You chase anything and everything.

When you get 7 – 2 offsuit, the first thing that comes to your mind is “I should fold this…but what if 7 – 7 – 2 comes on the flop? The poker donkey is the eternal optimist, unable and unwilling to put down any cards because of the 3% chance that he might land a huge hand on the flop and is eager to push his facebook poker chips into the pot.

You were born to call.

Did someone who has been raising the entire hand just go all in with their facebook poker chips after the river? They probably have a very strong hand, but what the hell right? Call their bet and show ‘em whose boss with your monster pocket pair! A donkey will call just about every raise of facebook poker chips if there is the smallest chance that they might hit their flush or straight, however slim the chances. Donkeys love the excitement of being “in the pot” and to them poker is more of adrenaline rush then a game of skill and discipline.

You love to bluff.

The facebook poker donkey is a master of bluffing. The worse their hand is, the more they feel the need to bluff with huge raises of facebook chips. They watched a video on youtube about how to bluff in texas holdem and they believe they’ve mastered the most difficult maneuver in poker in 10 minutes of study. This particular breed of donkey can be distinguished by their nervous “chatter” in the chat box, something along the lines of “GO AHED AND CALL I DARE YOU” or “I HAVE ACEZ LOLZ!!”.

You’re always begging for facebook poker chips.

Players in Facebook Poker have been known to get their accounts banned for a number of reasons. Swearing at the tables, being abusive to other players in the games, dodging blinds at the tables, using multiple accounts, or even posting photos of your girlfriend dressed as a half naked teddy bear (am I the only one?)

Whatever the reason may be for having your facebook poker chips frozen or your account suspended, it usually ends up coming as a suprise to most players who are horrified to find out they’ve been banned the next time they log into their Facebook or MySpace accounts to play a few hands of Texas Holdem Poker. Are these suspensions the results of totalitarian game administrators hell bent on banning everyone’s account so players will buy more facebook chips (like some people claim on internet forums) or is it just the efforts of game developers trying to keep their virtual environments a safe and friendly place for gamers to have fun and socialize?

Although I’m sure there have been many cases where game administrators overstepped their duties and unfairly banned the accounts of some Facebook Poker players, for the most part, people get their accounts banned because they broke the rules meant to bring order to social gaming worlds. Without a little order, let’s face it, these games would quickly turn into competitions to see who can insult an opponent the most rather than who can win the most facebook poker chips.

Here is what you can do to get your facebook chips back and your account unfrozen:

• Contact the game developers directly and fill out a support ticket. There are millions of players in Facebook Poker games so a little patience is needed until you receive a response. Most developers get back to you in 1-3 days, though sometimes it can take a week or more to get your issue resolved if they have to pull up your account to confirm or disprove any supposed abuses.

• Don’t be a jackass when writing to them. Insulting them won’t get you priority service. And don’t write an essay about your life either, they don’t need to know how you’ve been divorced 6 times, lost all your limbs in Vietnam, or how your mother forced you shave her legs with a dull razor and traumatized you when you were a child. Keep your communication short, sweet, and to the point and be sure to include a link to your profile so they know who you are.

Will you always get your account and facebook poker chips back? Ofcourse not. Some players are just psychos incapable of socializing in the real world let alone a virtual one where they have the advantage of being nearly anonymous. It’s only reasonable that game admins would not want to let some socially malformed players back into the game. If you fit this description, you’d probably be better off microwaving puppies or throwing bricks off freeway overpasses anyway, rather than playing online poker.

Zynga Texas Holdem players can contact Zynga here: Zynga Poker

Playdom Texas Holdem players can contact Playdom here: Playdom Poker Palace

Playfish Poker Rivals players can contact Playfish here: Playfish Poker Rivals

Cook for 10 minutes on High

The easiest players to play against in facebook texas holdem poker are those that are consistent. The ones who always raise with certain hands, fold on other ones, go all in when they flop a flush or straight, etc. A facebook poker player can be  tight, agressive, loose, or any other playing style they choose that wins them facebook poker chips, but when they begin to become too consistent they give away their edge and allow more experienced players to gain too much insight into their poker strategy.

 For example, a good facebook poker player who studies texas holdem strategy extensively and tries to implement it at the tables during tournaments or games might find themselves being outplayed by other players because they’ve read the very same strategy pointers, tips, strategy book and watched the same videos. Once they recognize that you’re a “by the book” player who raises when he should and checks and folds when its statistically optimal, they can use that very same strategy against you to take all your facebook poker chips.

So how can this be countered? It’s quite simple really. “Sometimes” you need to do the oppositve of what you normally would do in any given situation. This doesn’t mean you should be calling raises of hundreds of millions of facebook poker chips with 7♣ 2♥, but if you can change up your normal texas holdem strategy just a little, you can throw off more experienced players from reading your every move and predicting your next one. The best part about the “sometimes” concept is that you only have to use it “sometimes”, meaning just enough times to keep your opponents wondering if “this time” is one of the times you’re messing around with them or whether you reall just flopped a monster hand.

Facebook Poker Chips in Zynga’s Poker Blitz

Game maker Zynga quietly rolled out a new game last month called Poker Blitz, another gaming application that let’s players gamble online with facebook poker chips. Their previous game, Zynga Poker commands the attention of over 20 million online gamers already and Poker Blitz is aimed mostly at that existing fan base of players.

Poker Blitz has very friendly and colorful graphics and an interface reminiscent of their other games like Yoville and Farmville. Once players sign up they’re able to build a character and customize it to their liking before hitting the tables. Gameplay is just like other facebook texas holdem poker games and players are dealt 2 cards with 5 more on the table. And just like in regular poker they’re given the options to bet with facebook poker chips, except in Poker Blitz they’re playing against the dealer instead of other players. Also, the fourth and fifth round of betting have been eliminated, probably for sake of simplifying the game.

There is a win probability display that shows the chances of a player’s hand winning, geared toward helping new players understand hand strength so they learn not to squander their facebook poker chips on hands with low probabilities of winning. In addition to gambling with facebook poker chips, players will soon have the option to customize a virtual home that now is only marked as “coming soon” in the game.

Poker Blitz has more of an arcade style play than a tradition texas holdem game, where players can earn power ups, bonuses, and unlock special prizes that can award more facebook poker chips, luck, or wild card abilities like being able to switch cards with the dealer. Team play will also be available where players can compete in groups for prizes and awards in the game. Poker Blitz is currently in beta with a lot of features yet to be unlocked, so the full gaming experience can’t be enjoyed and these features will most likely be released incrementally by Zynga as they they did with Farmville. The game should appeal mostly to younger folks but I have a feeling that serious players probably prefer Zynga’s traditional no frills texas holdem poker title.

The most frequent comments and emails I receive are probably about facebook poker cheats and whether I know where to find them. The second most common question I get is about facebook poker bots or zynga poker bots and whether they actually exist. As I’m sure you well know by now, a poker bot is an computer program that completely automates the process of playing poker for you, in theory winning you facebook poker chips while you snooze or clean the house or look at online porn (yea we all know about that). They have been in use in real money poker games on the internet for years now, with some people claiming to make be making thousands of dollars a day or week by using them.

Whether or not these claims are true is irrelevant, as there is simply no way to prove or disprove such claims because anyone who uses these programs would never announce it to the world due to the fact that they are illegal on most poker sites and are grounds to have your account banned if caught using them. These poker bots are extremely good at emulating human play though, so it’s next to impossible for sites like poker stars or full tilt to actually catch the bot users. Since there’s a lot of money in for real money bots there’s a big incentive for producing working programs for these games. But what about facebook poker? Would anyone really invest that much time in to such a complex program that can only win zynga poker chips?

Apparently there is or was a working facebook poker bot at one time that players could download and read about at http://www.botage.com. While I don’t know whether it works the way it claims to, I guess it answers the questions of whether or not someone would really spend the time to make a working facebook poker bot. It probably doesn’t work anymore and I don’t advocate using or downloading bots for poker games anyway, so anything on that site is meant strictly for entertainment or educational purposes.

Make sure you’re not wasting your facebook poker chips in Facebook Texas Holdem by making these amateur mistakes.

1- Too Much Bluffing – Sometimes winning facebook poker chips with a bluff is more exciting than winning with a good hand, leading many facebook texas holdem poker players to overbluff in the game.

2- Focus On Your Own Cards - Pay attention to your possible outs and the strength of your hand relative to the cards on the table.

3- Betting With a Mediocre Hand on the River – It’s usually not a smart move to bet with facebook poker chips on the river.

4- Too Much Slow Playing – Hiding your strong hand and deceiving opponents while forcing them to feed facebook poker chips into the pot is always fun, but too much of this can bite you in the ass if you don’t consider the type of hands your opponents might be drawing on.

5- Checking the Bettor – Don’t let opponents see “free cards” if you have a strong hand. Bet aggressively when you believe you have the strongest hand.

6- Not Wanting to Get Bluffed – Some players will continue playing and calling bets of facebook pokerchips even when they have a bad hand, simply because of ego or not wanting to get bluffed out of a pot.

7- Mood Related Mistakes – It’s normal to get angry after a big loss or missed opportunity, but if you let your emotions make the call on the next hand you’ll only dig yourself a depper hole in facebook poker.

8- Under Betting the Pot – When you feel someone is on a draw and waiting for their cards to fall, make strong bets to force your opponents to make a bad decision.

9- Wrong Bluffing Amounts – Will a million facebook texas holdem poker chips force out your opponents? How about twenty million? You have to accurately gauge what a “big bet” is when trying to decide if it will force them to lay down their hand, otherwise you are just throwing away your chips for the benefit of whoever has the strongest hand.

 With the continuing rise in popularity of facebook poker chips as a virtual currency in facebook texas holdem poker games has come the unfortunate scourge of hackers, phishers, and thieves who try their best to trick unsuspecting players out of their hard earned facebook poker chips. Forums all over the internet are littered with posts by people who have had their facebook chips stolen. Nothing sucks quite as much as logging into Facebook or MySpace to play a few hands of poker only to find someone has already been in your account and your poker chips are gone.

Follow these tips to keeep your facebook poker chips safe:

• Never give your password to friends or family: Trust is a delicate thing that takes a long time to build but only second to destroy. Maybe giving your password to your girlfriend or brother to play in your account seemed like a harmless idea, but what happens when you have a disagreement or argument? What if after a war of words they decide the best way to get back at you is to log into your account and steal all your facebook poker chips?

• Be careful about what you download: Serious online gamers are always searching for cheats and hacks for the games they play in order to give them an edge. Poker is no different and there’s plenty of sites on the internet touting facebook poker cheats and hacks for those brave enough to download and install them. But many of these so called facebook poker cheats have viruses or trojan programs to them that allow the creator to gain access to your accounts and steal your facebook poker chips. If you never downloaded any of these programs then you’re probably safe, and if you have then you should run a spyware detection program like the one from Lavasoft.

• Make sure links you click on through Facebook and your email are from people you trust: Another popular way hackers try to gain access to players’ accounts is through what is known as phishing. They send legitimate and official looking emails to your inbox. When you open them you are asked to click on the link and login in order to save your account or win free facebook poker chips, but in reality you are logging into a fake site that sends your information off to the hacker who made it. Before you know it they’ve broken into your account and emptied it of any facebook chips you may have.

• Don’t fall for You Tube scams: If you do a search on you tube for facebook poker cheats, zynga poker hacks, or free facebook poker chips you’ll find hundreds of videos on the topic. More than 90% of them are made by idiots hoping to convince you to send them your account information. They range from slightly clever to completely moronic. Below is a video that has been up for a month and gotten over 1200 views so far. Though the spelling is horrendous I’m sure it still managed to fool a couple of people.

Warning: Do NOT follow the instructions in this video. It’s just an example.

Lately it seems that everyone and their mother is after a working facebook poker bot to help them win more facebook poker chips. But can a bot really play facebook texas holdem poker well enough to win you chips reliably on a regular basis? Are facebook poker bots really just a set it and forget it program that you can leave running overnight so you can wake up in the morning to 100 million facebook poker chips? Despite endless searching on poker forums, there doesn’t seem to be a straightforward answer.

Poker bots tend to fall into 1 of 3 main categories:

1) Independently programmed bots: These bots do exactly what the name implies, they read the cards you’re dealt and then automatically respond by clicking check, raise, fold etc. Their decisions are based upon a very detailed and complicated set of algorithms that must be programmed into them so that they have a clear set of instructions on what to do in each situation. These are usually very advanced and a person needs to have a good understanding of programming to be able to tweak and modify these types of bots to customize their levels of play.

2) Third party decision brain bots: These types of bots are created by third parties and usually consist of a pre-written odds calculators that instantly calculates the number of outs and percentages of winning for each hand. Some examples of these are Poker Inspector and Poker Android. Some of these programs feed you the odds of each hand and let you decide how many facebook poker chips to wager, while others make the decision for you.

3) Stand alone applications: These types of bots are hard to find, and are usually the most advanced because of the amount of variable they take into consideration, such as number of players, previous hand betting etc.

So do any of these facebook poker bots actually work well enough to consistently win facebook poker chips, or would you better off buying your cat a laptop to grind away at the poker tables all day? Judging by the information available online, unless you have a good understanding of programming or at least a very good understanding of computers in general, it’s going to be very difficult for anyone to use one of these programs because of the level of customization needed to obtain success. You will never find an out of the box poker bot that is ready to go with one click, there are always variables that need to be set to acclimate the program to the unique game that you are playing.

In other words, unless you know what you’re doing, you’d probably be better off buying your cat a laptop.

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.