bwin – the world's biggest online gaming platform

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?

There is an old saying in poker and it is that “why do the pushing when the donkey will do the pulling”. The meaning behind this statement is that weak players will beat themselves and this applies to any sport or game. It certainly applies to Chess where simply moving your pieces around and placing them into semi-threatening positions can be enough to beat a novice.

In backgammon then weak players will tend to beat themselves by their own weak strategies. By this I am referring to either leaving shots when they don’t need to simply because they have missed obvious moves, not realising strategic concepts or simply not allowing their position to have fluidity. This is the biggest error committed by a novice where many believe that leaving shots is not the correct thing to do.

So novice players basically defeat themselves and you can often build up a dominant position by around the 7th-8th role. However there is luck in backgammon and any player however poor can win games. Novices also fail to capitalise on their equity when they have it and also take poor doubles. You do not need to play a world class game to beat them and in fact doing so could be counter-productive if in doing so it allows the novice counter-play. This in principle is a bit like trying to bluff weak poker players who are calling stations. If they are going to call you down simply because they see a pair and think that it is strong then your complex play has done nothing more than make them inadvertently make the correct play.

In a game of backgammon then it is pretty clear how a game is sometimes flowing and in what direction. If you start off with a strong series of moves then the game really starts to flow in the direction of you attacking and your opponent either defending or trying to counter attack. It is imperative that you understand your position in order to maximise your chances of doing very well and to maximise your equity in the position.

This is a mistake that many novice players make, if they start well and they have an edge then they do not push that edge aggressively enough. This can allow an experienced player to get back into the game rather than them really going for the jugular. An example game may go something like this, a novice starts off with a lucky few rolls and gets ahead both in the pip count and the strategic nature of the position and this happens during the opening four rolls. An experienced player may double at this stage but our novice not only doesn’t double but he plays on and becomes negative in his tactics.

So the experienced player manages to balance the position during the next half a dozen rolls and suddenly the position is even. From here then the novice can get lucky again and regain the initiative although they probably will double more in this instance because it is nearer the end of the game. The novice though makes the huge mistake of only doubling in crushing positions where his opponent is likely to drop anyway.

In this post I am going to be comparing the merits of different types of betting systems in blackjack and the prospective short term results of each. If you fail to card count in blackjack then it is very difficult to gain a meaningful edge. Some people would say that it is impossible but that isn’t true. This is because of the fact that accurate basic strategy could in fact make you +EV if you had some sort of external financial source providing you with income.

To quote an example here then imagine if you made $10 bets and had 60 hands per hour playing basic strategy. At a house edge of roughly 0.5% and with you placing $600 per hour in action then your projected hourly rate figure would be -$3/hour. But imagine if you could create a scenario where someone was paying you to play the game. Like the casino for example who paid you to simply occupy a table and play blackjack to simply attract other players to the game. If the casino paid you $10 per hour to do this then your total hourly rate for the game would be +$7/hour even though you were using your own money. In fact you could increase this hourly rate by having a smaller minimum bet if you could get away with it.

In this instance then flat betting would get you the same effect as progressive betting but if you were looking to maybe play a short term single session then progressive betting systems can be very enjoyable to use. However some of them have to be treated with extreme caution because the bankroll demands on some of them are extreme to say the least.

I believe that there are two clear and distinctive strategies that are possible in poker and one is to play with a set system where volume can be your primary focus over extended quality and the other where you play far fewer hands but look to achieve a much greater bb/100 figure. The latter strategy is derived by being able to watch your opponents and to really feel the pulse of the game. This is easier to achieve if you happen to be playing against opponents that are multi-tabling.

Players who multi-table usually haven’t got the time to balance their play as well as if they were playing far fewer tables and so this can give an edge in this area to players who are prepared to play poker in this way. Does this mean that you can make more or less money playing this way? Well that isn’t clear because it all depends on what levels you are playing at. If you play NL100 and make 10bb/100 then you are making $10/100 if you play one table.

That is impressive and may be far better than another player who may make 4bb/100 and only $4/100. However the other player may be playing ten tables and seeing 800 hands per hour. In that case than he is making $32/hour while you are making around $8/hour…….some difference despite the fact that they are contributing EV to you.

However if you played say $5-$10 and crushed the game single tabling and made 8bb/100 then you are making $80/100 hands and in full ring that equates to around $60/hour. So even though the other player is playing ten tables then they cannot compensate for your very good earn level at a much high level of play.

The concept of pot control is a very important one in no limit hold’em cash games. This is especially true in deep stacked situations where your hand strength could in fact be very mediocre compared to how big you want the pot to become. Let us look at an example here to show what I mean. Firstly you get dealt Q-J in the cut-off and you have to ask yourself do you want to get all in at this stage for 100bb with this hand……..clearly then the answer is no as anyone would have at least QQ in their hand and your hand would be dominated. But what if your opponent calls and the flop comes Q-10-4…….now what?

Well in some instances then you have a better hand because your queen has paired but this is double edged. Your opponent is unlikely to have a hand that is weaker than yours and can call with it. So if you bet here on the flop then you are really hoping that the hand ends here. You clearly want to control the size of the pot here because betting and your opponent folding means that you win the pot but you have also risked a high percentage of money as well compared to what is in the pot. So even though you are handing your opponent a free card then you do not need to fear this as much as what you do in limit play.

I watched the movie “21” the other night for the first time. This is the supposedly true story of the “MIT” team that took the casinos in Las Vegas for considerable sums of money. There were many mistakes that were made by a supposedly 25 year veteran of playing blackjack that I found difficult to understand. Firstly they divided up the winnings after every trip which as far as I could tell was just over a weekend.

It is unlikely that any team would do that after so short a playing session. Variance is huge in blackjack and it would be easy to hand out $50,000 in profits to your team members only then to lose an amount of money that took you back down to where you started. Except as the backer then you would be down the money what you had already paid to your team if you put up 100% of the money which I assume that in the film he did because the students all seemed short of their own money.

What I also found strange was that it would be difficult teaching blackjack and evasion techniques to new players let alone shuffle tracking which is highly complex. From someone who has tried and used shuffle tracking and not to mention studied this art for a long time then I can vouch for how difficult it is. This would be made even worse by trying to teach novices this art that had never set foot inside a casino before in their life. The term “shuffle tracking” was used once in the movie but that never came across in what they did at the tables.