But does anyone actually care? Are the watching public casting an eye on each patch and rushing to the computer to sign up? Invariably, the people watching the action are poker players and they already have their own personal preferences when it comes to which site they spend their hard earned cash. So it really does make you wonder what the professional poker player actually does to earn their coin?

It is believed that at the time of Full Tilt’s demise they had around 250 professional poker players on their books in one form or another. What exactly were these players bringing to Full Tilt? We can imagine superstars like Phil Ivey attracting some newer players to the poker online site but what about the 249 other players?

When you get a piece of paper in your hand and write a list of poker sponsorships pros and cons the pros side is seriously lacking in ink. Maybe the death knell has sounded on poker sponsorship?

Another difference is the presence of an ante structure. Until just recently cash games never had an ante structure, but some sites now offer this incentive in order to create larger pots. In tournaments the same is true. The ante structure exists in order to create more money to be won pre flop and to ensure that the stack to pot ratio is controlled in tournaments where there are huge player fields. Those looking at WSOP Tournaments need to bear this in mind.

The introduction of the ante means that more money is being drawn out of the player’s stacks. The quicker the stacks reduce in relationship with the size of the blinds and antes, the more likely players are to be eliminated. It is this special feature that allows tournaments of thousands of people to be reduced fairly quickly. Fans of Betfair should remember this.

As the pots pre-ante are that much smaller, your strategy needs to a tight and solid one. As the antes are introduced and there is more dead money to win, then you can loosen up your game. Failure to do this will result in you losing fold equity and eventually being blinded out.

Super Stud is generally played in the hi-low variant although you can simply play for the hi if you want to. The pots can get quite juicy because there are more streets for betting than you would find in your usual flop, turn and river type of game. You won’t see it at Betfair WSOP 2012 but it is a lot of fun.

The dealer who announces the game of Super Stud will hand everyone five cards face down. Each player will look at their cards and discard two of their five cards. During this phase of play you can simply fold your hand although the game does possess a small and big blind. Once players have either folded or decided to continue, they each turn over one card face up and keep two cards face down. There is then a round of betting before the dealer hands each remaining poker player a second face up card called Fourth Street.

There are similar betting rounds on Fifth Street, Sixth Street and Seventh Street and the winner of the hi and lo hands are determined at showdown with the best five-card hand in each field being declared the winner. Due to the existence of extra rounds of betting some home games insist of a maximum of half pot bets on earlier streets to keep the pot from growing out of control.

So next time you are seated in a game of Dealers Choice and someone announces Super Stud, you will know what the hell they are talking about.

You Have The Best Hand

When you hold the best hand (or likely best hand) you are betting to extract money from an opponent holding a weaker hand. A good example is betting with ace-queen on a queen high flop against an opponent holding queen-ten. Keep an eye out for this at the World Series of poker 2012.

You Are Bluffing

When you do not have the best hand you may wish to bet to force your opponent to fold a better hand. In these sorts of instances you need to have a good understanding of the type of hand your opponent may have and the likelihood that they will indeed fold. It is also advisable to choose your bluffing hands wisely and you should always bluff with equity in your hand. A good example would be to bluff on a board of [9h] [7h] [Kc] holding [Ah] [Tc]. You have a back door flush draw and the added equity gives you the opportunity to double barrel bluff should your equity improve. So in the above example you can bet again if a third heart comes on the turn and your opponent may well lay down a hand as strong as pocket jacks. People with a Betfair Promo Code need to bear this in mind.

Dead Money

A third reason to bet is to take the dead money in the pot. Your hand could be ahead, but vulnerable to action on later streets, such as a pair of deuces, or you may have a strong hand like ace-king that has missed the flop but could improve on later streets.

Plenty of bets but each one for a specific reason.

Basically, the expected value is the average amount that we stand to win or lose if we see the same situation, repeatedly, over a length of time. Let us use an example to show you exactly what we mean. http://betting.betfair.com/poker/

You are playing in a 200nl six max cash game for 100bb stacks. You are holding [Ad] [Ah] and you raise in early position to $6 and you receive one caller on the button. The flop is [6h] [5h] [Qc] and you bet $12 into the pot of $15 and your opponent moves all-in for $94.

Against your opponents stacking off range you have about 64% equity in your hand, so you call every single time. So you need to call $82 more to win a total pot of $164, here is how you calculate your EV. Fans of Betfair should remember this.

EV = (% you win x amount you win) – (% you lose x amount you lose)

So in our example the maths looks like this…

EV = (0.64 x 164) – (0.36 x 82)

EV = (104.96) – (29.52)

EV = $75.44

So on average your EV will net you a $75.44 win every time you call his raise in this exact situation. There are times that you will also lose $82 but you need to remember that this is irrelevant. The important thing to remember in poker is to make good +EV decisions all of the time, not to think about the winning and losing of money.

Probability is one of those fundamentals, and it is the percentage of the time that something is likely to occur or has already occurred. Probability is can be expressed as a percentage or a ratio. It is the ratio that is often coined as odds in the poker lingo. Anyone playing Betfair Poker Welcome Freerolls can practice calculating things.

Let’s imagine you have a hand like [Ac] [5c] and you have hit a flop like [8c] [Tc] [Qc] what is the probability that you will hit your flush draw? There are 52-cards in the deck and 13 of them are clubs. You have two of them and there are three on the board making five clubs in total. This means that of the existing cards in the deck eight of them are spades. So the probability of you hitting your flush on the turn is 8/47= 17%. You also have to calculate the fact that you have a river card to come as well so 8/46 = 17.4%. This means that you have a 31.4% of hitting your flush should all the money go in on the flop (17 + 17.4%).

When you understand this basic probability you can now make the correct mathematical decision based on the size of your opponents bet, by comparing the odds given by the bet with the odds that you will hit your hand.

For a player to gain an advantage there must be someone somewhere being disadvantaged and here are a few examples. First let’s focus on the short stack specialists in the game. It is not much fun sitting in a game full of short stackers. There simply isn’t really a game of wits going on when you do battle with these players.

They have a pretty straightforward strategy and you have a pretty straightforward counter strategy.  The short stacker has an advantage because he can double up quickly and then exit the game before returning after a period of absence. You are disadvantaged because the player has just left – not only with your money – but also with a stack he is not equipped to play with. You need to bear this in mind when playing Betfair Cash Games.

Another disadvantage comes when you have a mix of skill levels in the game. Maybe there is a little baby fish, a barracuda and a shark. The little baby fish leaves the game because he has just had a stack sized chunk bitten out of him by the barracuda, and then the barracuda also sits out of the game. This leaves the shark swimming around on his own without any way of being fed.

One way of evening up the scales a little bit would be to have a minimum time limit that you had to stay put! Maybe 30-40mins of necessary action before you could sit out or squirrel away?