Losing Less vs. Winning More

Money saved is money earned. This concept, second nature for investment bankers, is equally relevant for a poker professional.
In my first year as a poker player, I spent every night grinding $4/$8 Limit. There was one full-time professional $4/$8 player who consistently crushed the game, to an extent that should not be mathematically possible.
I only saw him once in the space of a year with less than three times his original buy-in. I was willing to listen to any advice he was willing to sling. The only advice he ever gave me was this:
"You don't make money at this game by trying to win the most. You make money by trying to lose the least."
All poker players think, talk and write about maximizing their profits. But the topic of minimizing losses is skimmed over marked cards, or even disregarded by many. I guess winning a pot so big that the chips are spilling off the table is much more fun to talk about than the time you saved one bet with a good fold.

A Limit professional's bottom line: win one big bet an hour.

Generally, a Limit professional's bottom line is to win one big bet an hour. With that in mind, the importance of pot size management becomes clearly evident. For a single bet lost, you must subsequently win two bets to show a profit.
A State of Mind, Not of Play
The concept of losing less versus winning more is more a state of mind, rather than a state of play. A value bet is an example of what I'm referring to as a state of play. When you have easy cards tricks the best hand, you must figure out your opponents' call amount threshold, and bet as close below that number as you can.
Losing less is not as cut-and-dried. It's a state of mind that you will use to govern many other actions you make on the table.
Here's a simplified example, the free-card play:
$2/$4 Limit - Standard Tight Play on the Button:

Street	Situation	Opponents	You	Cost
Pre-Flop	Suited connectors	Limp	Limp	$2
Flop	Flush draw	Bet	Call	$2
Turn	Miss draw	Bet	Call	$4

Total cost to see river = $8 (2 bets)
$2/$4 Limit - Free-Card Play on the Button:

Street	Situation	Opponents	You	Cost
Pre-flop	Suited connectors	Limp	Limp	$2
Flop	Flush draw	Bet	Raise	$4
Turn	Miss draw	Check	Check	$0

Total cost to see river = $6 (1.5 bets)
Assuming the flush misses on the river, the free-card play saves us half a bet.
For those of you paying strict attention, you will have realized that the long-term profit-to-draw ratio will be the same if we use the free-card play or not. The difference is that using the free-card play, and the "losing less" state of mind, reduces variance. In a No-Limit game using it can offer us chip interest.
How This Applies to No-Limit
All these concepts can be transferred into a No-Limit environment. The cost per mistake can be much more in No-Limit poker. Therefore losing less becomes much more important. Saving yourself from getting stacked is worth the same amount to your roll as doubling up.
Finally, there is the concept of chip interest in No-Limit poker. Any bet saved on a No-Limit table equates to more chips in your active stack. When you double up, all "saved" chips get doubled along with your stack. Saving $25 in a previous pot will put a total of $50 into your stack after the double.
The more money you save (the less you lose), the more money you bring to the cashier: it's as simple as that.
More strategy articles:

Rant: It's High Time to Start a Rogues Gallery for Poker

In one fell swoop this week Christian Lusardi elevated his status from 30,252nd on poker’s all time money list to the top of the 10 Dumbest Criminals in the World list.
As The Press of Atlantic City unveiled, the 42-year-old Lusardi was responsible for the recent Borgata Winter Poker Open $2 Million Guarantee chip scam.
A very quick summary of what happened:
Borgata tournament officials and the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement (DGE) were forced to suspend play in the aforementioned event after players complained to tournament officials about a series of 5k chips that did not look or feel like ordinary 5k chips.
After studious examination the organizers and the DGE found that 160 forged chips (totaling 800k) had been added to the tournament field. Play was suspended indefinitely. It was going to be exceedingly difficult to find the perpetrators amongst a field of 4,812 marked cards players and an event that resembled organized chaos.
Step forward and take a bow Mr. Lusardi.

Chip Leader without a Single Hand of Note?

As a live tournament reporter it always rankles a bit when the day ends with a chip leader whom you have not seen play a single hand of note.

Borgata has sweet pipes, but not that sweet.

This is exactly what happened at the end of Day 1B of the aforementioned tournament when Lusardi was named the dominant chip leader with 519,000 chips.
Little did tournament officials realize that he'd just dumped a shedload of chips into his bag at the end of the night to give him a 200,000-chip lead over his nearest competitor.
Instead of using his counterfeit chips to propel him on to victory, the criminal mastermind was eliminated on Day 2 for a $6,814 cash.
How was he caught? Well it seems when news of the scandal broke Lusardi panicked and in a scene fresh out of The Wire flushed the remaining $2.7m counterfeit chips down the toilet of Harrah’s Borgata Hotel.
He did what? What did he think was going to happen with $2.7m worth of plastic chips? This isn’t coke or heroin Mr. Lusardi.
Did this kid ever do basic science in class? Chips were flushed, pipes were clogged, sewer workers were called and the shitty, pissy chips were traced back to the hotel room of the world’s dumbest criminal.
Now what happens next is extremely important.

It's High Time for a Rogues Gallery

I don’t know about you guys but I am getting extremely pissed off with all of the cheats and scams in our game. It’s high time that we put an end to it and I think we should start a Rogues Gallery.

Ali Tekintamgac can be in the gallery.

I’m no expert but I assume that Bill Kaplan will not be able to get a game of Blackjack in most casinos in the world. Systems already exist to prevent cheaters and scammers playing marked card tricks the casinos table games and so it’s time we did likewise for poker.
There is nothing to stop a cheating poker player from entering another tournament or cash game except the thickness of his or her own skin.
A fact that was never better demonstrated than in 2011 when the alleged cheat Ali Tekintamgac turned up to take his seat in the $25,000 World Poker Tour (WPT) Championship.
Tekintamgac, Jean Paul Pasqualini, Cedric Rossi, Christian Lusardi and the former Full Tilt Poker (FTP) crew can all wander into any of our major poker tournaments and take a seat with only the wrath of the rest of the players to contend with.
Unless you're sharing a table with Georges St-Pierre, there really isn’t much to be scared of.
Yet David Diaz can get blind drunk at an Harrah’s joint, make a bit of a mess, and suddenly he is banned from all poker events at Harrah’s establishments meaning he can never play in a World Series of Poker (WSOP) event in his life?
I’m not excusing the antics of Diaz, and I have my own thoughts on whether or not he has got his just deserts, but the fact that he can’t show his face in the greatest competition in the world -- but the rest of the Rogues can -- doesn’t seem like balance to me.

Let's Start at the Tournament Directors Organization

We need a judge, jury and executioner.

Over to you, TDA.

Poker needs to act as one to create a regulatory body that can take these cases through a process that either ends with guilt being exonerated or heads being chopped off.
I believe the best place to start is the Tournament Directors Association (TDA). Why there?
It’s the only time you will see the leading lights of official tournament-dom together in one place and part of their role is to create rules and processes that provide protection from our players.
Yes, players need protection from players. If an organization can ban Diaz then it can ban anyone, and I want them all to start by banning the guy who believes $2.7m in chips will dissolve in the waters of the New Jersey sewer system.
Christian Lusardi – welcome to the Rogues Gallery. Now who else do you think should join him?

GPI Bans Pasqualini and Rossi for Alleged Partouche Cheating Video

The Global Poker Index has banned two French poker players in light of cheating allegations at the 2009 Partouche Poker Tour final table.
Jean-Paul Pasqualini and Cederic Rossi will no longer be included in the GPI's live poker tournament rankings.
A video compilation of 18 hands played by Pasqualini and Rossi was posted roughly two weeks ago by Nordine Bouya, another French trick cards player.
The hands provide compelling evidence that the two players were using hand signals to communicate their hole cards to one another.
The video has since gone viral online and today the GPI took action and banned them from its worldwide poker rankings.
Global Poker Index CEO Alex Dreyfus released a blog post elaborating on the announcement. Here is an excerpt:

Recently, some information was made public about a very suspicious incident of cheating, which in marked card tricks poker is equivalent to fraud. We spent a lot of time analyzing the facts, checking the accuracy of the video and its sources. We also solicited the point of view of the GPI’s top 50 players.
The feedback from the industry and the players has been very clear - they were in support of suspending Jean-Paul Pasqualini and Cedric Rossi from inclusion in the Global Poker Index.
By taking this action, we are not claiming that we know they cheated – this is up to the casinos and the overseeing regulatory bodies to decide. What we are convinced of is that there wasn’t fairness at the table. Unfair behavior will not be promoted via the Global Poker Index. It goes against everything I’m trying to do to promote poker, players and events.

Jennifer Leigh

Jennifer Leigh will be one of the offered players on the International Poker affiliation Tour. Jennifer’s love of poker began online where she rapidly comprehended the game taking advantage of her motion picture game and machine information she used when she was more youthful. Intense about her new distraction, Jennifer read six books on marked cards poker over the span of one week and started considering hand histories to upgrade her internet playing aptitudes.

Inside one year of playing Jennifer turned into the most noteworthy stacked up female in competitions at one of the biggest online poker destinations. Thus, Jennifer was welcomed by GSN in July 2005 to play Royales’ Battle of poker of the Ages in addition to such masters as Dan Harrington, and T.J. Cloutier and Barbera Enright. She played four broadcast competitions, which reached a state of perfection in her decimating Harrington, and also Miami John Cernuto in a heads up match to pocket $16,000. Moving her game up a score at the ready age of 21, Jennifer beginning playing the most astounding stakes online at the 100/200 level.
Jennifer kept honing her poker aptitudes on the competition circuit. She put ninth in the World Championship of Online Poker procuring $10,000 in September 2005, as far as possible hold-em occasion easy cards tricks. At the WPT Pokerstars Caribbean Adventure in January 2006 she put 42nd out of 724 players for $13,500. To date Jennifer has charmed $100,000 in competition rewards on the web.

Being born on August 10, 1983, Jennifer still dwells in the place where she grew up of Wilmington, Delaware when she is not going far and wide seeking after her ardor for poker. At the age of 12, Jennifer made the online nom de plume Jennicide, which her legions of online fans still know her as. She says she chose the name since she supposed it sounded dull and complex while in the meantime being exceptionally near her genuine name.
As of now keeping tabs on playing live competitions, Jennifer could be seen as a component of the approaching IPA Tour which starts in May 2006 and will hit such problem areas as Niagara Falls, LA, Ireland, Monaco and Las Vegas. Jennifer will likewise be an offered player at the WSOP Ladies Event on the Queen of Hearts group supported by the IPA and Elle Magazine headed by group commander Jennifer Tilley.

How to Play Poker

If you want to learn how to play poker, then playkillerpoker.com is the site for you. At Play Killer Poker we have an ambitious mission statement: to train newcomers to the game and improve their poker skills in as little time as possible.
We realise that there are many, many training sites out there – but they don’t exactly offer the same thing we do. If you’re looking to learn how to play
marked cards poker, ask yourself these questions.
•    Can you afford an expensive monthly subscription to a training site? And wouldn’t that money be better off in your bankroll?
•    Do you have the downtime to spend hours watching training videos, or trawling the poker forums? And wouldn’t you rather spend that time at the tables?
•    Do you have the dedication to sit down and read a poker strategy book from cover to cover, and then read another… and another… and… Well, you get the picture.
And after you’ve watched all these videos, trawled all these forums, and read all these books, will you really be able to take those lessons to the tables? Will you be able to remember how to play in a particular way, with a particular hand, against a particular opponent, when the pressure is on? Possibly not.
The most effective way to learn how to play infrared ink poker is not cramming page after page of written material, or scanning hours of videos and podcasts.
The most effective way to learn how to play poker is to take short, sharp lessons in a particular element of poker, remember that, and put it into practice next time you’re at the poker table. And that’s what we aim to give you.
At playkillerpoker.com you’ll find bite-size pieces of poker information, and short blasts of poker education, all designed to stick in your brain… and make you a better player.

We hope you enjoy learning for free at Play Killer Poker. Good luck at the tables!

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