Silver Crosshair

What better night to be absolutely devilish than Halloween? Halloween is a time to let go of your inhibitions, forget about the boring nine to 5, get a little crazy and act like someone else - just for a night. If you’re preparing a costume fete this Halloween, collect great halloween party ideas, beverages, food and friends together for a spooktacular evening with a ghastly theme like a 7 Deadly Sins Fete! Pride, lust, greed, envy, sloth, wrath and gluttony will all play a part in making your party a sinful success. Make “sin stations” for your friends and have an awards ceremony at the end.

Turn your garage into a haunted house. Having your backyard decorated as a haunted house is a marvelous way to engage your friends with the theme of the party and will set the mood for the party. Having a costume contest at your Halloween party will ensure that everyone dresses in costume and will supply an extra incentive for your guests to think up with fun, original costumes to wear to your celebration. Since your guests are all going to be dressed in costumes, they will want a memorable way to recollect their night. Set up a photo booth at your Halloween party and have guests take a photo as they arrive.

A witch is not quite as marvelous without her broom. If you have enough party space, prepare broom races for your witches-in-training.
You will either require a large room (think finished basement or living room with the furniture cleared to side) or if it is a nice, sunny autumn day, have your broom races on the lawn.Be sure you have at least one broom per party guest. Luckily, you probably have at least one or two in the house and you can buy the rest at a dollar shop. You can even ask each witch BYOB… Bring Your Own Broom (but don’t forget to send it back home with her).

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3 Thoughts on Starting Hand Fundamentals in Poker By B. Butler 1. The basics of a lot of online poker are not common sense necessarily. They are learned. The best hands in the game, generally considered pocket aces, kings, queens, and ace king, are fallible to a variety of flops against any given hand. In these situations it can often be difficult to tell whether you’ve been caught or not until you get all your money in. 2. Many poker online hands, while capable of catching the bigger hands given the right flop, are often outmoded even when they do hit. Hands like a big card and a little card (queen three, jack two, even weak aces), might look good when they catch top pair or even two pair, but in big hands will often run into better versions of the same (you flop trips, someone has you outkicked, or has flopped a full house, etc.) Therefore, limiting your range from these hands that might be good in some spots but almost never the sure best bet, is often wise, especially when you are playing against players you don’t know on Everest Poker Francais. 3. Going in between these two extremes, perhaps the most value is from hands that hit big when they hit, and totally miss when they miss. Suited connectors and small pairs are popular for this reason: you make the draw or you don’t. There’s more feel and texture to how they can be played. This makes them both less of a risk and worth the minimal investment when you do hit.

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In poker games and tournaments, it happens once every round of betting-eventually, the blinds are going to come around to you, and you’ll be forced to bet without seeing your cards. Every player knows about it, but it seems inevitable that every online poker tournament and game has a few players who seem taken by surprise by the blinds. They grudgingly push the minimum bet in as if it weighed two hundred pounds with a face looking like it just bit into an onion.

Man up, you’ve been a big hundreds of times before, you knew it was coming, and you’re going to be the big blind again in a little bit. Everyone else has to do it, and if you’re blinding out, then maybe you should have made a few moves earlier on in the game. Besides, being the big blind isn’t all bad: unless someone raises, you pretty much have a free pass to see the flop regardless of how crappy your poker online hand is, and since you don’t have much at stake, your opponents aren’t going to have any idea what cards you’re playing with, and if you hit a big hand, nobody’s going to have a clue. So shut up, put your blind in, and play.

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Have you noticed how often it is that the winner of an online poker tournament comes out of nowhere? Whenever I’m at a home game, or in a casino tournament, the attention always seems to be on two or three of the biggest dogs, the gjys who start out with a fwee big hands right away and start throwing their weight around. But as the game goes on, those guy’s stacks seem to dwindle until someone else comes out of nowhere and grabs up the big stack, taking the lead and eventually the poker tournament.

Sometimes it’s with a few monster hands in a row, other times, it’s a matter of slowly building one’s stack, but the winners of poker tournaments seem to come from the guy that you don’t really notice until he’s got all the chips. It goes to show that while having the big stack at the beginning can give you an advantage, it also makes you as a target for the rest of the casino. Once you’re the big dog, everyone else is going to spend the game trying to knock you down a few pegs. If you can stay unnoticed while gaining the big stack, you’ll be under everyone’s radar until it’s too late.

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Poker is said to be a game of incomplete information. Pocket cards are hidden and players typically take actions to deceive and fool their opponents. However, face-to-face players at live poker tables often give away a lot of information about their hands without even realizing it.

When you are playing online poker, you should keep your intentions, strategies, and personal information to yourself. Although it’s common to see players talking about their hands during televised tournaments, for those who are less experienced, table talk can be very damaging. Some online poker players are natural psychologists who quickly pick up on the slightest tells a person gives off - whether it’s a small grimace, posture or revealing chit chat.

Skilled players will use talk to intimidate others, and ask questions such as, “Do you want me to call?” or “How many chips do you have left?” This type of interrogation is meant to elicit a response indicative of fear and doubt or to confirm an opponent’s confidence in a hand.

Unless you are skilled psychologist yourself, the best rule to follow is keep quiet and not give any information about yourself and your hand while at the table. If you don’t have to show your cards at the end of the hand, then don’t unless you have a specific intention for creating an image you can leverage later.

Keep your starting hand ranges, thought processes, and emotions to yourself.

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When a poker game goes to the last card with a player making a bet that is called, then the hand has gone to “showdown” meaning cards will have to be shown. Some poker players hate to ever have to show their hands because they don’t want to reveal their betting strategies or let other players determine what their starting card ranges are. However, there are times one has to show the cards, like it or not. Any time a player makes a bet on the last card, and gets called by another player, then the original bettor has to show. Basically, the other player has paid to see the original bettor’s cards by putting chips in the pot. The caller though does not have to show poker cards but can just toss them into the muck, conceding to the original bettor. When you do make a call at showdown, then make sure you see your opponent’s cards before you muck your own. Once mucked, cards cannot be retrieved. The showdown can be a tense situation. Deceitful players will sometimes make remarks to intentionally mislead another player into folding. Remember, the cards read. Never believe what your opponent says at showdown, instead let the cards do the talking. For amateurs, it’s always best to just turn your cards over when you call so the bettor has to show and the dealer can rule which hand wins.

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You have 8 equally matched, equally skilled, and equally stacked poker players at a table. Who will win? There is a law to this that is of great importance. I know, I know, you’re thinking, “There’s never a scenario where all the players at a table are equally skilled, matched, and stacked at the same time.” But that’s not the importance here. The importance here is the ability for you, the player, to be able to determine who will win, and why.

It comes down to Caro’s law of Least Tilt. First, though, what is “Tilt.” It’s a pinball machine term. It’s a word describing the angle at which something is situated. No. Not those definitions. Tilt in online poker is something entirely different. It’s the beginning of the universe prior to the big bang that is capable of sucking all of your chips into it and then exploding them back out with such force you’ll never see them again.

Tilt, is your emotionally reactive mindset and playing choices after you’ve been emotionally disturbed by something that occurred either while playing poker online or before. In any event, it’s not something you want to be in the state of.

So, once a player goes on tilt, he is of a less favorable mindset and will begin playing badly. There are ways to induce this in other players, which can be a good thing to learn. And there are also ways to avoid it in yourself. The key is discipline. No matter how many bad beats you take, now many suck outs you suffer from, no matter how many coolers you get hit with. You have to learn to not succumb to tilt.

Caro says write it down: The player with the most discipline is the favorite.

And that is Caro’s law of least tilt.

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As players come and go from the poker games, there are certain rules that must be followed regarding seat assignments and forced blind bets.

In cash games, where players can enter and leave a poker online table at will, the rule is that a new player to a table where play is in progress must post a blind for the first hand of play. If the player sits in the natural big blind seat, it’s simple. But more often, new players will sit in another seat. In that case, the dealer will ask the player to “post or wait for the blind.” This means the player can put up a big blind bet, or simply sit out all the hands until the big blind naturally progresses to the new player.

Players who sit one or two seats to the left of big blind often wait one or two hands for the natural progression rather than posting a big blind. A late position seat to the right of the big button would probably prefer to post the blind rather than wait seven or eight hands to play.

A player cannot come into the small blind seat, post the small blind and play a hand. Instead, they have two options: to buy the button, or sit out and wait for the button to pass, then post a big blind bet. To buy the button means the players puts up both a big and small blind. The player to the immediate left, who was scheduled to pay the small blind does not post. During the next hand, the button goes to the new player who “bought” it, and the player to the left pays the small blind.

These rules ensure fairness for blind posting to both the new players and those who have already been playing at the table. Remember this next time you’re at the casino online.

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It is generally accepted that you are under no obligation to like your boss. It has actually become socially accepted to publically admit that you do not respect or think well of your employer. It has become acceptable to whine. More than that, it has become the social norm to stay in dead end jobs simply for the paycheck.

While complaining about your boss may be acceptable to society at large, it is not acceptable to me. I do not understand why you would put up with a boss you do not respect when there is an easy way out of the situation. I assume if you are reading this, that you have an active interest in the poker world. You are probably a decent online poker player who reads articles like this on your constant search to better your game. You want to be better, but most of all you want to go pro. Why not go now? Going pro now would allow to ditch the job you loathe in favor of a full time hobby that you love. You would be your own boss, answerable to no one but yourself. If you want, you can stop working for the man and take control of your life. You can make a future being your own boss playing professional poker online.

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Let’s take a look at a poker hand. What we’re going to focus on is when to fold your draw and when to play it out.

You’re in the big blind at a 5/10 1000 NL ring game. There are six players and the stacks look like this.

SB (You)- 2000

BB- 500

UTG- 1000

MP- 1000

Cut-off- 1500

Button- 2000

You’re dealt J-9 suited. The cards are folded around to the button who raises to 30, 3x the big blind. You have three options here, you can fold, call, or raise. In most places, unless the button is just an abuser of position and will raise with any two in an unopened pot from the button, you’ll most likely never just call here. With J-9 clubs at a short-handed poker online table, you can fold and not feel bad about it. Or you can raise in order to change up your range. In this hand you opt to raise. to 100, about 3x the initial raise.

Let’s think for a second here about what hands the button could be calling with that beat you. 9-x with anything higher than a jack, all of which are unlikely except maybe A-9. Pocket 10s or pocket Qs (Pocket Ks would have most likely four bet, and pocket Jacks are unlikely since you’re holding a jack). The other two alternatives are pocket 4s or pocket 3s which could call you here for set value.

So you’ve polarized your poker online opponents range. What do you do next? If you answered anything other than wait and see the next card, you’re wrong. When in a marginal situation like this, speculation is not a good thing to be getting into. You’ll want to reevaluate your situation on the turn rather than speculate how to play your nine high.

You elect to bet out 1/3 and he simply calls. You turn over your J-9 and he turns over A-9, to take the pot down with a higher kicker. However, you saved yourself the trouble of donating an extra 700 dollars to him by protection betting your 9s instead of checking and letting him steal uncontested, and you made him hesitate getting it all in with your bet in position which gave you pot control. If anything in this hand could have been changed, you could have bet out a second continuation bet in hopes of taking down the pot with continued pressure after you showed strength throughout with a 3bet preflop. Oh well, live and learn.

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