Thursday, January 20, 2011
The best free online Texas Hold Em sites
Texas Hold 'Em is the most popular type of poker played in the United States. Televised events like the World Series of Poker and World Poker Tour has helped to expose the games to millions of viewers. Texas Hold 'Em is a community game where each player get two "hole cards" and a total of five cards that can be used by all players. Poker is a term which describe several types of card games, but all poker games use the same basic rules and each of them use similar terminology.
Also known as Texas Hold'em or Texas Holdem, this popular game is securing new players and fans everyday. Several websites offer free games to players and there are usually incentives that are meant to keep them coming back again and again. Prizes are given to the winners and there are opportunities for players to showcase their talent to the world. Listed below are some of the best Texas Holdem websites with free games, prizes, promotions and incentives.
Five Free Texas Hold 'Em Poker Websites
1] PokerStars.net
More than 30 million players are registered at the worlds largest poker website. If you are new to the game, you can learn from experts. There are special offers, a chance to play for $1,000,000 at Poker Stars Million Dollar Challenge. Players also have a chance to win a seat at the World Series of Poker. A free Texas Hold 'Em download is available for players.
2] UltimateBet.Net
Play free online poker at Ultimate Bet. One lucky player will be given the chance to go to Las Vegas to compete in the World Series of Poker Main Event. There are other promotions such as trips to Aruba, Tickets to hockey games, ring-side seats at major WWE events and more.
3] FullTilt Poker.net
At Full Tilt Poker, players can play poker for free and play in their daily Freeroll tournaments. There are chances to win prizes and a chance to play in live televised events. World Series Of Poker and World Poker Tour as well as seats on upcoming episodes of Poker After Dark are up for grabs to the best players.
4] Apple iTunes
Play against the computer in this Texas Hold 'Em game, made for the iPhone, iPad and the iPod Touch. Players can play off-line as well.
5] Pogo.com
At Pogo, there are several different game rooms and players not only play for free, there is a chance to win up to $5,000. The Pogo Jackpot allow winning player a chance to 'Spin to win' the current jackpot.
References:
* http://www.pokerstars.net
* http://www.ub.net/poker-promot ion
* http://www.pogo.com/games/no-l imit
How to win at Texas hold'em poker: Skills versus luck
There is an old saying “ it is better to be lucky than it is smart” although true in many ways of poker and life this is true, with Texas hold’em it is better to be smart than it is lucky on a long term basis. Texas hold’em poker enables you to outplay and beat your opponent even if you have the weaker or loosing hand, this means you can make your own luck.
Texas hold 'em is a game of math, reading your opponents moves and being able to remember past hands. Understanding your opponents choices is the alternate way to win at Texas hold’em, other than playing defensively you can also go play offensively.
Developing skill is the only way to change poker from gambling into a business, using bank management and keep a record of everything you do is a skill you control unlike luck which is almost like it is given you and you have no control over.
Skill
Attacking your opponent and always keeping them on their toes is one of the key skills of a great poker player. The only way you can understand and develop this skill is to play continuously until you begin to feel your opponents methods and know roughly how strong or weak they are. Usually online poker is much harder than face to face because you cannot get any tells on the person such as a twitch or itching themselves. The skill with online poker is to be able to calculate your odds of wining and keep track of your opponents past hands, the math online is the key to wining when in person bluffing is fare easier to fool a person by looking comfortable when you may be scared or nervous.
Lets face the fact that you cannot beat a person that is lucky no matter how tight, consistent or aggressive you play however luck never lasts forever. Nobody is lucky enough to play Texas hold’em and not use math playing purely on instinct is going to turn $100 into $1,000,000. Developing skills such as bluffing at the right time, reading your opponent's betting patterns, timing between raising/calls, remembering your opponents showdown value to their betting on the flop, turn and river and most of all your math.
Overall Texas hold’em is a game of math, memory and patience, if you are missing any of these then don’t plan to make much money or win many tournaments because statistically luck will not take you all the way.
The attraction of Texas Hold 'em
Texas Hold'em is as common today as baseball and apple pie. It's popularity is at an all time high. People of all different age, race, and sex are bellying up to the felt and peering down at their hole cards in search of "pocket rockets" or "cowboys."
So why is Texas Hold'em so popular? The simple answer is because it is flat out fun and simple to play. In Texas Hold'em each player is dealt two face down hole cards that only they can play, then five community cards are placed face up on the table for anyone to use. Whoever makes the best five card poker hand wins. The popular poker game's motto is, "It takes a minute to learn, but a lifetime to master." Perhaps that in itself is why the game is so addicting. Many people play for the competition, a lot of people play for the camaraderie, and few people are good enough to play it for a living.
There are numerous aspects of the game that make it enjoyable. The anticipation and the excitement of looking at your starting hand combined with the suspense of the flop, the turn, and then the river is what keeps people sitting at the poker table for hours upon hours. Then you add in the atmosphere, the camaraderie, and the chance to win some money and it is easy to see why Texas Hold'em has became so popular. The best part of course is raking in that huge monstrous pot and running your fingers through piles and piles of perfectly rounded wonderful poker chips. They say that in golf all it takes is one good strike of the ball and you are hooked on the game for life. Texas Hold'em poker is much the same way, when you rake in your first gigantic pot, you are hooked.
Perhaps the game is so popular because it is a game that anybody can play and if you hit it big you can become a celebrity. It does not matter if you are short, fat, or old and decrepit. Over the years of playing cards I have seen my share of oxygen tanks and wheelchairs at the tables. At the World Series of Poker's Main Event there was a man playing without any arms and there was another man playing who was blind. The point is that anybody who has the will to play can play. Texas Hold'em gives regular people a chance for stardom. A person does not have to be 6'5", bench press 400 pounds, run the 40 yard dash in 4.2 seconds, hit a 90 mile an hour fast ball, or slam dunk a basketball. All you need is money, guts, and a little bit of luck and you could be playing for millions of dollars at the final table of the World Series of Poker's Main Event next year.
How to play Texas Hold 'Em
Texas Hold em poker is a card game that involves betting on cards and hands. Played with up to eight players, the player with the best Texas Hold emhand wins the hand and all the chips put into the pot during play. To play Texas Hold em, you can play either on-line, or alternatively at an actual casino around a table. Alternatively, you can get a group of players together yourself and some cards to play the game. Here's a quick guide to get started.
To begin playing Texas Hold em two cards are dealt to all the players around the table from a card deck of 52 cards. Players sit around the table, with two players on what are called the blinds. The blinds are the minimum starting bets and involve two players who post the blinds.
Each player gets to either call, flop or raise from here on. To call, is to match any bet made, to flop is to quit the hand, and players can also raise the stakes if they wish. Overall, this is done in relation to the hand rank, with the strongest hand being a royal flush. The hand rankings are as followed:
♣ Royal Flush – Ace to high straight, suited
♥ Straight Flush – Straight of any suit
♦ Four of a kind – Any four cards of the same rank
♣ Full House – Three of a kind + a pair
♥ Flush – All cards of the same suit
♦ Straight – Five cards in sequence
♣ Three of a kind – Three cards of same rank
♥ Two Pair – Two pairs of cards
♦ One Pair – One pair of cards of the same rank
♣ High Card – The player with the highest single card wins, where no player has any higher ranked hand.
With only two cards, these cards are matched with the five cards that are dealt into the middle of the table on the flop, turn and river. On the flop, three cards are dealt with which players can then match their pair of cards with. Then, the river and turn includes one extra card dealt onto the table.
During play, betting is gradually raised on the flop, river and turn. At the end of the turn, the remaining players hands are compared, and the player who has the highest hand rank wins the hand and all the chips put into the pot.
Overall, there are variations of Texas hold Em which include limit and no limit hold em poker. The only difference here relates to the fact that limit hold em stakes must be equal to the big blind before the flop, then bets and raises must be equal to twice the big blind hereafter.
So, with these guidelines you should be able to get started with Texas Hold em Poker. To play Texas hold em poker well, you will need to fold with weaker hands, and raise if you feel your hand has a good chance of winning.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
How Farmville and Facebook Poker are changing the face of social gaming
Early every dawn, heaps of farmers all around the world rise to work in their own personal digital farmland. At night time, gangs of mobsters plan hits and scores of facebook poker players get ready for a game of texas holdem poker to play with their digital facebook poker chips. Indeed none of it's genuine. Yet the overpowering craze of social gaming - straightforward game titles which make it possible for gamers play with their pals on social networking sites such as Facebook, Myspace, Tagged, and Bebo is changing the definition of gaming, industry experts say.
And as the creator of celebrated titles like FarmVille and Mafia Wars, and Zynga Texas Holdem Poker, Zynga has ridden the games' increasing worldwide popularity to the very top of that promising segment. Zynga president Mark Pincus claims the formula for social gaming success on Facebook, Bebo and similar internet sites was simple: produce simple games which players love and yet will be able to almost instantly set aside. "We constructed the games so they really could be enjoyed in the tabs on your web browser despite the fact that you are on a conference call," said Pincus, a seasoned business owner who created Zynga in 2007.
As expected, they've also been aided by the large emergence of Facebook, where the social games are so renowned that they have spawned "fan" pages dedicated to protesting and complaining with regards to being compelled to observe close friends participate in them. With over four hundred millions users, is where the vast majority of online gamers engage in FarmVille and Petville, along with various Zynga titles like FishVille, Café World, YoVille and Myspace Poker. In all, around 65 million players engage in Zynga online games each day, as outlined by media tracking organization Developer Analytics, roughly equal to the quantity that have played the classic arcade game Tetris in the time of its entire existence, except now instead of digital blocks gamers use digital seeds and facebook poker chips to advance throughout the applications.
The substantial progress was pleasing however not completely surprising to Pincus, whose previous startups had included Freeloader, an information gathering provider; tech-support provider SupportSoft; and Tribe.net, an earlier social networking site from 2003. He said that starting off the social gaming firm, which he branded after his own dog, was an effort to fill up what he thought of as a surprising gap in the majority of people's day-to-day Internet use. What Pincus nailed, according to gaming specialists, was a recurrence to the "golden era" of games like Pac-man and Super Mario Bros.
Zynga applications like Farmville draw substantially elevated rates of female participants than most video games. By comparison, 3 of Zynga's leading five video games - FarmVille, Café World and FishVille - have got primarily women players, with lots of players outside the customary eighteen to thirty four year old spectrum. Those applications all run on the exact same fundamental premise. Starting up with a basic farm, aquarium or cafe, the gamer toils to help make it more substantial and more inticate, sharing goods with friends and encouraging one another on the way, whether it be sending trees to neighbors in farmville or facebook poker chips to buddies in texas holdem.
Several of Zynga's first games basically mirrored classic board and card online games. It was Mafia Wars - in which players team up to go one on one with other gangs in the game - that first showed what would most likely end up the outline of future social gaming scenarios: hassle-free, single-player action that's boosted by working together. With FarmVille, gamers grow virtual crops that can be harvested several hours, or days, later. Along the way, they invite buddies to become their neighbors and benefit each other by buying trinkets or helping with the farming. You can't "beat the game," however gamers receive pleasure in creating large, extravagant farms which they are able to showcase to their buddies. "A farm is something that is certainly globally understood and identified. It's culturally transcending, cross-gender, and blind to age," Pincus stated. "A fantastic social game should be like a outstanding cocktail party. If you want it to be liked by almost all people you invite, it really needs to be wide-ranging in its ingredients to ensure every person gets it." One can only wonder what games they have up their sleeve next.
And as the creator of celebrated titles like FarmVille and Mafia Wars, and Zynga Texas Holdem Poker, Zynga has ridden the games' increasing worldwide popularity to the very top of that promising segment. Zynga president Mark Pincus claims the formula for social gaming success on Facebook, Bebo and similar internet sites was simple: produce simple games which players love and yet will be able to almost instantly set aside. "We constructed the games so they really could be enjoyed in the tabs on your web browser despite the fact that you are on a conference call," said Pincus, a seasoned business owner who created Zynga in 2007.
As expected, they've also been aided by the large emergence of Facebook, where the social games are so renowned that they have spawned "fan" pages dedicated to protesting and complaining with regards to being compelled to observe close friends participate in them. With over four hundred millions users, is where the vast majority of online gamers engage in FarmVille and Petville, along with various Zynga titles like FishVille, Café World, YoVille and Myspace Poker. In all, around 65 million players engage in Zynga online games each day, as outlined by media tracking organization Developer Analytics, roughly equal to the quantity that have played the classic arcade game Tetris in the time of its entire existence, except now instead of digital blocks gamers use digital seeds and facebook poker chips to advance throughout the applications.
The substantial progress was pleasing however not completely surprising to Pincus, whose previous startups had included Freeloader, an information gathering provider; tech-support provider SupportSoft; and Tribe.net, an earlier social networking site from 2003. He said that starting off the social gaming firm, which he branded after his own dog, was an effort to fill up what he thought of as a surprising gap in the majority of people's day-to-day Internet use. What Pincus nailed, according to gaming specialists, was a recurrence to the "golden era" of games like Pac-man and Super Mario Bros.
Zynga applications like Farmville draw substantially elevated rates of female participants than most video games. By comparison, 3 of Zynga's leading five video games - FarmVille, Café World and FishVille - have got primarily women players, with lots of players outside the customary eighteen to thirty four year old spectrum. Those applications all run on the exact same fundamental premise. Starting up with a basic farm, aquarium or cafe, the gamer toils to help make it more substantial and more inticate, sharing goods with friends and encouraging one another on the way, whether it be sending trees to neighbors in farmville or facebook poker chips to buddies in texas holdem.
Several of Zynga's first games basically mirrored classic board and card online games. It was Mafia Wars - in which players team up to go one on one with other gangs in the game - that first showed what would most likely end up the outline of future social gaming scenarios: hassle-free, single-player action that's boosted by working together. With FarmVille, gamers grow virtual crops that can be harvested several hours, or days, later. Along the way, they invite buddies to become their neighbors and benefit each other by buying trinkets or helping with the farming. You can't "beat the game," however gamers receive pleasure in creating large, extravagant farms which they are able to showcase to their buddies. "A farm is something that is certainly globally understood and identified. It's culturally transcending, cross-gender, and blind to age," Pincus stated. "A fantastic social game should be like a outstanding cocktail party. If you want it to be liked by almost all people you invite, it really needs to be wide-ranging in its ingredients to ensure every person gets it." One can only wonder what games they have up their sleeve next.
Facebook rolls out its new credits currency for buying facebook poker chips, farmville cash, and other in game currencies
Facebook has rolled out it's new 'facebook credits' currency recently in hopes of implementing their vision of bringing a single universal currency to facebook that can be used in every game and application. Some of the earliest companies to join in and start using the facebook credits system has been Crowdstar, maker of popular games like Happy Aquarium, Zoo Paradise, and Happy Island, as well as Zynga Game network, who brought us Zynga Texas Holdem Poker, Farmville, Mafia Wars and a slew of other applications.
Facebook's reasoning is that by creating a universal currency under their Facebook platform that users can use to buy anything from tractors in Farmville to facebook poker chips in Zynga Poker to fish food in Happy Aquarium with the click of a button and the transfer of a few credits, as opposed to logging into their paypal accounts or whipping out their credit cards each time. This ease of transaction, they say, will increase sales of virtual items in the game because it takes away some of the hurdles to purchasing them.
When a player loses all his facebook chips for example, he may be more apt to buy more if all it takes is a click of a button rather than finding his wallet, taking out his credit card, and entering his personal information each and every time. And if that same player got tired of facebook poker and decided to switch over and play some Happy Island later in the evening, he could buy coins in their game with same ease and speed.
Sounds great right? Who doesn't like making things easier? Well this new system comes with a price for game developers: a whopping 30% of all transactions will now go to Facebook for the privilege of using their facebook credits currency. Facebook claims that the increase in sales will more than compensate for the cut in revenue that will now to go Facebook. This model, however, is brand new and unproven at the moment and it will probably be some time before we see the majority of developers switching over exclusively to facebook credits.
For the time being we are likely to see game makers tiptoe into the new virtual currency by rolling it out to one or two games and analyzing the feedback and conversion numbers. It will be interesting to see how willing both gamers and game developers are to assimilate into Facebook's virtual currency of the future.
Monday, January 17, 2011
What makes a bad facebook poker player?
As with almost all things in this life, most people don’t like taking responsability 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, noone likes to admit when they’re a bad player, so if they lose all their facebook poker chips it’s generally someone elses 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 ones apply to you?
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.
It would seem that the same thing applies to facebook poker, noone likes to admit when they’re a bad player, so if they lose all their facebook poker chips it’s generally someone elses 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 ones apply to you?
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.
Tags: buy facebook poker chips, cheap facebook poker chips, facebook poker cheats, Facebook Poker Chips, facebook texas holdem poker,facebook wsop poker chips, free facebook chips, glamble poker chips, poker palace chips, zynga poker chips
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)