Ah, bluffing. When you get it right, you feel like a master strategist; when you get it wrong, you feel like a doofus. Bluffing is lying, to put it plainly. To be more specific, bluffing is lying about the strength or weakness of your hand. There is a common school of poker strategy that teaches to play every good hand as if it were a bad one and every bad hand as if it were a good one. Now while that may be a bit too simplistic to be applied across the board, it speaks to a sound underlying principle — you can win with a good hand and you can win with a bad one; its all in how you play.

If youre playing No Limit poker especially youre going to need to know how to bluff (and as a bonus consequence, how to tell when others are bluffing). Bluffing is generally more effective in No Limit poker than in Limit poker because in Limit poker, you can only raise so much at once, and you can only raise so many times in each round of betting.

A player in a Limit poker game is much more inclined to call a bet or a raise with a mediocre hand than a player in a No Limit game, and the main reason why is the size of the bet or raise. In No Limit poker, you can call All In at any of your turns and set the whole table on tilt. Theres just no equivalent in Limit play.

Now to extend the conversation on bluffing to the online poker arena, there are far fewer methods of bluffing online than there are offline. The main way to bluff online is to place a humongous bet or raise (when your hand doesnt merit it, of course). You can try a bit of coffeehousing or blustering over the chat window, but if your opponents arent reading the chat window (or have that feature turned off) youre wasting your time.

One way to heighten the impact of a bluff is to do it quickly and confidently. Though they cant see your face while youre doing it, like they could if you really were sitting across the table from them, but they can gauge how long it took you to come up with this maneuver based on how look it took you to execute it.

Youll find 3 basic types of bluffs at the poker table, online or off:

The Stone Cold Bluff: Betting a huge amount right away with lousy cards; the choicest time to pull this is when youre the last player to act in that round of betting and not much action has happened yet;

The Semi-Bluff: Betting on a potentially winning hand that for now is worthless (such as four cards to a straight or a flush); its considered a bluff because its currently a garbage hand, but since it could turn into the nuts or the best hand possible at that time, its considered to be only a semi-bluff;

Representing the Flop: Bluffing in two parts – first, raise a small amount in the initial round of betting, making folks think you have the beginnings of an excellent hand, though it seems clear you need to pull something useful on the flop to make it happen; in this round, you raise just enough to get the majority of players at the table to fold. After the flop, then, go ahead and bet a ton (maybe even going so far as to go All-In) suggesting that you just pulled whatever cards you needed on the flop.

It takes nerves of steel to pull off a good bluff, but it takes even more than that to fold when you believe your opponent is bluffing. If your hand is weak, especially, then no matter how convinced you are that your opponent is trying to pull one over on you, you still want to walk away and save your chips for another hand. If you dont think you can win this round with the cards youve got, then by all means you can try bluffing. But if you sense youre being bluffed, make sure you can beat it before you go ahead and call it.

Online Poker Secrets of Winning Sit and Go Tournaments

Online Poker is the new and upcoming trend of making money online. Many though, have lost a lot of money playing online poker, mainly because they do not know what they are doing and keep saying they can win it back to only get deeper and deeper into their loss. There are proven techniques to winning without investing a lot of money into lengthy strategic books that make you piece together your own strategies.

Once you have a full understanding on how to adapt and use a tournament format to your advantage, playing against the other players with a systematic approach is very straightforward. You will then have a clear concise strategy and you will be playing in a manner you can use to your advantage to achieve consistent results.

So how do you do this? It could literally take years to put together the exact right combination of techniques, do the necessary research, read all the right manuals and then apply and play with the different techniques until you see what works and what doesnt. Just to figure out how to win and place in the money enough to turn a profit every once in a while.

A few key strategies for you if you want to be in the vast few out in the internet today that make a decent amount of money playing online poker using the sit and go single table tournaments. This will involve game selection, specific odds strategies, and very importantly, emotional control as well as money management.

To acquire some solid poker skills, I would recommend a single table tournament that has a fifty pound reload, these tournaments have good starting odds for you to place in the top 3. I would strongly recommend this type of site for the beginner. Paradise Poker and Party Poker are two of the best to start at. I have performed quite well at both of these sites.

I would not start any higher than fifty pounds. Limit yourself to what you can afford each month, absolutely do not let your emotions take over when you are losing thinking you can put money in that you cannot afford to spend to end up losing more. If you reach your budget, then sit back and watch and learn but do not put any more money into your account once you have reached your budget. That is foolish. Set goals for yourself, when you take your fifty pounds and turn it into three hundred pounds, then take back your initial investment plus a percentage of your earnings. This is smart.

The main issues are to play smart, have fun and make money. Do not be like many of the losers out there who use their mortgage payment in the hopes of winning an online poker tournament. Think smart, you can even make yourself a Sit and Go Tournament Spreadsheet to help you track your winnings. Have fun and play safe.

For additional resources on online poker playing check out these websites:
http:internetpoker629.blogspot.com
http:texasholdempoker629.blogspot.com
http:winningonlinepoker629.blogspot.com

Invasion of the Poker Bots: Is No Online Poker Room Safe?

Theyre worse than poker sharks. Theyve taken over online poker rooms everywhere. In fact, theyre most likely sitting next to you at the table right now. They probably have most of your chips. Emotion doesnt get in their way. Neither does greed, exhaustion, or fear. Their tells are nil and, try as you might, you cannot put them on tilt. Theyre poker bots, and rumor has it, theyre fleecing you bare.

Poker bots are computer programs set up to play on behalf of (and instead of) an actual human being, according to a consistent and, presumably, proven strategy. Hearing of the possible presence of these borderline cheaters in your online poker rooms could be enough to make online poker players question whether to sit down at the online poker tables at all.

So lets start there. In a word: yes. Of course you should keep playing poker. As well explain, these poker bots are far from foolproof and even farther from unbeatable. Secondly, online poker rooms are in the process of making it harder and harder for a poker bot to even get through their virtual doors (think: cyber-bouncer).

You see, heres the thing: there are countless poker bots. Countless programmers with pound signs in their eyes have tried and are trying their hand at pitting technology against humanity. There are so many different types of poker bots to choose from, new ones cropping up on online poker rooms all the time, that it leads to but one crystal clear conclusion:

They cant all be unbeatable. This is both a caution against relying on them and a consolation to those players who fear being unwittingly pitted against them.

What about a table with more than one seat occupied by a poker bot? If you think it hasnt happened, doesnt in fact happen all the time, then youre kidding yourself. In an instance like that, some poker bots have got to lose. In fact, in each hand, only one can win.

In truth, each bot is only as good as its programmers. And to be clear, thats programmers with an s: theres the guy or gal who built the program and you, the user, who must determine the parameters (or settings) by which the poker bot will play. Thats two human variables affecting quite directly the actions of the poker bot. So, let us ask you something: Why not just play the darned game yourself?

Another thing to realize is that poker is not suited to mechanical play. Its a human game. Sure, a poker bot cant be put on tilt, but neither can a poker bot read a tell nor spot a bluff. Its questionable at best how beneficial a poker bot can be to ones game. Youre probably just as well off improving your game the old fashioned way: practice practice practice.

But this threat may not be a threat for long. You might think, why should the poker rooms care, since poker bots make just as much money for online poker rooms as real people? The answer: the real people are getting restless. And at the risk of having their flesh and blood customers retaliate against poker bots by boycotting online poker itself, the online poker rooms are starting to take notice of the problem.

Already, may online poker rooms are instituting software that identifies when a player seems to be using too much of a pattern in their play. Itll be a tricky road, since distinguishing poker bot play from human play is a tricky and therefore risky business. Nobody wants to make false accusations or, worse, take erroneous action, like blocking an innocent users account. But theyre working on it.

As a new form of competition arises — namely: who can build the better bot? — well find more and more online poker rooms hosting bot-only tournaments (dont laugh, some already have). Hopefully, an increase in this practice will encourage poker bot enthusiasts to create a niche for themselves (surely a profitable niche for the online poker rooms) and leave the rest of us ordinary folk to play against other flesh and blood human beings.

Playing and winning online poker is a science. It is both a skill and an art of mastering things that most players take for granted.

If you are signing up for an online poker game, keep in mind never to choose the any game at this limit option. By choosing this, you are also hindering your capacity to take control of your position on every sign up list. There are options that give you the privilege of having the top position by winning and giving up the place by quitting and at the same time you could still rejoin and have you name at the bottom of the list.

Always look for a card room that fits your style. This way you always get the upper hand. If luck strikes in and you get on a bad round, look around the page for another table.

Playing two games at the same time seems a nice idea. It seems that by doing this, you could double your money in one playing hour. This could be true for some players, but remember, it happens for a few and not for everybody. Besides, playing two games at a time would definitely lay down your small blind more and you sure are most likely to tilt. Keep yourself focused on one game. This way you could have the upper hand especially if youre playing a major, drawn-out pot. Playing one game at a time also helps you play straightforwardly with only one opponent to concentrate on.

There is online software that has proved to be marvelous. However, there are minor glitches that you need to stay away from. This is the in-turn button. This button allows the player to act on hand before your actual turn and allows him to go back trying on other moves. But there may be instances that the internet connection may not be at their best. There may be a time that while clicking the check in-turn button, the action may already be on you. What will happen is that the call button might be popping out on your screen in the place where you are supposed to click the check button.

In poker, the only sure way of winning is by showing down the best hand. This is true not only for casinos but for online as well. However, there a number of reasonable ways a smart player could increase his chances of winning. The sure way of acquiring winning poker skills is by checking out how players deal with their games and keeping in mind the right moves.