Jeff Anthony - Gambling Pro

Heads-Up Poker is the climax to every single game of Texas Holdem, if you are going to win you will always face a heads up situation. Heads up poker is where you play one-on-one against a single opponent and whether you start off with two players in the game or two thousand, the result is always the same - a heads up between the final two players.

If you start with a high number of players, or indeed any number of players bigger than two, the game will lose one of them at a time as they run out of chips until you are left with the final pairing - the heads-up.

Now heads-up poker is different from the rest of the tournament and requires a different mindset in order to be successful. Nowhere is the contrast more stark than in online Texas Holdem poker play and if you’ve never made it to the final of a Hold ‘em tournament you are in for a rollercoaster ride when you do!

The pace is extremely fast and furious with little or no time to think, you are relying mostly on your experience and quick thinking to pull you through. But the number one strategy you need to adopt when playing heads-up poker online is to be aggressive. It is a ruthless winner-takes-all situation and if you don’t show enough determination and aggression, your opponent almost certainly will and you will quickly wilt under the onslaught.

You need to call almost every hand, after all you’re paying for the blinds so if you don’t call it your opponent gets to keep the blinds for free. Remember also that when it gets to this stage, the blinds are at their highest so every hand is important to win. You can’t afford to let one go for free unless you feel you have absolutely no chance of winning the hand.

Of course a Holdem hand that you would probably fold in a ten player situation is often one that you can go all-in with at heads-up poker. Any Ace at all is certainly worth raising and re-raising, the chances are your opponent is adopting a similar strategy to you and he may be going in with a King or Queen along with a lower card.

Say for example you are dealt King-Eight. Now at a ten player poker tournament you would most probably fold this hand in early position, but call or possibly even raise in late position. In a heads-up situation you would be perfectly entitled to go all-in with a reasonable expectation of winning the hand if it got played out.

Vary your play and if you find yourself in front in chips, be even more aggressive! Don’t be afraid to put in a big raise with no hand, your opponent will most likely back down unless he has a big hand.

The bottom line is this for heads-up poker - attack or be attacked! www.flingcom

Online Poker Tells are when your body language just can’t keep it’s mouth shut! Any little sign or gesture by a poker player that might indicate what cards he or she has is called a tell.

In a real-life game at a poker table there are many tells that you can use to try and read what cards your opponents have. Eye movements are probably the biggest giveaway of all, that’s why a lot of amateur and even professional poker players wear sunglasses at the table.
There are other signs peculiar to individual players, some may have a twitch or even sweat when they are in a spot. If you put a top class professional poker player at a table of amateurs, the pro player would be able to read the cards by the players’ tells, almost as if the cards were sitting face up.

Playing poker online however is a completely different matter - there is no way to see your opponents so the normal poker tells are lost.
However there are a few things you can watch for in the other players that might just give you a read on what they have.

1. Speed of response,  an amatuer mistake. This is the main tell you have on your opposition when playing poker online. In particular look for players who take a while to check, this is seen as a weak play and indicates that the player does not have a good hand.
You should beware of this in your own play - if you are going to check with a poor hand, don’t hesitate before you do.

2. Chatting. This is the other big online poker tell. If someone is constantly chatting at the table it shows weakness. These players normally come along and tell you why they folded or tell you their hand after they’ve mucked it, basically copying what they’ve seen the pros do on the TV. These players normally don’t do very well, there’s not a great deal of time when you’re playing poker online and if they are typing out chat then they aren’t concentrating on the game.

3. Maniacs. These are players who live on a do-or-die basis and often go all-in with almost every hand, especially in the early stages of a tournament. They are of course very easy to spot, and equally easy to stop. All you need to do is wait for a good hand and call their all-in, you will probably find yourself very strong favorite to knock the maniac out. If however the maniac is left unchecked to do his work, he can turn very dangerous as he will have built up a leading chip stack by being unopposed and can then sit back and play only good hands.

4. The Limper. This player is the opposite of the maniac. He will try and see every hand for free but will fold as soon as the betting starts - unless he has a really good hand. This is another very good tell you can use, just simply fold if the Limper starts to bet, unless of course you have a really good hand too.

These four online poker tells should stand you in good stead and you will now be able to sort out the wheat from the chaff among your opponents.

Poker strategy – avoiding the tilt. A poker player goes on “tilt” when he is playing in a different way from normal - a way driven by emotion because of what’s just happened in the game.

Rather than stick to his normal game plan, the player on tilt does things that he wouldn’t do under normal circumstances. He starts to make over-aggressive bets, stays in the betting for too long when he should be getting out and totally loses his discipline and self-control.

So how does it happen? Why does a poker player go on tilt?

The main reason, in fact the reason in the overwhelming amount of times a poker player goes on tilt, is that he has just suffered a bad loss when he had expected to win the hand, in other words a “bad beat”.

This causes a massive surge in emotion in the poker player which cannot be controlled by the average person. Emotions are far more powerful than our powers of reasoning and logic, they will always win the battle of thought processes.

In his mind the player sees all his patient poker stategy that he’s used to build up his chip stack being blown away in an instant, and the natural response is to try and recover the deficit just as quickly. The brain is trying to win back all that lost money as fast as possible resulting in the poker player playing hands he would not normally play and calling bets he would fold nine times out of ten.

Can “tilt” be avoided?

In a word yes. It requires discipline and the ability to stick to an emergency exit plan but it can be done. Some people, even poker professionals, mistakenly believe that tilt can be avoided by pausing for a few moments to collect your thoughts and “counting to ten”.

This simply won’t do it.

The only real way to avoid going on tilt is to get yourself away from the poker table altogether for a few hands. If you’re in a casino, stand up and walk away. Get a coffee or just take a walk. If you’re playing on the internet click on the “Sit Out” button and walk away from your computer for a while.

Most importantly, you need to do it immediately after you lose the big hand, as soon as the hand is over you get out of there. Don’t be tempted to just play the next one I case your luck changes, that’s a recipe for disaster.

How long do you take a break for? As long as it takes. You need to get yourself back into the right frame of mind and start playing your poker strategy again like you did before the bad beat. Get emotion out of the equation, it’s not anybody’s “fault”, it just happened. Switch back into logical mode and get on with the game.

The reason that poker professionals don’t go on tilt is that they are used to it. They have played so much poker that they know it’s inevitable there will be hands they thought they were winning only to suffer a bad loss. It’s part of the game and they just get on with it.

In the end good poker strategy will always beat emotion, calculation will win over instinct and experience will triumph against almost anything.