EPT====
Bertrand ‘ElkY’ Grospellier took home $1.4mil by winning the WPT last year. Ivan "(Orky)Soul" Demidov took home $5.8 mil finishing second in the biggest poker tournament of the year - the 2008 WSOP main event. Fredrik "[GG99]Slayer" ostervold was spectulated to have made over $10 mil (judging from the tax he pays) playing the high stakes online. Even idunnohisrealname "HovZ" just won the Cali Poker Champs for $327,714 last week. And rekrul? Don't even get me started.
So you want a piece of the pie, you are a starcraft player, your favourite race is zerg. this should be easy monies right?? Wrong! Look at the players above. Zerg players dont win.
No but seriously, you probably had some interest in this but never knew where to start. And you knew plunging head-first into the world of online poker sans any research will leave you like a dragoon who just got dragoon bugged. But fear not, help is on the way - thats what this guide is for. And for me to get my starcraft 2 beta key!
General FAQ
Isn't Poker just gambling?
No. Poker is a game of skill, and every decision you make is about maximising your Expected Value or EV for short. And i will explain why.
Most gambling games, like roulette, for instance have a negative EV for you, and a positive EV (5.49% in this case) for the casino. You can wiki roulette to see how they do the calculations. Meaning - sure in the short run you could win, but in the long run, if you played the game 1000 times, the casino would always end up winning by about 5.49%. These gambling games are in favour of the house.
Poker however, pits you against other players and not the house. In a full ring game (9 players) or shorthanded game (6 players), you want to make the best EV decisions against the many other players playing worse(making -EV decisions) than you.
A very simple example would be if you were delt AA before the flop came (preflop), which everyone knows is the best hand preflop. This hand has an about 80% chance to win against any other hand preflop. If u played and raised all in with this hand against a player who played and called every all in, you would undoubtedly have a huge edge as you will be an 80% favourite every time, making it a +EV decision. Of course this is an exagarated example and playing one hand would be silly so what you would do is play say the top 20% of hands. Against a person who plays maybe 70% of their hands, you again, will be making a +EV decision every time u play with him as chances are your starting hands have a lot higher probability to win. This is just scraping the surface, and there is an EV attached to every decision and every situation. As such, many sites often provide starting hand charts for beginners to use, as this would be the simplest way to boost your EV.
A limit holdem starting hand chart from Stox Poker
![[image loading]](http://knol.google.com/k/-/-/2d3sme8l1xe89/pf2x26/starting-hand-chart.jpg)
However, there is always variance and in the short term poorer players might get lucky, win big but thats also what attracts them to come back. In the long term, a good player who always makes +EV decisions will always end up a long term winner. And that is why poker is not gambling but a game of skill of understanding and exploiting your opponents mistakes.
Is online poker safe?
Extremely. Some sites have over 50,000 people logged in at one time. They run advertistments on the TV and the web. Major sites are listed on the stock market. Any bad publicity would affect their business so these sites often provide top notch customer service. As long as you don't do anything silly like giving people your password, or getting keylogged at a pubic internet cafe, your money is in very safe hands. These sites have no incentive to cheat when dealing hands, as you bet against other players, not the house. If anything, they want to be extremely fair as they want you to play as they earn their income in the form of "rake" which is a very small % cut (less than 1% usually) of the total pot. Unlike the casino, you are playing against the other player, and not the house.
Obviously if the poker site seems very dodgy, you have heard of it, they don't advertise, there aren't many players - you wouldn't be depositing your money in there. But for the vast majority of sites, they are very safe and reputable.
Where should i play?
Two of the biggest sites are Pokerstars and Full Tilt Poker These sites have lots of traffic, play money tables, plenty of freeroll tournaments and the very best customer support. If you're a beginner i suggest playing at these sites when you start soley because of the number of games available (play money too), and the excellent support.
The site says "Deposit and get another $600!" OMG! Do i really get another X amount after depositing?
Sadly, not right away, and its kind of misleading in that sense as no one bothers to read the fine print. Well for some sites you get a very small portion (around 10%) of your deposit instantly, but that is rare. What the sites normally mean by this is, you deposit $600, and then after you accumulate a certain amount of player points, they will give you your $600. Now these player points are accumulated by playing raked hands, meaning the sites gets rake from you (for every pot above x amount), gives you player points in return, and if u reach the required points you get that "bonus" which is effectively giving you back a percentage of the money they raked from you. Long story short, this takes about a month of constant play, is very hard to clear at any limit below NL25, and bonuses are effectively about 20-50% rakeback. So bonuses are a good thing of course, but what actually happens is the site is just giving you back 20-50% of the money they took from you.
Is there an online community?
The biggest online community would have to be the 2+2 forums. Basically what happened was David Sklansky wrote a whole bunch of extremely popular poker books, published by 2+2. Players naturally flocked to the site to discuss everything poker related in the forums and a community was born. Posters discuss everything from graphs of their yearly winnings, their desktop setup, the optimal way to play certain hands, and the usual whine post of the bad beat that they just suffered. This site along with TL's sister site, liquidpoker, are very good places to visit daily to improve your game.
![[image loading]](http://knol.google.com/k/-/-/2d3sme8l1xe89/pf2x26/thebryce2007yearendpt.jpg)
"TheBryce" posted his 2007 poker winnings in this 2007 yearly winnings graph 2+2 forum post. Which was subsequently met with "OMG" "SICK" etc, sending 99% of the population on life tilt. Probably the most amazing stats ever posted. Yes, he made 2.587 mil over 157k hands.
