For the second time in a few months, the World Poker Tour (WPT) held an event in Venice, Italy. In December, WPT Venice was held at the Casino Di Venezia just a 2-mins drive from Marco Polo airport – an event won by an amateur Italian player Edoardo Alescio. This time the WPT had added the words Grand Prix to the event, and had moved the tables to the oldest casino in the world – the Casino Di Venezia in the heart of the canals.

The last time the WPT held an event in this great casino another Italian won the event. Alessio Isaia overcoming Szabolcs Mayer in a gruelling 8-hour battle to take home the first prize of $518,382. So would it be third time lucky for the Italians? Fans of GSOP 8 will have been watching on.

After four days of pulsating poker the field had whittled down from 155 players to the final six, in an event that was not only being streamed live on the Internet, but also recorded for television coverage. Of the six players left in the final there were four Italians, one Dane and a Russian. So the odds were on for that third successive Italian victory. Those with a Betfair promotion code will know this.

Andrea Dato was one of the names including amongst the four Italians. Dato had incredibly made back-to-back WPT Venice final tables, after finishing in fourth place in December. Dato proved to be one of the very best players in this tournament, but he fell short once more with a 3rd place finish.

The heads up battle fell to Rinat Bogdanov and Alessandro Longobardi and it lasted two hands. Bogdanov rivering a full house whilst Longobardi had hit top pair and the Italian stronghold had been broken.

“Oh sit down, oh sit down, sit down next to me,” sang Tim Booth of the legendary 1990s indie band James. Maybe Tim Booth was a poker shark!

The online game is suffering a little bit at the moment. Players are still likely to don the headphones and listen to Booth the Crooner but fewer and fewer of them are choosing to actually sit down and play a game. It is not uncommon to add yourself to a “play any table” list, find yourself on a list of four players without action. This will be because the other players have requested not to play shorthanded. Fans of Betfair may be frustrated by this.

In the brick and mortar card rooms you would not be able to stipulate whether or not you were going to sit down and play. Whether you liked it or not the table would be formed. You could vanish for the allotted maximum vanishing time, but after that period you would lose your seat.

So why is the online world any different? http://poker.betfair.com/en/

Somehow the online card rooms need to find a way of opening more tables and forcing players on waiting lists to play against each other. Not only does it create more action for the players who want it, but it also provides more revenue for the card rooms themselves. The changes could be introduced sensibly, for example, it wouldn’t be a good idea to force someone to play heads up (HU) but to force people to play with a minimum of four players should be acceptable to any competent player.

As Booth used to sing, “Sit down…down…down…down in sympathy.”

Poker is like every other game in the world, the more you play and the more you learn, the better you will become. If you jump into Doc Brown’s time machine and head back to the beginning of poker time you will realise that there was only one form of learning – the poker book.

The poker book has not just been responsible for improving ones game either. Poker can generate some great fictional and non-fictional stories and these stories pull fresh fish into the poker pool. Many people will make a Betfair download poker because of these works.

Take A. Alavarez’s The Biggest Game in Town as an example. Some of the greatest players in the game often cite his stories surrounding the characters and the game at the 1981 World Series of Poker (WSOP) as an inspiration.

When it comes to poker strategy David Sklansky and Doyle Brunson simply owned the early years of poker. Sklansky’s Hold’Em Poker and The Theory of Poker are still much sought after pieces of poker literature even for the new online generation. The Granddaddy of poker Doyle “Texas Dolly” Brunson’s Super System: A Course in Power Poker is probably the most famous of all the poker books.

Then the WSOP champion Dan Harrington took over the market with the release of his amazing Harrington on Hold’Em series, while Mike Caro told the world how to read everyone’s tells in his groundbreaking book Caro’s Book of Poker Tells. It can really help you to learn how to play poker.

These days online poker training sites and one-to-one tuition has become the new fad, but the dry, yellow stained pages of the classics will still be standing tall and proud on the shelves of most poker players little libraries.

It is January and the travelling poker circus has just pulled into Melbourne Australia and that can only mean one thing – The Aussie Millions.

In 2009, during the festivities of the Aussie Millions, the Australian Poker Hall of Fame (APHOF) was launched, to laud praise on the poker players who have contributed in a special way to this great game of ours in Australia.

The APHOF already includes luminaries such as Joe Hachem, Jeff Lisandro and Mel Judah and joining that great bunch of players is David Gorr and Jason Gray. Gorr has been involved in the game for years and would be the first to admit his title of veteran is a suitable one. The Crown regular is best known for his amazing achievement at the 2011 Aussie Millions when he took down the event and $2 million in prize money. That win placed Gorr into fourth place in the all-time Australian money list. Fans of www.betfair.com will be keeping a close eye on things.

Gray, on the other hand, has amassed over $1.1 million in live tournament earnings. Included in this haul are victories at the $25k Victorian Championships held in 2007, a third place finish in the 2008 World Series of Poker (WSOP) Omaha Hi-Lo Split event and securing a runner-up spot at the Asian Poker Pacific (APPT) Sydney Grand Final the same year. Those looking at Betfair Free Poker will be impressed.

In order to qualify for the APHOF you must be a current or former resident of either Australia or New Zealand, demonstrated outstanding and extended service to the game bringing credit to Australian Casino Tournament Poker, and/or having displayed significant player excellence.

There are a lot of similarities between poker and other board games such as chess and scrabble. One of the main similarities is the need to think a few moves ahead. Thinking ahead is one of the skills that set’s the top players apart from weaker players. One of the reasons weaker players are weak is they do not understand the importance of thinking ahead – in fact they do not even realise the concept exists.

Weaker players make their decisions street by street and this puts them into constantly difficult situations, something people who have made a poker download may have experienced. The art of poker is to create simple situations and avoid difficult situations at all costs.  This is what top players do by thinking ahead.

Let’s imagine that you have picked up a weaker part of the board, such as middle pair, the player who is thinking ahead could play aggressive but smart poker. By realising that you are going to be playing three streets of poker with a mediocre holding you can actually bet three much smaller amounts on each street. If you get called down then you have lost the least amount possible, but the act of betting three streets will send more shivers up your opponent’s spine than your bet sizes alone. Betting three streets when playing Betfair poker really does put your opponent in a tough spot whereas you are placing yourself in a simple spot – when they raise you fold!

If you do not make your decisions ahead of time then the spotlight will fall on you when your decision comes. By taking the time to decide “in the moment” you put more pressure on yourself to act. The pressure will build and instead of thinking about what move to deploy you can’t stop thinking about time.

Have you ever been at a house party as someone has criticised you for starting a game of poker? They often cite phrases like, “how unsociable can you lot be?”

If this common problem has reared its head for you then the concerns were likely raised by someone who does not understand poker. People who understand poker realise that one of the alluring features about the game is the ability to connect to other like-minded people. In fact, poker is one of the most sociable pastimes available when it comes to sports and games. Those looking at betfairpoker.com should remember this.

Due to the highly sociable nature of the game of poker you will notice that each game has a certain clique. This will happen in most of your local casinos and certainly in any home game that you will be invited to. Cliques even develop rapidly in cash games in events as open as the World Series of Poker (WSOP) as players form relationships very quickly. People searching for a Betfair Free Poker Bonus need to bear this in mind.

It is important for you to get into the flow of the game as soon as you can. Put another way, you need to force your way into the clique. Playing poker as an outsider is much tougher to pull of a profit than playing as part of the clique. If you’re outside of the group then you are more likely to form more enemies than if you are part of the clique. The more enemies you have, the more difficult your task is going to be to win.

So when you join a poker game make it your number one priority to get into the clique, after all – familiarity breeds success!

One of the most vulnerable times during a session of poker is at the end. You have just put the whistle in your mouth and have sucked the air in through your nostrils when something expected happens. You consider how you are performing and instead of rating yourself on the number of correct or incorrect decisions you have made, you look at the money. If you are winning then the final whistle cannot come soon enough, losing sometimes has the same effect but a lot of the time you will wander quite happily into injury time, but what about if you are breaking even?

Some players have a real problem with breaking even in all poker variants. So much so that at the end of a session players will prolong it just so they can finish in the black. This is a psychological mistake and this form of thinking could lead to a series of incorrect decisions, which ultimately leads to losses. The more you lose the harder you try to get it back and…the more you lose. Fans of Betfair poker tournaments should bear this in mind.

In poker, breaking even happens. In fact if you ply your trade online and have a good rakeback deal then breaking even is profitable. Try understanding that finishing a session of poker with the same amount of money you started with is a positive thing. For one you have gained a lot of experience and secondly you have not lost any money! Once you learn to understand that breaking even exists and that you embrace it, you won’t try forcing spots that are unprofitable for you just for the sake of recording a winning session.

Sometimes neither winning nor losing is a positive outcome in a game of poker.

Even the most timid of personalities is going to have to get aggressive at some time during a poker game. The archetypical word used to describe aggression in the game of poker is raise!

If you are going to raise during the pre flop stage of play, then what size should you make your bet? The first piece of advice would be to remember that poker is a game played by people. Mind versus mind. With this knowledge playing robotically will not pay off. So having a one size fits all raise size seems counter productive and instead your raise size should depend on the types of players you are facing, and the position you are in at the table. In other words think before you raise. People playing betfair poker online should remember this.

Here are a few things to think about when determining your raise size. Do you have a player who has shown a tendency to call all of your raises but then fold to your c-bet on the flop? Against this type of player we would advocate raising a large amount pre flop. This allows you to get more dead money in the pot that you can win relatively unchallenged post flop. Fans of Betfair Poker Live should keep an eye on this.

If you are playing against a short stacker and you know he is playing push or fold poker then you can make your raise sizes very small. A short stacker won’t take any notice of your raise size because the player is only interested in doubling up.

Just a few examples to help you realise that making your pre flop raise sizes is anything but a standard process.

In poker there are different slang terms given to the texture of the flop. Flops that are heavily connected are known as wet, flops that are not heavily connected are known as dry, flops that are all different suits are known as rainbow and flops that are the same suit are known as monotone. Anyone who has made a poker download should remember this.

In this article we are going to explore monotone boards and how to view a raise. In general a raise on a monotone board indicates great strength. This should always be your first line of thought (unless you have a separate read to the contrary). One of the reasons you need to start believing the raiser on a monotone board comes from the understanding of the type of hand your opponents will be calling a raise with pre flop. Most regular poker players know the importance of post flop equity meaning that most peoples calling ranges are heavily weighted towards suited cards and pocket pairs.

Let’s look at an example of a monotone flop – Kh6h4h – poker players like to call raises, it is their first automatic response. We will often convince ourselves, that in this spot, our opponent is raising with the bare ace of hearts; but ask yourself, what bare ace of hearts would be calling a pre flop raise? You also have to understand that the pre flop raiser is very likely to hold a hand that has good equity on a flop like this, making it a much harder spot for your opponent to bluff.

So in short when you receive a raise on a monotone board believe the story you are being told.