About Paul Ratchford



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Poker Players Earnings

Should you try to become a professional poker player and what are poker players earnings? These are challenging questions to answer. In my last post on mortgages for poker players I talked about the difficulties that poker players can have getting financing for property purchases. Now lets focus on the big questions…. Should you be playing poker? What are poker players earnings in todays games?

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Exploitive No Limit Holdem: How To Crush Mid And Low Stakes Poker

I am super excited to announce that my e-book Exploitive No Limit Holdem is now on sale at ThePokerCapitalist. Exploitive No Limit Holdem is also available in bitcoin if you so choose. If/when 🙂 you buy the book you will receive a download link that allows you to upload it in your preferred format(ePub, Kindle, or PDF). To learn more about this book watch my youtube video.

You can also find additional information about Exploitive No Limit Holdem here. Hope you enjoy the read!

If you have any questions or comments about the book I would love to hear them.

Here is my Profile on Google

-By Paul Ratchford “ThePokerCapitalist”

Anonymous Poker Tables III (Poker Bots Cheating)

It really amazes me that this stuff is not getting more attention than it is. I think a big reason nobody seems to care or write about poker bots is that they are mostly at low stakes. This is really terrible though, and I am trying to get the word out. I hope that networks will do more to stop poker bots especially at anonymous poker tables where other players can’t police the networks. When playing at anonymous tables your opponents simply show up as player 1, player 2, player 3, etc. Here is an image that shows what anonymous tables look like. In this case the players are labeled Villain 1, Villain 2, etc.

Anonymous Table

I have talked about the potential for anonymous poker cheating previously. However, I was not aware just how developed the technology and support for poker bots has become. If any of you have challenged the “Neo Poker Bot” you will know that it is actually quite a challenging bot to play against. While I think poker bots are predominantly at low stakes I wonder how sophisticated they can be. Obviously, the low stakes bots just play a very TAG style and 3-bet in certain situations with premium hands for value. However, I have a feeling with a good poker mind behind one it could become quite a good player. After reading through some of the PDF manual I feel as though I could build quite a strong bot. What is really crazy is that there is a 90+ page user manual to support people that are trying to use poker bots to cheat. This is really disturbing to me. It really is unfortunate that such an operation exists. Poker players don’t want to sit and lose their money to a poker bot.

I did some research on forums around the web about these poker bots and they do not seem to be getting detected. It would be great to see some stats on this, but anecdotally it does not look good. Poker bots are especially a concern in an environment of anonymous poker tables. It can be difficult enough to spot a tight bot on a normal table, but unfortunately the task is much more challenging on an anonymous poker table. It amazes me just how many networks are moving toward this anonymous poker table model.

It seems fairly clear to me that numerous poker networks (I won’t name any names today) are not doing a good job of stopping cheating and bots at anonymous poker tables. I am not a technical support wizard, but I would love to hear some stats (from poker operators) on just how many poker bots are getting shutdown. Please poker operators if you are reading this feel free to contact me….. From what I can tell poker bots are all over the online poker world, and in all likelihood they are especially common on anonymous poker tables.

Would love to hear your thoughts

-ThePokerCapitalist

 

 

The Rise of Internet Poker Part I

The first hand of online poker was only dealt in 1998 (Source Wikipedia). Since then massive changes have occurred in the realm of poker gambling. The internet has revolutionized the way that poker is played. Perhaps slightly dramatic, but think for a moment about how gunpowder changed warfare, the wheel changed transportation, etc. Internet did exactly the same thing for poker. Prior to the internet you had limited options if you wanted to play poker. Either you were playing in a home game, a poker club (possibly underground), or in a casino. The limiting factor in all of these games was player pools. This all changed in 1998 when the first real money poker hand was dealt online.

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Poker Vacation Kauai

It has been a little while since I updated my blog because I have been on vacation! Everybody needs a poker vacation from time to time, and Hawaii is my favorite place to go in the winter. The island of Kauai is absolutely amazing and the temperature was 75-80 degrees the entire time. So I stayed close to the Poipu beach area with my wife and a couple of very good friends. One of my good friends has a cool website on fashion in case you are interested.

Our accommodation was about a 3 min walk to this beautiful beach

 

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Poker Mind – What Tilt Is and How To Fix It

In order for an internet poker player to control their poker mind and know what causes tilt, they first need to understand what it is, and what triggers it? Poker tilt is when a poker player’s frustration and confusion causes them to take less optimal lines than they otherwise would take. There are a myriad of possible causes for tilt. In many cases the causes of a poker player’s tilt is unique to the individual. Lets take a look at some common causes and solutions to tilt.

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