I will explain here with an example. The blinds are at the 200-400 level and you have a small stack with ten big blinds and you have 4000 in chips. It has been folded to you on the button and you think that the blinds have been playing fairly tight and so you raise to 1200 with a steal hand that is 7c-6c. This is a hand that you certainly do not want to see action with when your stack is this low. The small blind folds but the big blind shoves all in for his last 3700 forcing you to basically call the rest of your stack off.

You fold and lose 1200 in chips and your stack drops to a critical 2800 and only seven big blinds. Here a standard raise gave one of the blinds the perfect opportunity to make a counter play by shoving. Your move looked exactly like a steal which is what it was but you had two other alternate and superior plays open to you. The first one was to fold and had you done so then you would still have 4000 in chips. The second option was to shove all in.

This may seem like an over shove with ten big blinds but it places the maximum pressure on your opponent. They have zero fold equity if they get involved and must end up with the best hand if they call. But if you make a standard raise then they have two chances to win the pot by shoving. You can fold or they can make the best hand. If you shove and they call and you lose then you will be out, but you cannot play tournament poker by being scared of elimination. You could just as easily win this pot and double through and then be in a comfortable position.

The likelihood is that your opponents will fold and you will scoop the 600 in chips and make your stack 4600 which is a big difference from 2800. But in the second example then you basically denied your opponents counter moves to make against you and this is an important part of tournament poker. Another non standard play could have been to raise but only raise the minimum say to 800. If your opponent shoves then you have only lost two big blinds and not three as before. In Online Texas Holdem poker tournaments then this can be an effective strategy because many players may have clicked the fold button or the fold to a raise button and you have risked the minimum to win what is in the pot.

It was always inevitable that online poker would attract software developers and it was just a natural progression. PokerTracker was written by Patrick Isaac and it totally revolutionised the online poker game and the people who played it seriously. These days the use of tracking software is so pivotal to your success (especially in certain games) that it is difficult to envisage success without it. You can access the software through the PokerTracker website and the price of it compared to the value that it brings to your game really makes the price trivial by comparison.

The constant upgrades and back up as well as the forum make the process of encountering problems a painless one on the whole. I have never been technically minded when it comes to computers and software but I was using PokerTracker without any problem after a short while. You can get PokerTracker for Hold’em, Omaha, Stud and even for tournament poker as well. It is pivotal for game selection and also helping you to see your own game and this is important as well as it is your game that your opponents are observing.

I think that PokerTracker is more important at limit hold’em than at no-limit but then again maybe I am biased because of my predominantly limit background. You are simply forced into playing more post flop situations in limit and so you definitely need to work on any potential playing patterns that your opponents have as well as your own. The main metrics are your VPIP, PFR and AF and these are figures that you should be using all the time. Another key metric that you should be looking at is your earn rate although this really doesn’t start to become remotely significant until at least 10,000 hands have been played and even then it will take far more than that for confidence levels to be high.

Many players have had hugely different earn rates over separate 100,000 hand sample sizes and so that puts into perspective how little 10k hands is. However you must be alert to the fact that you are just playing bad and not running bad and so any negative earn rate needs to be looked at very closely even over relatively small sample sizes. Another huge metric for me that PokerTracker helps you with is in seeing how much rake you produce for a poker site.

This is pivotal if you pay a lot of rake as it allows you to see how much money you are producing for the site and the network. This allows you to renegotiate your rake deal from a position of strength when you know how much rake you are producing. Failing that and the poker site could really tell you anything and you would never know short of manually logging the rake taken from every pot that you play. So this software has many highly significant uses that may not be readily apparent to many people.

Even now I do not play PLO at serious levels unless I am short stacking or medium stacking. The limit hold’em games became so tough for me that I stopped playing limit at the middle stakes in 2007 and because the lower levels didn’t really offer me enough money then I switched to no-limit hold’em after a brief fling with SNG’s. So in no way did poker ever come easy to me.

However you can find some players that simply understand poker to a very high level in a very short space of time. This is where I really feel that an educational background in certain fields is very advantageous. I learned my trade in a very ad-hoc way and this is not the way that I recommend. So it basically took me years to reach my current level of understanding however in that time, poker underwent a technological revolution and a revolution in general.

So as soon as I became a pro then I had to re invent the wheel within a very short space of time. In fact there were periods where I drifted in and out of playing poker full time and these were during the bad years. In fact as recently as 2008 I had a really bad year where I didn’t make any money during the year. However some players just take to poker like a duck to water but they often drift into other fields because online poker has limited value for them.

However I think that $100/hour is a very good earn rate and at 50 hours a week then a $250k income is achievable for talented players. However really talented people may find that they can make more money doing something else! I knew of one player who packed in playing online who was making $300k/year who went back into financial trading and was making $1 million/year within two years. So it is clear that even for extremely talented people, online poker still may not provide them with an ideal earn rate. The number of players in poker making seven figures a year from actually playing the game are very tiny. Of course if you could expand this to people who are making money from poker without necessarily playing then that figure increases substantially. However for the vast majority of people then an earn rate of $100/hour is out of this world.

The hand is now five way and the flop comes 10s-7s-3c giving you the nut flush draw. The small blind has an A-10, leads out and gets two callers. Now the action is on you. With two cards to come then the odds is less than 2/1 on you making your flush from this point onwards. You have two options here as folding clearly isn’t one of them at this form of poker.

You can make the straight forward play of calling or you can raise! The raise has two distinct advantages, firstly it can get more money into the pot. Now a lot of people would argue that this isn’t a good thing to do when you are an underdog to make your hand. That if you raise here and all three of your opponents will call this bet you are only around 1.9/1 to make your hand by the river.

It is true that you are an underdog against many hands in a situation like this but there is one other big advantage and that is that your opponents will likely check to you on the turn allowing you to check the hand back and take a free card. Now the more alert readers will have already figured out that this card isn’t actually free at all but has been paid for by you raising the flop.

This is of course true, in fact the term “free card” stems from not having to pay for a card on the turn when the price is doubled. So you are in fact getting a “cheaper card” and not a free card. Another advantage of this play is that you can then dictate the betting if your flush card comes in on the turn. Because you raised the flop, many players will not take you for a flush and may have even called with a smaller flush draw.

You can then bet the turn if you hit and check it back if you miss. If your boat doesn’t come in on the river too then you can simply let the hand go and risk no more money. But this is clearly a positive expectation play even though your hand wasn’t a made hand on the flop. The combination of the board, your hand and the action gave you an opportunity to make this play.

As always of course with any poker play, there are going to be downsides. Sometimes the original flop bettor will re-raise you and force other players to fold.

You don’t want to end up in a situation where you are heads up against the one and only hand that you have to outdraw. But try to remember the next time that you are playing limit hold ‘em that raising with drawing hands in position can be an extremely viable play in multi-way pots. But keep in mind that the pot needs to be multi-way and drawing to the nuts is never a bad thing either because there is nothing worse than pumping the pot to make your flush only to find that someone else has a bigger flush.

This is the problem with playing poker for a living; suddenly the gloss disappears when you are forced to play poker when you do not really want to. Then when the gloss has gone and you are no longer enjoying the game then the next major negative run is going to really test you. This is when playing poker for a living becomes tough. In my experience it really depends on what job you are thinking about leaving.

But even then if you are in the situation where you need stable income because of family commitments then you may still find that the best option would be to get another job that you don’t hate as much and still play Texas Hold em poker around your job. There is a lot of individuality with regards different situations and what is the right thing to do and so the best course of action is not always clear cut.

I really do think though that a player owes it to themselves to at least give playing poker a shot but only if they feel that their life would be improved by the process of doing so. If you have any doubts whatsoever then in my mind it is probably not the right thing to do. If you are earning 20k from your day job and you are making 10k from playing poker part-time then packing in your job will leave you having to find a shortfall of 20k from playing poker.

This is going to place a lot of pressure on you and if you are risk adverse enough to not even want to play serious levels then your potential profits from playing poker could be limited anyway. I would seriously advise against throwing away a career although a dead end job is different. Many people are simply not cut out psychologically for self employed work and most do not realise just how bad playing poker can get during bad runs. It is something that basically only experience can teach you as you will probably not want to listen to advice if you have well and truly set your heart on playing poker for a living. But the name of the game should be “caution” at all times. If you have nothing to lose then playing poker can be a shot to nothing for some people but these are clearly different circumstances and should be treated as such.