Low Stakes Poker - Low Stakes Poker Player

To win at multi-table poker tournaments it takes a lot of concentration, stamina, and patience, patience, patience (much to the degree of what Daniel Negreanu says in his PokerStars commercials).

Nonetheless in multi-table tournaments I cannot stress the word patience enough. In these types of tournaments the key is to preserve your chips as much as possible until the time is right to start taking some chances. But for the point of this discussion I’m going to stick to the early stages in tournament poker. A player wants to choose his spots wisely so they don’t donk off their chips when there is any reason to do so.

For example, if the blinds are 15/30 and you are under the gun with a mediocre hand like A 10 its best to fold and get out of the way. I would recommend only playing strong starting hands from this position with blinds being the way they are. If you are raising in this position with a hand like A10 then you would be risking 90 chips for a whopping 45 chips if you were to take down the blinds. A player could be raising like that to set up an image at the table but I still think it’s the wrong play because with a table full of players to act behind you your A10 is likely dominated by another hand. If someone would come along with AQ, AK or even a big pocket pair then you’re in real trouble already. Also if a player is holding AJ or better and you both hit your Ace then you could end up losing some chips if not your whole stack. There are many different areas where you can preserve your chips but this one example of how to play smart and patient in the early stages of a tournament. Remember the word patience when you are playing your next tournament and watch your tournament cashes increase.

Poker legend Daniel Negreanu is going to attempt an incredible low stakes poker feat. He plans on trying to turn $10 into $100,000 playing online poker. He will start off playing $0.01/$0.02 micro-stakes no-limit hold’em games. For his sake, I hope he polished up on his low stakes poker strategy, because the game-play in those small stakes games is vastly different than the nosebleed games he is accustomed to.

Fellow pro Chris “Jesus” Ferguson succeeded in a similar feat years ago when he turned a bankroll of $0 into $10,000. It took him several months to do this as building a bankroll from nothing is not easy.

I predict Negreanu is unable to maintain the patience required to complete such a feat. As far as meets the eye, he does not have any high-stakes side bets or any other significant initiative in place to motivate him to complete this challenge. I’ll bet he simply has too much money and values his time too highly to spend the countless hours of grinding low stakes that is required to complete this challenge. Just to go from $10 to $1,000 would take several thousand hands played over the course of dozens of hours. Going from $1,000 to $100,000 is a whole different story. Even Daniel Negreanu won’t have the easiest time beating mid- to high-stakes online poker games nowadays. Many of these games are filled with young sharks who don’t easily dump off their stacks.

So while, on paper, this is an interesting sounding challenge and all. I’ll bet no way Negreanu even comes close to going through with it. If I were him, I’d just focus more of my time on hanging out with fellow gamblers making high-stakes bets on golf and paying visits to the Vegas-area strip clubs afterwards!

Despite its current popularity, the game of poker is thought to have originated more than ten centuries ago.  Most poker historians believe it to be a combination of different games that usually have involved ranked cards and the process of bluffing one’s opponent.

Most people believe that poker came from the Chinese around 969 A.D.  Legend holds that Emperor Mu-tsuang played “cards” with his wife on the eve of the New Year.  On the other hand, some poker aficionados believe that the Egyptians deserve the credit for introducing the first poker variant.  Egyptians in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries played several forms of cards; and in the sixteenth century, Persian peoples used “Treasure Cards” for a variety of gambling games.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the French game Poque and the German game Pochen were very popular.  Both of these games developed out of a Spanish game called Primero.  This game was played by dealing three cards to each player and involved bluffing as a large part of the game.  This was actually the first game that directly relates to what we now consider poker.

The game was brought to North America by the French and it was eventually introduced into New Orleans in the eighteenth century.  After this, it didn’t take long for the game to spread throughout the country.
In the 1800s, Jonathan H. Green referenced poker in his writing when he mentioned the rules to the “cheating game.”  This game quickly replaced three-card monte, as many people felt it was more honest and more challenging.  Green looked again at the game and named it Poker.

Following this came a time in US history when there wasn’t a saloon across the country that didn’t have a poker table.  During the Civil War, both armies played the game.  The influence from Europe on the game of poker ended in 1875 with the introduction of the joker.

In just over two hundred years, poker has become so popular that there several different variants of the game that have dominated the poker scene.  Five card draw was the most popular for over a hundred years.  In fact, the State of Nevada determined that five card draw was a game of skill, and therefore could not be affected by existing gambling laws.  However, stud poker was still illegal since it was believed to be a game based only on chance.

In 1931, Nevada reversed its decision and legalized gambling in its entirety.  Seven card stud became all the rage after the Second World War and lasted for almost forty years as the most popular variation of poker.  Texas Hold’em hit the circuit in the 1970’s when it was introduced as the title game in the famous World Series of Poker, and it continues to be the most popular variation of poker today.

You’ll also find many other variations on the game, including Omaha, Draw, Razz, and Manila, but none are anywhere near as popular as No Limit Texas Hold’em.  It definitely looks as though poker is going to stick around for awhile.  With the advent of poker rooms online and the ease of playing with real or play money, its safe to say that poker will continue to grow in popularity for some time to come.