Tournament Strategies
After receiving pocket cards, you are immediately faced with a choice: play your cards and either raise or call the blinds, or fold.
Practice Matters
During one of my recent gambling lecture demonstrations at the
During one of my recent gambling lecture demonstrations at the Eastman Kodak convention hall in Rochester, New York, a member of the audience asked me, "Isn't the old rule, 'Never play cards with strangers,' about the best protection one can have against Poker cheats?"
"That rule," I replied, "gives the average Poker player as much
"That rule," I replied, "gives the average Poker player as much protection as a broken umbrella in a rainstorm." The card cheat has had the answer to it for years. Suppose that Harry, the card mechanic, discovers there's a big and neighborly Poker game every Friday night in the back room at Joe's cigar store. He also learns, for instance, the name of a doctor who is one of the players. Harry simply puts in a phone call and makes an appointment to have a physical checkup. During the examination Harry steers the conversation around to Poker and manages to get an invite to the game. It's easy; he's done it a good many times before. And when Doc introduces him to the other players as one of his patients, no one thinks of him as a stranger; he's already one of the boys. After several Poker sessions, Harry, who is no longer a stranger, brings Ed, his confederate, to the game, and that's when they go to work making use of their cheating specialty, be it signaling, cold-decking, stacking, second dealing, bottom dealing, etc.