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Posts Tagged ‘poker’

Strategy: Implied Odds

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

Here’s is one of my favourites and the reason that I like to mix my home game so much.

Implied odds = The chance that I have of taking all of your stack

                                       How many chips I have to put in to call

Now it works in the home game more because there are certain players that I can count on, I can count on J6 to play junk and think that a J high flop with JQ is a good hand, I can count of Ace to fall in love with his over pair, I can count on The Mouth to never believe me when I have a hand, and a couple other players like Nice Guy Eddie to keep firing at the pot no matter what flops.

Now a lot of people like to slow play a flopped set, but I like to build a pot, there is no sense letting them decide how much they are going to lose, after all, they are the ones that woke up with AA and now have their vision so clouded with WSOP bracelets that they can’t lay them down. I say get in a fight, get your money in good because they will pair the board sometimes and kill your flopped two pairs, occasionally they will hit the runner runner to take you out with a backdoor flush or a straight, but when you raise with 36 off-suit, get re-raised by QQ and smooth call, and lead at a 245 pot, more often than not you are getting paid

Poker Movies: Rounders

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

rounders

Listen, here’s the thing. If you can’t spot the sucker in the first half hour at the table, then you ARE the sucker.
~Rounders

Well if there is a better poker movie I sure as hell haven’t seen it. This may be some source of argument down the line, maybe there is some movie I haven’t heard of yet, or some old movie that I am yet to discover. I’m open for suggestions if someone has a good one, but for now Rounders is the gold standard.

Rounders has it all:

Matt Damon-check

Ed Norton-check

Voice-overs-check

Famke Jannsen-check (hey, I just thought of another poker babe)

Cheesy accents-check

Johnny Fucking Chan-check

Check, check , check!!!! He trap me!

So many good quotes come from this movie you can practically play an entire night using nothing but sound bites. The starting scene, the final scene, man, I’ve seen this movie over and over and I’ll still watch it on a lazy hangover Saturday when it comes on the TV.

If you are a poker fan and haven’t seen the movie yet, go out and buy it, I say “buy” and not “rent” because like me you are going to have it on loop for a while.

Beyond just good entertainment, Rounders is a metaphor for life. Don’t give up what you were meant to do, and what makes you happy just to try and please someone else, because in the end neither of you will be happy.

For the sake of the one poker fan out there that hasn’t seen the movie yet I’m not going to spoil it by giving away the ending. Nor will I by going into it too much, but I will link the trailer and maybe that piques your interest.