Expected Value

EV stands for expected value, and players usually speak in terms of positive EV (+EV) or negative EV (-EV). This simply refers to the value of a certain play in a poker game. If you call a $20 bet to win a $100 pot and you are better than 5-to-1 to win the hand, you have made a +EV play. If you are worse than 5-to-1 to win the hand, you have made a –EV play.

The Importance of EV in Poker

Put simply, expected value is what poker is all about. If you make more positive EV plays then negative EV ones over the course of your playing career, you will be a winning player. If you make more negative EV plays, you will be a losing player.

Calculating EV

Calculating expected value is not always easy and how you will do it will vary given the situation. For example, some players will refer to a decision to sit in a game at higher stakes than you are ready for as “-EV.” Even though this is not as clearly quantifiable as putting $50 into a pot that is only really worth $20 to you, it is still meaningful. If that game has stakes so high that the variance will wipe out your bankroll before you have a chance for your +EV plays to work, you are in a –EV situation. If you are in a game where most of the other players are making more +EV plays than you, you are in a –EV situation. Of course, more simply, calling bets when you don’t have the correct odds to do so is –EV.

Using EV
EV is a helpful analysis tool because it will alert you as to what the correct play will be should a similar situation arise again. Your goal as a poker player should be to identify common –EV moves that you make and replace them with +EV moves.

What Is Added Value?

Added value simply means that something is worth more than you are paying for it. If someone sells you a seat at the main event of the World Series of Poker for $5000, you have gained value, since it is worth $10,000. On the other hand, if Phil Hellmuth offers to sell you half of his World Series of Poker main event winnings for $6000, you are probably gaining value, even though the face value of such a proposition would be $5000, because he is such a strong player.

How Can You Take Advantage of Added Value?

The most common situation you will find yourself in where you can gain added value is in a tournament with a large guarantee. A guarantee means a certain amount of money will be paid out no matter how many entries they get. Generally, the buy-ins are enough to cover the guarantee but if not, you have added value. For example, with a $100 buy-in tournament with a $200,000 guarantee, the tournament would need to get 2000 players to make their guarantee. If they do not, you get added value, because there is more money available than has been contributed per person. Be on the lookout for these opportunities.

Rakeback Do’s and Don’ts

When looking for rakeback deals, do:

Go to a rakeback affiliate. You won’t find rakeback directly at your poker site. You will need to go to a site that is specifically designed to direct poker traffic to sign up with various online poker sites through offering rakeback.

Find the best rakeback deal you can. Not all rakeback deals are created equal. You may be offered 10 percent, 20 percent or even 30 percent rakeback. The amount of rakeback may depend on how popular the site is to begin with and how badly they need traffic, but even if you have a specific site in mind, it can’t hurt to sniff out the best deals.

Prepare to sign up with some of the less well-known sites. If you have to play on a major site like PartyPoker or PokerStars, you’re out of luck when it comes to rakeback. These sites are big enough that they don’t need to offer this kind of promotion. If you don’t mind playing on one of the less popular sites though, you can find all sorts of great deals.

When looking for rakeback deals, don’t:

Don’t try to get a sign up bonus and a rakeback deal with the same site. You cannot do both, so if you’ve already signed up with a site using an online poker bonus (or signed up without any kind of promotion), you will have no chance of getting rakeback for that site.

Don’t sign up through a rakeback deal if you don’t plan to play on the site long term. Rakeback really pays when you put in many hours at a given site. If you’re planning a “hit and run,” you’re much better off seeking out a lucrative sign up bonus.

The Frequent Player Points Concept

It’s also the idea behind frequent player points. Frequent player points may go by different names on different sites, but they all mean the same thing. They are credits you earn by playing on a site that can be exchanged for rewards. Some sites offer advanced FPP programs instead of rakeback. Taking advantage of these frequent player points can enhance your online poker experience.

Earning Frequent Player Points

Remember what you had to do to clear your online poker sign up bonus? Frequent player points are earned the same way, with the distinction being that you can use them at any time. You earn frequent player points with every raked hand and tournament you play. There was a time where you could only earn points by playing in cash games, but tournaments are so wildly popular that most sites have relented and allowed tournament players to earn points to, albeit often at a much slower rate than their cash-playing counterparts.

What Can You Do with Frequent Player Points?

There are two main options for your frequent player points. You can exchange them for merchandise or you can use them for tournament entries. When you use them for tournament entries you are essentially “buying” a freeroll, playing in a tournament with a cash prize without putting up any money. Frequent player points are also popular for buying into satellites, small tournaments which can earn you an entry in a bigger tournament. If you don’t feel the need to use points for tournaments, the online poker site will have its own store where you can shop using your frequent player points. Depending on the amount of points you have, you can buy anything from a deck of cards emblazoned with the site’s logo, or on the other end of the spectrum, you might even be able to buy a car. You’ll have to put in some serious hours for that though.

What’s Rake?

The rake is the means by which online sites make money for providing tables for poker. Since poker games are not played against the house, poker rooms need another form of the house advantage, so they created the rake. The rake is an amount between five and ten percent that is taken from each pot. In most cases any player who receives cards gets credit for participating in the rake. Some online poker rooms give grace by declining the rake when a hand ends before the flop.

How Does a Rakeback Offer Work?

When you sign up with a rakeback affiliate site, you begin accumulating rakeback as soon as you start to play. The web site will offer a percentage of rakeback to be awarded to your account at the end of each month. So if you pay $100 in rake over the course of a month and the rakeback rate is 26 percent, then you will receive $26 dollars back into your poker account at the end of the month.

Typically, when you calculate win rate, the rake is already factored in. So consider the increase with a rakeback return. If you generally maintain a win rate of $15 an hour playing in raked games, then your win rate stands to become $17 or $18 after collecting rakeback.

Consider Rakeback

If a large sign-up bonus already drew you to a specific site, you will not be able to sign up for rakeback on that particular site. If you are still weighing your options between a sign-up bonus and rakeback, consider your own attention span. Are you someone who prefers a new poker site every few weeks? Then hefty sign-up bonuses might be the better choice for you. If you are a player who likes to stick with familiar tables and return adversaries, then the rakeback is probably a wise move.

Full Tilt, whose name is a play on both the idea of doing something with maximum effort (”going at it full tilt”) and the concept of tilt in poker, which means to lose emotional control and play badly as a result, was founded in 2004. The concept was a players’ poker site, created by players for players, and the initial founders included such poker celebrities as Howard Lederer, Phil Ivey, Mike Matusow and Jennifer Harman.

Team Full Tilt

The team of poker pros affiliated with Full Tilt Poker has now expanded to become the most massive field of pros in online poker. These pros not only play on the site, they also offer tips and advice that can be accessed by Full Tilt Poker members. Full Tilt players even have the opportunity to ask these pros questions at certain times.

Games on Full Tilt Poker

Full Tilt Poker offers a wide variety of poker games. They have Texas hold’em of course, and Omaha and Omaha hi/lo. They also have Razz, seven card stud, seven card stud hi/lo and mixed games like H.O.R.S.E. Full Tilt has cash games and tournaments and even has a large tournament series with a huge prize pool known as FTOPS (The Full Tilt Online Poker Series). Full Tilt Poker accepts U.S. players.

Every time that you play a hand of online poker, you are paying for the privilege. Poker sites do not charge players outright. Instead, they take a percentage of the pot called the rake. The rake is five to ten percent of the entire pot. Sites offering rakeback refund up to 30 percent of each player’s rake contribution back to the player. So essentially, if you are not taking advantage of rakeback, you are just giving your money away.

Two Types of Player, Two Ways to Collect Rakeback

Before deciding on which rakeback method to go with, you need to consider your own style of play. Are you a conservative or tight player who waits patiently for the perfect hand to play? If this sounds like you, the dealt rakeback method is probably your best choice. With the dealt rakeback, players are given equal credit for contributing to the rake even if they do not contribute to the pot. Do you prefer to take risks and stay in the action for as many hands as you can? Then you will make more money by choosing the contributed method. The contributed rakeback method pays players back in congruence with the amount that they individually contribute to the rake.

Boost Your Bankroll and Upgrade Your Win Rate

After you choose the appropriate rakeback method for your style of play, you can immediately begin earning rakeback. Once the new income hits your bankroll, your hourly earnings will rise and your win rate will increase. In fact, with rakeback your average return per hand can increase by 30 percent, and if you are a player who likes to multi-table, the combined rakeback might surpass the amount that you contribute to rake altogether. If you play two tables at once on a regular basis, and end up paying $300 per table to rake over the course of a month, then you can bring home $180 in rakeback alone. All you need to do is sign up with a poker site that offers rakeback.

The other day someone was saying, “You don’t need a strategy to play video poker… you’re just playing against a machine… you just choose your cards and wait to see what you get… there’s nothing to it… anyone can play it!

But there is a video poker strategy and if you master it then you could win a lot of money. Just like normal poker you have to know your odds, what are the chances of getting a winning hand and what is the value of each hand.

Probably one of the most important things to know is the payout structure of each machine to ensure that you are getting enough back for the risk that you are taking. You have to get the payout to make it worth it.

You have to have a strategy to play video poker, if you go in there with no idea what you are doing you’ll get beat every time. Sure there aren’t all the human aspects that come into play when you are sitting around the table with other poker players, but that doesn’t mean that you can switch off and just hope for the best!

Ultimate Bet prides itself on offering more poker games than any other site. If there’s a poker game played at a live casino, it’s probably played at Ultimate Bet. Games offered at Ultimate Bet include the ever-popular Texas hold’em, Omaha and seven card stud, as well as mixed games like H.O.R.S.E., H.O.S.E. and half hold’em half Omaha. Ultimate Bet even offers more esoteric games like deuce to seven triple draw lowball, where the objective is to make the worst hand possible, razz, a seven card stud all low game, and crazy pineapple, a Texas hold’em variant where players get three cards instead of two in the hole and must discard one after the flop. Ultimate Bet is also host to a major live poker tournament, the Aruba Poker Classic.

Ultimate Bet Disadvantages

The biggest disadvantage that Ultimate Bet is currently addressing is its affiliation with Absolute Poker. Absolute Poker has recently been exposed as being the victim of possibly the biggest cheating scandal experienced by a major site. Although these are two different sites, the same parent company, Tokwiro Enterprises, owns both, causing some players to have some trepidation about Ultimate Bet.

Second is you have to be able to play your position for it is a very important part of poker. Being in early position should make a major difference in the way you play out your hand as it should when you are on the button in last position. Also learn how to play your opponents and not their cards. Try to catch some things which you notice are similar in their behavior every time they pick up a big hand or every time they go for a bluff.

Last thing for me is PATIENCE…I think this is the most important concept of the game, especially in tournament poker. You should only end up playing a small percentage of hands out of all the hands which you are dealt. People that play very lose most of the time end up loosing their money. Thats about it from me so hope you guys found it helpfull…