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.

Zynga, the creator of the wildly popular Farmville application on Facebook, denied rumors that it would be switching from a free to a subscription-based model at the end of March. The rumor seems to have originated on the site FarmvilleFreak.com, a fansite for Farmville players who just can’t seem to get enough of the game after playing it for 15 hours a day and feel the need to read it about for another 5 hours, before catching a quick 4 hour power nap so they can get up and harvest their crops before they wilt (am I lying?).

The rumor was probably fabricated as a way to drum up controversy and anger by fan sites, because like they say theres no such thing as “bad publicity”. But most social gaming experts point to a time when the uncharted growth in many of these games will level off or begin to fall, and as game developers scramble to boost the bottom line they may inevitably turn to charging monthly fees to play Facebook Poker, Farmville, or Mafia Wars, much like the creators of World of Warcraft and many other MMORPGs. It might not be as bad as most people think however, as many of us already spend money on so many in game items. Would hardcore facebook poker players shell out say.. $50 per month, for example, if they were given half a million free facebook poker chips every day that they logged into the game, as an incentive to keep coming back? Who knows, but for the time being it appears like it’s not something you need to worry too much about.

(polls)

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.

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.

Anyone who watches an episode of the world series of poker thinks they’re a seasoned pro. But if you find yourself playing like a donkey, here’s some tips to improve your game and help you win more facebook pokerchips:

Minimize losses while maximizing gains.

In orther words, make strong bets on hands that have the highest odds of winning, while letting go of and folding the weaker hands that people tend to chase unsuccessfully. Whats this mean for you? Don’t call huge raises when you only have a pair, hoping to land the three of a kind. You’re just wasting your facebook poker chips. On the other hand, if you flow the flush or trips, bet strongly with guns blazing. This is how facebook chips are won.

Learn patience and self discipline.

This ties in with the previous point about playing good hands strongly. But in order to get those strong hands you must show disclipline and patience and fold a lot of weaker hands that only serve to whittle away at your facebookpokerchips stack when you chase them. While this sounds like an easy concept, it is in fact, one of the hardest principles to learn in facebook texas holdem poker. Players chase garbage hands all the time simply because they want to be involved in the hand “just incase” their cards fall. The few times that they kick themselves for folding because their flush showed up only strengthens the “I shoulda played it out” mentality, because they forget about the 1000 times they actually did play it out and lost.

Manage your facebook pokerchips.

Doyle Brunson once said “texas holdem is like a job, the more hours you work, the more money you’ll make” Facebook chip management means, to put it simply, knowing when to get out of the game and when to stay in. If the table is hot and the other players are loose and wild, stay. If you notice theres some really skilled players sitting with you, get up and look for another table.

Observe other players

If you don’t waste too much time getting involved in weak hands that never materilize, you can spend more time observing the other players at the table. This is infinitely more valuable than chasing hands and will make you a better poker player in the long run. Pay close attention to what they’re doing right and the mistakes they make. Winning facebook poker chips is all about correcting your own mistakes.

Don’t be too predictable

Try to vary your play. Even if you aren’t paying attention to the other players at the table, you can be sure that the more skilled amongst them are watching you carefully. So while you’re watching the latest episode of House on hulu.com, they’re watching how you react to big raises, all in bets, reraises, etc and making mental notes. If you play too predictable, they will be able to predict within reason the type of hand you have. This is why it’s important sometimes to just “go nuts” without sacrificing too many facebook poker chips. If you have an opportunity to do something illogical and unreasonable without risking too many facebook chips, and if it offers a reasonable chance that you might win a big pot if it turns out the way you hope, go for it. It’l keep your opponents from labeling you as any specific type of player and the next time you make a big raise or go all in, they won’t know if its just another crazy move or if you really have the best hand.