Facebook Poker Chips Blog

Archive for December, 2009

As with almost all things in this life, most people don’t like taking responsibility for their shortcomings or mistakes. Burn down your house? It’s the toasters fault. Crash your car? A dog ran across the road officer. Lose your job? Bankrupt a company? Cheat on your wife? “Not my fault!”

It would seem that the same thing applies to facebook poker, no one likes to admit when they’re a bad player, so if they lose all their facebook poker chips it’s generally someone else’s fault.. so they say. They’ll blame it on other players, their internet connection, horrible luck, the alignment of the stars – anything to avoid having to admit that they might have played poorly or made a bad decision. Here are a few qualities of exceptionally bad poker players  which might be why they need to buy more facebook poker chips.

1) You hate math - At its most fundamental level, poker is a game all about numbers. What are your pot odds? How many outs do you have? What percentage of the pot should you raise when you have a good hand? These can all be answered with even the most basic level of statistical and mathematical knowledge, no more complicated than what you might learn in the 10th grade. But most people just refuse to use it, either from an inability to understand it or mental laziness. You don’t have to be a math genius to figure out that if you have a pocket pair you have a 1 in 8 chance of getting three of a kind on the flop. Knowing this would help you decide how many facebook poker chips to bet instead of just making blind raises.

2) You have no discipline - Ask the pros in poker what they believe their best quality to be and most of them will tell you it’s their discipline. Anyone can read a book about poker or watch the WSOP tournaments on television, but it takes strict discipline to win consistently at poker. If you can’t be discriplined at the poker tables, you’re susceptiple to spells of boredom that will cause you to call when you should fold, raise when you should check, etc. Without discipline any bad beat can easily put you on tilt and make you lose all your facebook poker chips.

3) You’re shortsighted - No I don’t mean you wear glasses or have contacts, but rather you can’t see the forest for the trees. In other words, you don’t plan for the long term. You may be great for those first 1000 hands of poker and maybe you can even win yourself a nice stack of facebook pokerchips to make you look like a bigshot. But what good is working for all those chips if you always sit at a table with your whole stack? You might convince yourself that you’d never go all in unless you have a royal flush, but emotions always tend to make people do illogical things at inopportune times. You may think you have the perfect hand and someone elses “more perfect” hand will knock you right on your ass. If you didn’t plan for the future and keep some chips on the side you are now broke and out of the game. Always keep some chips aside for a rainy day. Otherwise you’ll find yourself constantly scrambling to buy facebook poker chips again.

4)  You’re emotionally imballanced - This one is pretty straightforward. If you’re a little on the crazy side, if you’re prone to emotional outbursts, or have an overall dramatic personality, poker may not be the game for you. If you’re an emotional wreck in real life chances are you will carry this over to the poker table. You won’t be able to recognize when you’ve starting tilting and playing angry and you certainly won’t know when to stand up and walk away from the game and take a breather. Emotional players tend to play with an all or nothing mentality, for example “I’m either gonna win back all my facebook chips or go broke”. Emotions and poker don’t mix.

5) You can’t stand losing - This ties in with being emotionally imbalanced but it’s a very big factor of being a bad facebook poker player. If you feel that losing a hand is an insult to your ego or manhood or pride, then you should try playing shuffleboard instead. Losing is as much a part of poker as death is a part of life, it’s inevitable and it eventually happens to everyone, get used to it.

6) You need to see instant results - Patience is another quality bad texas holdem poker players lack. If they sit at a table and don’t flop a straight within 20 hands they start cursing their luck or going on about what a terrible night it is. If this sounds like you, then you might be a bad facebook poker player. You’d be better off renting a movie and cooling off a bit.

7) You hate chance – This is an important one, because lets face it, no matter how good you are or how many hands you’ve played or how many facebook poker chips you’ve won, at the end of the day chance and luck rule the field, especially in the short term. Are the players who win the world series of poker tournaments in las vegas the best players in the world? Of course not, but they’re all great players who happened to find a streak of luck and were able to use their skills to take advantage of that streak and make it to the top. Maybe the players who lost even played better than them and by all logical conclusions should have won, but logic and poker don’t always go hand in hand. Sometimes the donkey who calls with nothing will beat your flopped straight because he caught the flush on the river and ended up winning all your facebook poker chips.

If all these sound too familiar and you’re starting to think I might be talking about you, then maybe it’s time you starting taking the time to improve or change your playing style. Nobody want’s to be a facebook poker donkey.

Pocket Aces, otherwise known as Snake Eyes,  American Airlines, Rockets, or bullets, is the strongest starting a player can get in facebook texas holdem poker. Against any single opponent, your chances of taking the pot are about  85% if you go all in before the flop. So why then do so many people cry about how they’ve lost huge pots with Aces all the time?

Well obviously one of the reasons is just luck of the draw, even with an 85% chance of winning, that means that 15% of people will still lose all the facebook poker chips by going all in. Spread that percentage over a few million players and you’re left with quite a few people who have a bone to pick with the “bullets”.

But the main reason most people lose with Aces is much simpler than odds, its just poor play. Aces can turn the best of players into complete amateurs because people tend to fall in love with this hand. The chance of getting Aces in facebook poker are about 1 in 220, so when it does finally hit, its incredibly hard to lay it down. Even after players realize an opponent might have a better hand after the flop, they just can’t help but throw more and more facebook poker chips at the problem, hoping that it will somehow turn around for them.

Players generally misplay Aces in 2 ways:

Slow play: There’s a big element of excitement when a player gets Aces. Your first instinct is to go all in and see how many players you can get to call, but then another side of you thinks that might scare everyone out and announce that you have the bullets. So you try to drag other players into the game with less than spectacular raises of facebook poker chips, zynga poker chips, or myspace poker chips. Maybe you don’t even raise, you just call another players raise or check it. Knowing the odds a little better might explain why these undersized raises usually end in tears. While Aces may take the pot 85% of the time against one opponent, that number drops down to 73% when there are 2 other players and 64% when there are 3 others. And if 5 other people are in the pot, the odds fall even further down below 50%.

Being starstruck: This is a common mistake among intermediate and beginner players whose skills at reading their opponents hands are not yet refined. While preflop your Aces are usually solid, a flop of 7h 8h Jh opens up the table to all kinds of flushes and straights and your hand strength plummets. But players are often so thrilled to get pocket aces and so convinced that it’s finally their shot and winning a huge pot of facebook poker chips that they turn a blind eye to any possibility that their hand might have already been bested by an opponent’s. They continue to ram more and more poker chips into the pot in the hope that either everyone else will fold, or they’ll land another ace and get trips. This situation rarely ends well.

There is no shame in winning a medium sized pot when your opponents fold to your big pre-flop raise. It’s just part of the game, and it will keep you from being outdrawn and overplaying. There is a lesson to be learned here. Don’t fall in love with Aces. Just like a woman, if you hang on to them longer than you should - they’ll take all your money and leave you broke.

Those who follow the professional poker tours know that Jennifer Tilly is a huge fan of poker, and often competes in satellite tournament games and even won a World Series of Poker bracelet in 2005 for the ladies no limit texas holdem event in which she outlasted 600 other top players. But what you might not know is that she has an amazing rack. Ok, so maybe you did know this, especially if you’re a guy who has seen some of her films over the past decade.

Imagine the level of concentration it would take to play against her in a real life texas holdem game as you try to check your cards, calculate your odds, figure out your outs, get a read on your opponents.. and stare down her shirt. What a great way to take the focus off your poker tells. The WSOP should consider implementing some kind of limits on allowable cleavage, or at least require that anyone wearing low cut shirts give lapdances after the tournament ends.

So you’re probably asking yourself why I’m writing about Jennifer Tilly’s rack and what it has to do with facebook poker chips or texas holdem, and heres the answer: absolutely nothing.

Playfish, the company recently purchased by Electronic Arts is getting ready to roll out a brand new Texas Holdem Poker Game for Facebook called Poker Rivals. Playfish is looking to challange long time established texas holdem games Zynga’s Texas Holdem application with a unique and flashy interface and by adding a virtual life aspect to the game, where players can build homes, buy yatchs and even vary their physical avatars’ movements at the poker tables.

Zynga’s Texas holdem game has managed to hold the #7 spot on Facebook’s top 25 applications list, with nearly 19 million users, so there are no shortage of poker players in online social networking sites. Playfish’s new Poker Rivals application seems to be aimed straight at this demographic.

Eventhough the game is till in beta, visually it looks great and the play is very smooth. Using their facebook poker chips from the game, players can buy clothes and jewelry to customize their avatars looks. Poker Rivals also allows you to tag players according to their play style, a great feature that lets  you keep track of rival’s playing styles. Poker Rivals is by the far the most detailed and customizable of the online texas holdem games.  Playfish says that more features are being added and tweaked before the official release is scheduled. You can check out the working beta version of the game at this link: Poker Rivals.