Poker Night With The Guys From The Office
I played poker online for nearly six hours last night and I have to say that I am feeling the results of it today. There were a lot of coffee cups at my desk today.
Another interesting thing happened at work today, I found out that half the guys in the office play poker. After talking about the game for awhile we decided that we were going to have a poker night after work once a week to see who will gain the title of the best poker player in the office.
I’m in a bit of a dilemma, what if I get the chance to take my boss out of the game? Part of me would want to win the game, the other part of me would be debating whether it’s worth the risk of ticking off the guy that signs my paycheck every week.
I have failed to mention to guys that I am really into poker and that I even have a site and blog about poker that I look after on my spare time. If I manage to win the poker game I’m thinking they may not be too happy if they stumble across my site.
I can play poker against my buddies and people I don’t know on the internet, but it’s these people I work with everyday. I guess I’ll take them out to lunch if I manage to win.
Poker: A Game on the Rise
I started playing poker around 10 years ago and since then I have seen the game grow from an excuse to drink beer and smoke cigars with your buddies to a multimillion dollar industry.
It’s not that I’m complaining about it, but I can’t believe how popular poker has got. If you’re a good poker player and enter the right tournaments you could eventually became a celebrity, as popular as some up-and-coming movie star.
I can understand why poker is popular on television. It’s a lot like a game show, average people trying to win a crazy amount of money playing a game that you and I can play at home.
With the evolution of poker comes the armchair poker pros that seem to make their way to every poker game you play. I played against one recently at a party a friend of mine was hosting. He talked in detail about all the winnings he stole from some of the best players around, he also talked about all the offers some online poker sites and professional tournament wanting him to play for them. I know that I am not the world’s best poker player, I’m not even close, but I destroyed this guy at the table, he was one of the worst players I have ever seen.
He was the type of guy who would go all in every time he had something that resembled a decent hand. Of course most of the time people would not play him, but eventually I ended up taking his chips when he bet everything on pocket threes.
Anyway, what I am trying to say with this rant this week is poker is a game that has changed a lot over the last few years and it will be interesting to see how much further it will evolve over the future.
To Bluff or not to Bluff
To be honest with all of you, I am not the world’s biggest bluffer, from my experience constant bluffing is a way to lose a lot of chips and have a lot of early walks away from the poker table.
Now like most people I will sometimes bet more on a decent pair than I probably should just to scare people away, but that is as close as I usually come to stealing the pot.
A lot of people do bluff and it’s a skill that when used wisely can sometimes win you the big pot. From my experience the best way to win the pot by bluffing is to try to believe you have the hand you want people to think you have. If you have a full house and want people to think you have nothing, than try to act like you would if you had nothing, the same goes if you have a hand that should have been folded a long time ago.
You will lose money if you bluff all of the time, sure you will win the occasional pot and sometimes that pot could be big, but eventually people will catch on to the way you play. On the other hand, being a player who always bets on good hands and folds on weak hands will not get you very far either.
The key is to find the right mix of both extremes. There’s nothing wrong with folding on horrible hand and being a little aggressive on a hand that might not be the best on the table, that’s what makes poker a game of chance.
The best way to find out how far you should take a bluff is checking for a flop to see what your opponent bids, by letting him make the first move you may get an idea of what your up against.
