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In gambling strategy then it isn’t sufficient to simply devise a way of playing that is fundamentally sound. It not only has to be fundamentally sound but it also needs to overcome any vigorish that may be up against you. For example we can look at biased wheels in roulette as a perfect analogy. Wheels can become biased but there are biases and biases and not only does a wheel have to be biased but it has to show enough of a bias to overcome the house edge.

This analogy is significant because it highlights the fact that many systems fail in gambling not because they are fundamentally unsound but because of the vigorish that is imposed on it from the casino or the gambling house. Poker is the same with table fees and rake and many would be successful poker players end up either not making money, losing money or not making enough to make the entire process financially viable above and beyond doing another line of work.

This process is the same for poker players because not only do you need to find a successful style but you also need to find a successful style that beats the rake and other overheads and also to find a successful style that allows you to earn an amount from the game that you deem to be financially viable. So any casino gambling strategy by sheer definition has many obstacles for it to overcome before it can start down the road to making money.

Over the years then I have witnessed many bad tactics in blackjack and one such tactic is to play momentum. This may happen along the lines of the following. A player loses several hands on the trot and then places a larger bet. This strategy cannot possibly work unless you happen to know that the deck is favourable for the player. You cannot possibly know this unless you happen to be using a card counting system. Based on the fact that not many players who play the game will be using that then the chances of anyone playing in this fashion are slim at best. It simply cannot be done that you can bet blindly and get a long term edge at blackjack.

If you are increasing your bet blindly then you are simply placing more money onto the table when the count is unknown. So this means that the count will be unfavourable as often as it will be favourable…….almost like a coin flip. Based on the fact that you are as close to even more money as it is close to get in terms of the expectation of winning a particular hand then you will see why getting too excited about the prospects of winning the next hand simply because you have won or lost a certain number of previous hands is a rather poor strategy to try and execute. This is no different in principle to a player who bets red or black on roulette simply because there has been a previous sequence of red or black numbers.

Let us look at an analogy here to describe what I want to talk about, let us look at warfare here to highlight the importance of deception. If there was absolutely no deception whatsoever in warfare then many more soldiers would get killed because their enemies would know what was coming and adequately prepare. Deception may seem like dirty tricks but it is a vital part of the game and this applies also in poker. If you do not play in a deceptive way then you simply make your opponents decisions far easier. At the end of the day then you need to make your money in poker by you avoiding as many mistakes as possible and your opponents making as many mistakes as possible.

Poker is about making decisions and it isn’t enough to make a decent decision these days and as ex-world Chess champion Emmanuel Lasker once said….. “If you think you have found a decent move at the board……stop….think…..then find a better one”. There are always better ways or nearly always better ways to play poker hands than the one that you originally arrive at. As a rule then deception assists you in not only playing a poker hand better yourself but also helps your opponents to play badly. Think about that for a minute because let us say that you have J-J and limp-raise from early position. This is deceptive because it makes your opponent think that you have AA-KK. But if your opponent thinks this and they re-raise then they almost surely have you crushed.

One of the things that you need to remember in blackjack is why basic strategy exists. It exists so that the player can play each hand in a mathematically correct way. But many of the decisions are losing decisions whatever you do. Sometimes you have to make counter-intuitive plays in blackjack like defensive splitting for example. Let us look at a hand like 8-8 vs a dealer 10 which is 16 vs 10. Now this is a bad situation to be in for the player. Taken from a 52 card deck then we have seen three cards which leave 49 unseen. If we stand on 16 then any 7, 8, 9 10 value card or ace beats us straight away.

There are a total of 10 cards of 7 through to a 9 (we have two eights) and a further 15 ten value cards (the dealer already has a ten) and 4 aces. This means that the dealer will beat our total straight away 29 times out of 49. But they will also pull a combination of smaller cards to make 17 or more as well and so the chance of our standing and winning is small. If we take a card then any card will bust us unless it is an ace through to a five. Whichever way we go then our chances are slim.

But if standing has a certain value, taking a card has a certain value and so does splitting then we take the play with the best value. Quite often this involves placing more money onto the table. If you stand to lose 10% in EV on a $10 bet then you are losing $1 in expected value. However if by splitting your EV becomes -2% then although you now have $20 on the table your EV is only -$0.40 and not $2.

There is actually a famous poker book by this very same title but that is not what I want to discuss here. I have both played and studied poker now for a very long time and in fact that time is more than 15 years. It is very difficult to study something for that length of time without arriving at a totally different situation to the one that you were in a few years ago.

This is an inevitable process for any complex field that is constantly evolving. I think that the real education of a poker player comes when they realise that in order to be a successful poker player over a long period of time then you have to learn to adjust.

It isn’t just a case of learning to play poker hands well because that can be easily achieved with just a moderate amount of study. In fact I think that this is the biggest mistake that millions of poker players the world over make because they take their poker education to a certain level and then stop in the belief that they know the game.

In a sense then they really do know the game but they do not know the game enough to be able to survive when the environment becomes tough. This is when the better players begin to play poker far differently to what they had previously played it. Only when you can compete and survive in an environment that has totally evolved can you really say that you have completed your education as a poker player, fortunately for the select few…….most never reach this goal.

Someone asked me the other day how much control you can have in a game of poker? Well firstly you simply cannot control losing money…..this is an absolute given that you will lose money. However there are things that you can control and the first one is in how you conduct yourself mentally and how you react to losing money. If you react badly then your results will suffer but this is something that you can control. You can also control the size of the pot in many cases using pot control techniques.

Another aspect of the game that you can control is the level of variance. A low variance style will mean that the dips to your bankroll will be less than if you were playing a higher variance style. In the world of financial trading then these dips are called drawdowns! Many financial traders view having low drawdowns very high up on their list of priorities and I can understand why that is. I have known many poker careers cut short by highly negative variance.

So you can control losses but only to the extent of those losses. You simply cannot control losing money because that is as inevitable at some stage as the fact that you will be a day older tomorrow than what you are today or that the sun will rise. I believe that controlling your losses is as important as making money and some of the best technical players in the world have tried to optimise their earn rate by increasing variance only to then get blown out of the water so to speak.

The art of playing backgammon is often in how fluid you decide to make your plans for playing from the very start of the game. Often if you have been playing an inexperienced player then they often start the game in a defensive pattern and may not even make the most of very good doubles. The attacking game in backgammon is often called a “blitz” because it places your opponent on the back foot and into an even more defensive position.

For example let us say that you throw 5-4,many novice players look to run with that from their opponents inner board but that is in fact a very weak move that doesn’t really build your position all that much. You have several key objectives in backgammon and the first one is to make it as hard as possible for your opponent to play an easy game.

In principle then this is a lot like poker because your moves in a poker game can often make life harder or easier for your opponent. In fact you need to ask this question as a poker player all the time because if you are making life easy for your opponent then their playing decisions become easier and your profit potential drops. But if their decisions by definition become easier then yours must get harder……it is the law of the jungle.

This principle applies perfectly to backgammon as well and before you make your move then you have to assess if your move makes life easier or harder for your opponent. If your move does nothing to make life harder for them then you may want to consider making another move.

Looking at the statistics of online poker for a minute is very rewarding. Around 90% of all online poker players fail to make money……period. The remaining 10% make consistent money and by the way, the 10% is a rough estimate that could be out by as much as 5% either way. So we are effectively looking at a range of 5%-15% of online players making long term money at whatever level. I would definitely say that the figure would in my opinion be far more likely to be on the lower side of that range than the higher side but that is a point for debate.

So if around 90% of players are losing money or not making money then 90% of poker players are doing something wrong or a combination of wrong things. This means that we then need to know or try to work out what the masses are doing or what they should be doing but are not. If we know how the masses are playing poker then we can more readily design strategies to beat them. The strategies that we therefore need to construct are probably not conventional strategies as dictated to us by the mainstream poker fraternity.

It can be immensely instructive to first read and learn what the masses are reading and following because once you establish this then you basically know how they think and act. There will always be players who only take their education a certain way down the track either because they cannot be bothered to work harder or because they haven’t got the time. But there is a reason why the masses do not make money, in years gone by it was because the greatest majority of them were simply very bad poker players. This is not the case now because a much larger percentage of the masses while not being great poker players are also adequate and efficient poker players.

One of the best pieces of advice that I have ever been given regarding risking money and being able to mentally absorb the actual risk was when I read about a financial day trader who said that you need to almost step outside of yourself as if you were watching someone else do it. There is a lot of stress involved in the risking of money and especially if that risk involves substantial amounts of money like it does if you play poker or bet on sports for a living.

Blackjack is no different and in many ways is far worse because the variance in blackjack is very severe and is akin to limit hold’em in severity. Although what can be far worse in limit is that you can end up having played many escalated pots to only then find out that your opponent was better than you and that you were getting outplayed. This can never happen of course in blackjack as you can never be outplayed by the dealer. The most that the dealer can do to thwart a card counter is to maybe only cut half the shoe but that is about all.

They could maybe count along to see if the counter is upping their bets during high counts but that is about it. They cannot alter the rules of the game and so cannot stand or take cards differently to 17. But sitting back and acting as if you are merely observing someone else commit the process of risking money is a good way to proceed. This all assumes of course that you have a good winning game plan to begin with.

As an online poker player of almost ten years standing and many of those years as a full time pro then I know all too well what it takes to be able to make money. I have made many mistakes in that time and so I actually want to pass on the benefit of my mistakes and the knowledge that I have acquired over that time. At the outset of my career then I ignored the importance of outside financial factors for far too long. However the games were so good back in 2001-2004 that you were never dependent on sign up bonuses and rakeback for your income.

So what this meant was that you sort of become blasé about how you made your money. It was only when the games started to become tougher that I can could see how important it was to be able to make money from poker in other ways. These ways were sign up bonuses and rakeback. At the end of the day then you make money by your opponents making mistakes but the mistakes that players were making were getting thinner and thinner on the ground.

When you are maybe getting $1000 per month in rakeback then it simply takes all the pressure off you to have to make money on the actual tables. It is exactly the same with sign up bonuses because at the end of the day then this is money that the sites are giving to you so it is certainly in your interests to take advantage of it don’t you?