Recently, I lost a prop bet for $200.  I learned a costly lesson about Mobile Poker.  The terms were simple I couldn’t play and win $100, either in cash games or in a tournament on my computer before my friend could play and win the same amount on his phone.  We both could play on as many tables as we wanted and the bet would end when one of us won $100.  We only had to win $100 on a single table, so we didn’t have to be “up” $100 over the course of the bet.  We just had to win $100 in one session on one table.  Any sized cash game or tournament counted, except for heads up matches.  I thought I had a monster edge in the bet, turns out I was a massive dog.

Understand my friend is a great poker player, and I’ll concede a far better player than me.  His bankroll and his results put mine to shame.  So, it’s kind of a sucker bet, because unless I got lucky he was going to win $100 before I did.  Except, I thought it was a sucker bet the other way.  For starters I didn’t know you could play Mobile Poker.

I didn’t know any of the sites offered a platform for Mobile Poker in any way.  Thinking that none did, I thought he was taking by far the worst of it.  After all, I just had to win a $100 on my computer at some point and time before Mobile Poker begins to exist, whenever that would be.  He may be a good poker player but he’s not the most tech savvy guy in the world, so I thought it was easy money.

Running a Mobile Poker game is a tough objective, unfortunately somebody’s figured out how to do it.  Turns out he plays on bwin, and turns out bwin’s been offering Mobile Poker for some time now.  Which one of us is tech savvy again?  Apparently, it’s really him.  Not only is he a better poker player than me he’s also a bigger tech geek too.

So we made the bet at his house, and I decided to stay and watch the rest of the soccer game that just started on TV after he challenged me.  After that I planned on going home and firing up my computer.  I was going to play some sit ‘n goes and cash tables until I won $100 on one of them.  As were we watching the game he starts text messaging people.  I think nothing of it, because he’s not much of a soccer fan, as he always says he rather be playing it than watching it but I’d never seen him so focused on texting.

The game was pretty good with three first half goals.  Meanwhile, he’s nonstop with the texting.  Eventually, I ask him who he’s talking to?  He says “Talking?”   I say “Texting.”  He smiles and says, “Oh right now, I’m with Apple_fan83 and a couple of her friends.”

Oh okay, whoever that was.  The guy dates a lot it could be any number of girls.  I could barely land my girlfriend and he gets a phone number every time he goes grocery shopping.   Except it wasn’t some girl he met picking out vegetables.  Apple_fan83 was on his cash table, and my buddy was in the process of killing a Mobile Poker game.  All that texting? Just him playing the game.

Halfway through the second half, I decided I wanted to see what Apple_fan83 and her friends were texting about.  I walk across the room and look over his shoulder and I see he was sitting on $92 in a Mobile Poker game.  He smiled and said, “I started with $20.”  I didn’t say a word, I just grabbed my keys and ran to my car.  Just as I got home and was getting online he sent me a picture mail.  It was his phone, the cash table and he had $123 on it.  He texted “Ship it!”

I remember hearing what top professional player David Benyamine said in an interview sometime back when someone asked him to give a poker tip. He replied that in order for poker to love you then you had to love it back. I thought long and hard about that statement and it has many different meanings. I am therefore going to put my own interpretation to that statement because fundamentally we all love poker and this is why we play the game. But the fact of the matter is that poker and playing poker can be an absolutely horrible experience.

This is a fact for some people and it is usually to do with losing something that many people cherish above everything else…..money! If you honestly and truly cherish many other things more than money then you will no doubt be the type of person who tilts less or even doesn’t tilt at all. So losing in poker is inevitable and something that cannot be avoided and what is more, you will have the capacity to lose a lot of money relative to the stakes that you are playing. The more you cherish money and the more you hate losing then the more poker is going to be a nightmare experience for you.

At the end of the day you are trying to control events that cannot be controlled. You can spend ages waiting for opportunities and finally get your opponent all in for one hundred big blinds with AA against their JJ and the flop comes 9-8-7 with a ten on the turn and you are history. This happens because in order to maximise your earn rate in poker then you have to accept marginal situations or situations where you are not a shoe in to win the hand.

I think that one of the major issues with people who play Texas Hold em poker is that essentially they either do not understand gambling concepts or they do not accept them psychologically. Either way they are attempting to control an environment that cannot be controlled and this can lead to tilt and anger and a whole host of negative emotions. So I think that what Benyamine meant was to accept all that poker is and see poker for what it really is. All too often though people put their own interpretations to poker or any complex event for that matter and so they never really see the truth.

I am not saying that I have all the answers when it comes to playing poker because I haven’t. The game is so complex that you can never master it and all you can do is to take your game and your mindset to a level where you can be considered an expert. But the definition of “expert” does not mean that you know everything that there is to know about poker. But I will repeat myself by saying that you have to love poker for what it is and it is a bit like a partnership with the opposite sex. It really doesn’t matter who you are with, they will have faults and flaws and accepting them is part of being with someone.

A few years ago I used to coach Texas Hold em poker but the more I discovered about poker made me believe that many of the coaching methods are wrong. It is a little bit like trying to coach someone how to drive a car and showing them nothing but manoeuvres like three point turns, reversing, parking and so forth. These are clearly such a minor part of driving that being very good at them does not even begin to come close to being a skilled driver. The more I discovered about poker then the more I realised that in order to be the best that you can be then you had to concentrate on your mindset more than the technical side of the game which is more easily learnable.

There are many psychological factors behind why many players fail to be successful in poker. Although one of the reasons why things get rather hazy when it comes to the definition of “success” is that many define it differently. There must be millions of people the world over who define themselves as successful poker players who in my opinion are not. This will mainly be to do with them having had some decent or half decent tournament results. With the very high level of variance in poker tournaments then I would never define someone as merely successful simply because they had won a couple of events.

I have heard of WSOP bracelet winners being so broke that they had to sell their bracelets and tournament players needing people to stake them because they had no money. But yet these are the same people who would have called themselves “successful poker players” and who would have been looked on as “successful” by other people. In tournament poker then the definition of success is always dollars won over dollars spent over a very long period of time. The online databases that give tournament winnings do not even begin to tell the real story. Most players sell pieces of themselves, have backers or people who stake them or they simply owe money to people and so their tournament wins are rarely their own money.

You are faced with a very difficult problem when someone perceives themselves as “successful” because these are players that would never ask for coaching. Once again this is down to mindset and is something that I try to alter whenever I coach. Most people these days look for ways to play hands better but yet this isn’t really where the money is for most people. If you do not have the correct attitude to risk then you will never play high stakes poker or even middle limits for that matter and so this means that working your way up through the levels will be impossible. Irrespective of the mindset and the level of understanding then you will never reach substantial levels. But once again this gets back to mindset and knowledge of not just the technical side of poker but on the other factors that go to make a good poker player.

There has been numerous articles written about the subject of bankrolls in poker but I feel that much of what has been written has either been general or wrong or non specific or in some cases too specific. Back when I first started to play no limit Texas Holdem then I had a bankroll of 50 buy-ins that I had for levels that included NL100 and NL200. However as these levels became tougher to beat then the variance became more severe as did the bankroll requirements. I then started to study other players and how they played the game including one of the most successful players at that time who was Prahlad Freidman.

His approach to bankrolls sort of set me thinking about the game and I decided to try what I called a “no bankroll” approach. This sounds a little strange when you first hear it but let me explain. What I found or used to find when I first started playing poker was that negative runs used to affect me but on reflection it used to affect me because of how much of my bankroll I had lost. So if I had a bankroll of 500 big bets at say limit hold’em and I went on a 250 big bet downswing then I would really worry about losing 50% of my bankroll.

This would have an adverse affect on my game which led to me playing worse and potentially compounding the problem. So I decided to try a new approach to how I looked at bankrolls. I knew that I had to become really aggressive to compete in these modern games but having a finite bankroll may not allow me to do that as it had the possibility of affecting me psychologically. I knew that I had the income to constantly top up if I lost so I had the idea of having an infinite bankroll. This allowed me to play far better and more powerful poker.

So if I went on a downswing then I had not lost a set percentage of my bankroll but something that could not be quantified in terms of percentage because the bankroll was in theory anyway an infinite one. In reality of course the bankroll wasn’t infinite at all because there is no way that I would have continued losing money at any level of play. But if I needed to make a light call down with an entire buy-in then I wasn’t under pressure to do so based on my bankroll or my attitude to it.

This is not the best way or the optimal way to approach having a bankroll but it worked for me personally. It allowed me to play at some levels that would have been unthinkable to me under normal circumstances. So it is clear then that you can afford to be creative with poker bankrolls as long as what you are doing suits you personally and fits in with what you are trying to achieve long term.

The process of spinning up in poker is where a player buys into a cash game or SNG for a limited amount of money and then tries to create a much larger amount of money from that. This usually involves moving up through numerous levels. There have been numerous stories told of how people have spun up tiny amounts of money into huge amounts.

My own personal record is spinning up $100 into $8000 at no-limit Texas Hold’em poker. But there is an art to doing this as most people tend to win money and then bust out through trying to push the boat out too far.

What you have to remember when you attempt to spin up is that you are in fact practicing absolutely terrible bankroll management. If you buy into a NL100 game for $100 and through careful aggressive play, double that to $200, then you now have two buy-ins for that level!

But most players who attempt to spin up then take the $200 and sit in a NL200 game where they are not only back down to one buy-in again but are now playing against better players than they were before. But lets say that they get lucky again, now they win another $200 and are now sitting with $400 to their name.

So now they try their luck in a NL400 game with the $400, back down to one buy-in again and this time mixing with even better players. Many professionals play at this level and the games will now be far more aggressive. Let us say that you keep replicating this process and take $600 into NL600 and $1000 into NL1000, just how long do you think that it will take to lose just one buy-in…..the blink of an eye that’s what.

If you are going to make spinning up work for you then you basically have to avoid treating the entire process like a poker tournament. If you sat down in a 1000 man online poker tournament, irrespective of how good you were, the overwhelmingly probability is that you would get knocked out at some stage prior to actually winning.

The increasing blinds and high variance would make the entire process heavily luck based irrespective of how well you played. But yet this is precisely what you would be doing if you attempted to spin up and take it too far. Compare the difficulty in winning an actual tournament with regards outlasting half the field.

Coming 500th in a 1000 man poker tournament could be achieved a very high proportion of the time but winning is a different story. The analogy with spinning up in cash games here is clear. Take the profits too soon rather than hang on and be greedy. The entire process is thrown a curve ball when an otherwise good NL100 player is then playing with opponents several levels higher and is now outclassed.

Suddenly the moves that he could make and get away with at NL100 are now getting played back at and three bet and the games are far more aggressive. He now finds that every time he attempts to steal the blinds that he is getting re-raised and his big hands are not getting paid off.

So my advice for anyone who is considering trying to spin up is this. Ignore what you read and hear and even if you hear of someone turning $100 into $8000 like I once did…..ignore it. That was exceptionally lucky and I may never again replicate that and nor would I want to. In fact with more sense and knowledge now, I would now take the profit sooner and probably cut-out at about $500. Do not ever get into a situation where you have to catch lightening in a bottle in order to win money. Otherwise all you are doing is paying for entertainment in a roundabout way.

You see them all the time in cash games, the tournament players who are waiting for a tournament to start who drop into a Texas Hold em cash game merely because they have some time to kill. The thing is with tournaments, they have fast structures and these dictate that you need to sometimes push the pedal to the metal as you simply haven’t got enough time to get lucky.

Risk taking and playing hands quickly is the norm with tournament poker. It may seem rather obvious but the winner of any poker tournament has to get their hands on every single chip that is in circulation. People instinctively know this but yet do not adjust their play to compensate for it.

Many cash game poker players don’t shift gears enough when they play tournaments and exactly the same thing happens in reverse. I have often heard it said that cash games and tournaments should not be mixed and I believe that to be true mainly.

It is the mindset that is difficult to shake off when you switch games. If you are a regular cash game player and especially if you play full-ring then suddenly switching to a tournament mindset could prove difficult. Some players can do this and do this well but I would not recommend it for most players.

What tends to happen is that cash game players and especially full-ring players play too slowly and try to amass their stacks too slowly in the same way that they would in a cash game. I don’t believe that six max players fare any better to be honest.

But it is exactly the same with tournament players who switch to cash games, they are used to playing with stacks that are small compared to the average blinds. Only in the very early stages of a poker tournament does cash game play really come to the fore. Even then there is a lot to be said for playing faster than usual as your time restriction is still severe.

This is why many tournament players play fast and loose even in the early stages because they know that the early stages where the blind to stack ratio is high will not last long. They also figure that whatever dead money is around will be less likely to be around in the middle to late stages and they open up their game to try and get their hands on some of that. I have tried my hand at tournament poker several times and at the start, the transition from playing cash games was difficult.

I think that my hyper aggressive tournament style would do very well long term but this is why I don’t play live tournament poker, I would absolutely hate the prospect of travelling to heaven knows where to play a poker tournament really aggressively only to then bust out after one or two hours of play.

So online cash games definitely suit my personality and I try not to impede on that by playing tournament poker. I see tournament players in cash games all the time race with hands like AK on flops like A-10-5 for their entire stack. Sometimes this may be players simply over playing their hand who have yet to learn the nuances of cash game poker. Other times of course it is something else and that something else is often when tournament players drop in who are still playing far too quickly for the type of poker game that they are currently in.

I always think that players with certain personality sets are attracted to certain types of poker games. To quote one example of what I mean then consider the following. A player drives 30 miles to their local casino to play poker. When they get there they only see one available game in the card room and they wait for a seat in that game and eventually they take a seat. This is a small casino with a mid-size card room that doesn’t see an awful lot of action unless the weekly poker tournament is in full swing.

Essentially then this player has sat in this poker game through a lack of choice. So if this game is full-ring then they could be playing full-ring even though they prefer shorter handed play. Likewise they could be playing if this game were six handed even though they preferred full-ring. However the situation is vastly different in large online card rooms with lots of active games at many different forms of poker.

If a player sits down in a full-ring game online then they have purposely selected that game above anything else. So what can we make of this? Well firstly it is a strong indication that this player prefers games with relatively low blind pressure compared to six handed or heads up play. It is also an indication that this player probably has a game more suited to full-ring than six handed play as well.

Whereas we could not tell anything with regards the mindset of the player who sat down in the live poker game, in this situation then we clearly have something to go on. This is where specialising in one form of poker is ideal as you get a good feel for the average ranges of the players and what types of hands they get all in with. These are different from six handed play to full-ring and they need to be for obvious reasons.

But I do think that a player who selects games with low blind pressure has a more defensive and cautious style of game than a player who plays six handed. A true six handed player has to be prepared to play five and even four handed when players sit out or drop out but five and four handed play would horrify many full-ring players who would quickly leave the table.

In no way however am I saying that full-ring game players are cautious tight playing rocks compared to their six handed counterparts. All that I am saying here is that they are more defensive minded when it comes to preferences regarding blind pressure and other factors. The average hand that a player will get all in with for their entire stack in a deep stack situation will be vastly different in full-ring. In six handed play then it would be often correct to get all in for 100 big blinds with a hand like J-J pre-flop. In full-ring this is rarely correct and hands like Q-Q are too weak to get all-in for 100 big blinds pre-flop.

One of the things that novice poker players underestimate about Online Texas Holdem poker is the fact that it is poker player electronically on a computer. This fact may seem obvious to everyone but how many novice poker players are fully aware of the reality of the modern online poker situation. I use Poker Office when I play but I also don’t think that its use is essential to success either.

Let me explain, if you are multi-tabling then using software like Poker Office will help you to know important facts about players that it would be impossible to find out watching and playing in so many games at once. This is where tracking software really comes into its own. The problems stem from how players misuse the software or expect too much from it.

People have a habit of blindly following technology as if they are the ultimate Holy Grail. I have heard countless stories of motorists getting lost simply because they blindly followed their satellite navigation systems. This is the same in principle with tracker software, it needs to be used with common sense and not blindly followed.

But let me give you an example of how you can find information out about players that software like Poker Office cannot pick up. Let us say that you are playing NL400 on bwin poker and the game is six handed. You are not in this particular hand but you notice that one player suffers a particularly vicious outdraw. They then proceed to raise the next two hands.

Now it is possible that this could just be a coincidence and the player could have been dealt two good raising hands in succession. But the likelihood is that this player is tilting from the outdraw! There is no way that any tracker software can pick this up as a piece of software cannot detect subtle changes in human emotion. They are merely very good tools that are recording data and providing averages.

If a player has VPIP of 23% in a six handed no-limit game then this does not mean that they will put money into the pot in 23 of the next 100 hands that they play. That 23% is a long term average when all game factors and dynamics have been taken into consideration. Depending on current game dynamics then correct VPIP could be substantially higher or lower than what is often considered optimal.

This means that a player who may at first glance be playing optimal poker with good tracker metrics could have terrible leaks in their game at certain times. Maybe every time they win a big pot they loosen up for the next 100 hands or so. You can often feel this happening even in online poker. If you join in mid-game which you always have to do with online poker then it isn’t possible to know what certain players are feeling. It is for this reason why I often watch games that I intend to play in for at least fifteen minutes prior to sitting down in them.