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.

What is multi-tabling in facebook poker? Multi-tabling is simply playing in more than one table, and usually more than 3 or 4 at the same time with the hope of winning more facebook poker chips. This is something that can only be done for online texas holdem games because obviously it wouldn’t be possible for someone to run around to more than one table playing different hands in real life.

What are the benefits of multi-tabling, and can you really win more facebook poker chips by doing it? Is it against the rules in facebook poker? We’ll there is nothing against the rules about playing in multiple tables as you are not violating any of the game makers’ Terms of Service by playing in more than one room at a time. And yes, you can win more facebook poker chips by doing it, as long as you follow a few simple pointers:

- Open a new browser for each additional room you intend to play in and resize it so that it fits onto your screen. If you’re playing in 2 facebook poker rooms place the browsters next to each other, if you’re playing in 4 tables, place the browser windows on top of each other, just as if you were stacking 4 boxes. Never open a new table in the same browser using the “tabs” feature as this will most likely cause your browser to crash and throw you out of the table.

- Firefox handles flash better than Internet explorer does and is much more stable.  You can download Firefox direct from Mozilla.

- Close any programs that aren’t essential. Running multiple games of facebook poker in browsers can strain your computer system’s resources and if you’re chatting it up on MSN while watching clips of Girls Gone Wild on YoutTube at the same time, sooner or later your computer is going to freeze up and crash and eject you from all the tables.

- Forget about chatting in the chatbox. It might be fun to flirt or talk to friends when you’re playing in a single room, but multi tabling takes concentration and focus. Is it worth giving up a hand of a few million facebook poker chips when the timer runs out just to tell the hot girl seated across from you that you wana lick her face? Probably not, and “she” is probably a 45 year old man from Lebanon anyway.

The main advantage of playing in multiple tables in facebook texas holdem poker is that it allows you to see more hands than you normally would, letting you play a greater range of cards in a short amount of time. Any decent and careful player should be able to take advantage of this and use it their advantage to win more facebook poker chips. On the otherhand, if you play like a drunken monkey in heat and have the concentration of a stick you may want to think about passing on multi tabling.

In a recent facebook poker poll the question was posed as to what the most humiliating thing players in Facebook Texas Holdem have done for a few free facebook poker chips. While “begged a stranger for facebook poker chips” received the most votes at 29%, a whopping 18% of you voted for “pretended to be a cute girl and tricked a guy into giving me chips”.

Are grown men really creating fake facebook profiles and filling them with pictures of sexy young girls just to scam other lonely men out of their facebook poker chips? Well, yes.  

More importantly, why are guys so quick to fall for these tricks? Do they really think that hot young supermodels have nothing better to do with their time then play facebook poker and flirt with middle aged men who keep asking for their MSN so they can chat on instant messenger?  That’s right, they just flew in from their photo shoot in Paris and are winding down before they jet off to Milan with a few hands of Facebook Poker. .

And so far 11% of those who voted claimed that they’ve shown themselves on a webcam in exchange for facebook poker chips. Apparently Facebook poker has become a 24/7 online orgy with guys pretending to be girls flirting with other guys pretending to be rich oil barrons from the middle east. And the social gaming world goes round and round.

If you haven’t voted yet or just want to see the results, you can check them out here.

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.