Facebook Poker Chips Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Facebook Poker Chips’

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.

..not everyone in poker is human.

There are a lot of rumors and misconceptions about bots in Poker, ranging from how they work, to what exactly they are, and whether or not players should fear them.  Bots in competative games aren’t a new trend, they’ve been around for years dating back to artificial opponents in chess.  At its core, a poker bot is a simple program that tracks and translates the cards dealt into mathematical equations and acts (ie. raises, folds etc.) according the odds of each possible outcome.  But they’re far from a ‘set it and forget it’ program to rake in facebook poker chips.

Most experts in poker seem to agree that poker bots are only ever successful in Limit Texas holdem due to its primarily mathematical structure, and that they seem to lag behind human players in No Limit Texas Holdem due to the large “all in” variable that bots have trouble dealing with. But this doesn’t mean that they’re not out there being used in both real money and facebook texas holdem rooms to win poker chips.

No hard statistics exist about just how much bot play might be out there in poker rooms across the internet, obviously because such a thing is nearly impossible to gauge. Most real money rooms ban players accounts and freeze their funds if they’re caught using bots, because players feel that it might give others an unfair advantage to have a computer calculating odds for them. Poker pro Barry Goldstein has a different view on bots in texas holdem however:

“I believe poker sites should allow bots, but only on clearly defined tables. Players should know who the bots are, and have the choice if they would like to play them or not.”

But most regular folks feel that bots offer too much opportunity for collusion, where a bot operator might be running 4 or 5 bots at the same time, sharing hand knowledge between the bots to fleece unsuspecting players who wander into the room. Anyone who has ever played facebook texas holdem poker has probably come across a bot at least once or twice, especially in the mid level rooms. All the tell tale signs are there: mechanical better, never talks to other players, never buys any gifts or drinks, no friends on their friend list etc. The next time you’re grinding in the rooms trying to win some facebook poker chips keep in mind that the disciplined player across the table from you may not be a human at all.

It’s been said that bluffing in texas holdem poker is the line that seperates average players from great players. Anyone can get dealt a pair of Aces and click the all in button (like 90% of facebook poker players) but it takes a true professional to work with real garbage hands and turn them into facebook poker chip gold. But how do you bluff someone when you can’t see their face, their nervous gestures like tapping their hands or twitching their eye, or the sweat beading up on their brow? Don’t forget that this works both ways and they can’t see your poker tells either. If you wana bluff your opponents and steal their facebook poker chips here are some pointers to follow: 

1) Don’t show your fear: If you’re a timid player who is afraid to risk their facebook poker chips, don’t bother trying to bluff others. You have to be comitted to picking good hands to bluff with and following through on them, or other players will sense your fear and make your bluff ineffective. 

2) A small bet is just as good as no bet: The point of bluffing in facebook poker is to get your opponents out of the pot with a bet large enough to scare them. Small raises don’t show confidence or aggression and will only waste your facebook poker chips. 

3) Try to bluff after the flop: Bluffing preflop is a tricky situation, as you never know when you are up against Aces or Kings. But after the flop, even pocket Aces can be cracked by 3 of a kind or a flush/straight draw. Your opponents know this and if you can make them believe you have the flush or straight you will succeed at pushing them out of the pot. 

4) Forget your pride: Even the most well played bluff can backfire and go wrong sometimes. If someone is continually calling or reraising you and you feel you really have no shot at improving your hand, don’t be afraid to swallow your pride and back down. Proving you’re a real man (or woman) isn’t worth losing all your facebook chips. 

5) Let your opponents catch you bluffing occasionally: Once you get caught bluffing a few times you can change up your strategy and play tight, so the next time you make a big bet others will be more inclined to think you’re full of shite and call you. 

6) Pay attention to your opponents facebook poker chips: It’s important to consider your opponent’s chip stack when betting against him. Bluffing against someone with only a few facebook chips may not be effective as it is likely to just push them all in as they will seize on any last ditch chance to double up their chips and get back in the game. Bluffing against someone with a large amount of facebook poker chips may not work either as they can comfortably call any raise you make and not worry about running low. Your best chances are to bluff against someone who has a similar amount of poker chips because, like you, they will worry about being knocked out of the game and thus less likely to make risky calls that put their facebook poker chips at risk. 

                 One of the craziest bluff’s in texas holdem poker: 

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.

Make sure you’re not wasting your facebook poker chips in Facebook Texas Holdem by making these amateur mistakes.

1- Too Much Bluffing – Sometimes winning facebook poker chips with a bluff is more exciting than winning with a good hand, leading many facebook texas holdem poker players to overbluff in the game.

2- Focus On Your Own Cards - Pay attention to your possible outs and the strength of your hand relative to the cards on the table.

3- Betting With a Mediocre Hand on the River – It’s usually not a smart move to bet with facebook poker chips on the river.

4- Too Much Slow Playing – Hiding your strong hand and deceiving opponents while forcing them to feed facebook poker chips into the pot is always fun, but too much of this can bite you in the ass if you don’t consider the type of hands your opponents might be drawing on.

5- Checking the Bettor – Don’t let opponents see “free cards” if you have a strong hand. Bet aggressively when you believe you have the strongest hand.

6- Not Wanting to Get Bluffed – Some players will continue playing and calling bets of facebook pokerchips even when they have a bad hand, simply because of ego or not wanting to get bluffed out of a pot.

7- Mood Related Mistakes – It’s normal to get angry after a big loss or missed opportunity, but if you let your emotions make the call on the next hand you’ll only dig yourself a depper hole in facebook poker.

8- Under Betting the Pot – When you feel someone is on a draw and waiting for their cards to fall, make strong bets to force your opponents to make a bad decision.

9- Wrong Bluffing Amounts – Will a million facebook texas holdem poker chips force out your opponents? How about twenty million? You have to accurately gauge what a “big bet” is when trying to decide if it will force them to lay down their hand, otherwise you are just throwing away your chips for the benefit of whoever has the strongest hand.