cash is on the line. Besides, the action moves far too quickly in that the only game supported is Rush Poker. This also is hard to find fault. I doubt I would settle down for an hour or more session on my phone, even if battery life wasn’t a more ominous threat than Phil Ivey joining the table. No, this app was meant to fill time while out and about. For a serious game, the PC is still your ticket.

What would I change? Down the line I’d like more games supported, and yes, even the long-term games. It would be awesome to play an hour plus tournament on my PC, decide I have to take off and continue the endgame on my cell. That’s what I call freedom. Thinking even more outside the box, I’d like a warning before starting a game in a sketchy data zone. Dropping a call is nothing compared to dropping a game. It would also be pretty slick to replace chat with voice chat. However, I know that’s pie -in-he-sky for now considering FTP would have to revamp their whole system, both mobile and desktop for that to happen.

Overall, I’m hellahappy. If you want to try and get in on the beta, your best bet is to private message FTPSean over on the Two Plus Two forums with your Full Tilt handle and device. That is, if your device is one of these:

Acer Liquid Stream S110
HTC Desire
HTC Droid Incredible
HTC Evo 4G
HTC Google Nexus One
HTC Desire HD
Motorola Droid 2
Motorola Droid Pro / Droid 2 World Edition
Motorola Droid X
T-Mobile G2

Get it? Go it? No? Then… demo.

Before I get started I thought I would give a short introduction to the blog I run. The Poker Bankroll Blog is an online poker article database with articles on every aspect of poker. I’ve written many of the articles myself, but also get contributions from guest authors who want to share their view on poker. My blog has been online for a couple of years now which has resulted in roughly 400 poker articles. I hope to hit 1000 when I reach my 5 year anniversary.

Enough about my blog, let’s return to poker bankroll building. In my opinion there are basically two primary upsides to dedicating your time and effort to building a poker bankroll. One is the satisfaction and sense of achievement of building something from scratch. Secondly, once you have proven to yourself that you have the discipline to maintain your bankroll and the capabilities to become a winning player at specific levels there a never ending series of challenges to be found in moving up in levels.

Usually when there’s an upside, there’s also a downside and in my opinion the biggest downside to any poker bankroll building project is the grind. In order to maximize your chance of success you need to grind it out at levels which are within proper bankroll management. In his famous 0-10000 dollar challenge, Chris Ferguson took 7 months to reach a bankroll of 6.5 dollars. There’s the slim chance you’ll build a bankroll with lightning speed like November 9 finalist John Racener. His mom gave him an initial deposit of 50 dollars which he turned into 30000 dollars in 6 months. He then decided to give the Poker Stars Sunday Million a try and won it in his first attempt. Now he finds himself on the final table of the World’s largest poker tournament with the chance of winning 9 million dollars. You might as well brace yourself for the long haul at the tables whether your building a double or nothing bankroll, a No limit cash game bankroll or a tournament bankroll.

In my eyes grinding is about as exiting as counting ants on an ant hill and the sheer boredom of playing the same tables for hours on end clearly outweighs the upsides. If you ask me poker bankroll building is definitely not worth the effort. Instead I deposit a few dollars once in a while on Poker Stars or Full Tilt and take a stab at some large MTTs. Once in a while I get lucky and have some decent deep runs. If you have the motivation and discipline to get started I wish you the best of luck and have a final piece of advice for you. Do yourself the favor of learning the basics of poker mathematics as soon as possible. Some time ago I wrote an article series about poker odds, poker probabilities and EV poker which you might want to check out.

Good luck at the tables

Mark

In descending order of use, players employ caffeine, energy drinks, marijuana, alcohol, nicotine, sports drinks, and cocaine.

I think more than 80% of the people I know, poker playing or otherwise, use some combination of coffee, soft drinks, Gatorade, beer and cigarettes daily. The fact that the study is getting any press at all is a symptom of society’s desire to paint poker in a bad light. Connecting one vice, drugs, with another vice, gambling, is a win in appealing to a conservative audience.

If any of those listed drugs are “performance enhancing” it is only in that caffeine and energy drinks are helpful in keeping a player awake during long sessions. A better study would be showing the effects on how weed or alcohol affect a poker players’ results at the table. I guess that they would mellow out an overly aggressive player, but I don’t know because NSU opted not to perform an actually useful study.

To be fair to NSU, most of my rant is directed toward the echo chamber reporting the 80% headline. Their study also found that 28% of players use prescription drugs while playing poker and 46% of players use dietary supplements. I find those numbers of more interest, but when it comes down to it, the study was just an online survey of a self-selected sample size of less than 200. Big deal.