Given the catastrophic loss of the US market it was fairly inevitable that many of the major online poker houses were going to start courting the European markets more heavily and so sees the announcement from PokerStars that they are to move the start times of all of their regular major tournaments to earlier times in the day.

This is a smart move by PokerStars and one that will inevitably snare more casual players to tourney play. We all know that a decent finish will see an investment in time of several hours so the earlier start times will be welcome to most in Europe.

A round up of many of the tournaments and start times are –

Sunday Kick-Off – 17:00 GMT
Sunday Warm-Up – 19:00 GMT
Sunday Rebuy – 20:00 GMT
Sunday Storm – 21:30 GMT
Sunday Million – 22:30 GMT
Sunday 500 – 23:30 GMT
Sunday Second Chance – 00:30 GMT
Sunday Supersonic – 02:30 GMT

These new tournament start times begin on Sunday 5th June and as a kicker PokerStars are adding more than $200,000 worth of entries to a selection of daily satellites. Check out the lobby at PokerStars for details on the satellites if you are interested in getting a cheap entry.

In order to help you to calculate pot odds and the probability of you making particular poker hands pre-flop and after the flop you should carefully study the following percentage odds of you making your desired hand.

Probability of being dealt

Pocket aces – 0.45%
Any pocket pair – 5.9%
Any two suited cards to the river to make a flush – 6.4%

Probability of hitting on the flop

Turning a pocket pair into trips – 10.8%
Hitting a flush from two suited cards – 0.84%

Probability of hitting on the turn card

Making a straight from a gutshot draw – 9%
Making a straight from an open ended straight draw – 17%
A flush when you have 4 suited cards already – 19%
Making a full house from trips – 15%
Making a full house from two pair – 9%

Probability of hitting on the turn or river

Making a straight from a gutshot draw – 17%
Making a straight from an open ended straight draw – 32%
Making a full house from two pair – 17%
A flush when you have 4 suited cards already – 35%
A flush when you have 3 suited cards already – 4%

Probability of making on the river from the turn card

Making a straight from a gutshot draw – 9%
Making a straight from an open ended straight draw – 17%
Making a full house from trips – 22%
Making a full house from two pair – 9%

Out of interest I decided to play in one of the freerolls at PartyPoker that was geared towards the Drive the Dream promotion just to see what level the folks were playing at. What a mistake that was! Read on for details on why I believe PartyPoker is one of the worst online poker rooms around at the moment.

Basically PartyPoker ran 2 or 3 qualifiers in order to get through to the final $15,000 Guaranteed Drive the Dream Final Satellite that was to be played on 12th September. Anyway, I played in one of the freerolls which was so soft that I qualified for the 12th September tourney straightaway. Fair enough I thought, I might check out the action on 12th September as there are a couple of places on offer for the Drive a Dream Final in London.

So I was sat in front of my laptop on 12th September at 14:00ET ready for the off along with 800 odd other players. The tourney kicked off at the scheduled time and we got about 2 hands in and that where things started to go wrong…

After 2 hands were played our table was “paused” for a few minutes, this pattern then carried on for about 10 minutes after which we were then placed on a paused status for much longer. 5 minutes passed, then 10, the 20, then 30, during which time the other participants were getting restless and one even commented that is was a regular occurrence for PartyPoker to mess up monthly finals. I waited (foolishly) for 30 minutes on hold after which time I gave up and emailed PartyPoker support.

I won’t go into details with regards to the level of support offered by PartyPoker suffice to say that they couldn’t find me on their systems, and only accepted I was a player once I provided a screenshot. It went even further downhill from there. Additional attempts at resolution were even less satisfactory from the hapless support staff there.

So essentially, I am none the wiser as to why the tourney didn’t progress and there is no opportunity to re-play that I can see. The PartyPoker support staff are worse than useless and there has been no official communication to players that were due to play in the tourney so I guess that’s it! Serves you right for playing in a freeroll I hear you say. Fair comment. I won’t be doing it again, certainly not at PartyPoker.

The moral of this tale – avoid PartyPoker like the plague…

If you’ve ever played in DON (double or nothing) Sit N Go’s over at PokerStars you will likely have come across the user name rs03rs03 at your table. I did, but thought nothing of it. When he was on my tables day after day after day I started to get suspicious. There is actually quite an interesting story behind it…

If you find the same user on your table all the time one assumption could be that the player has been taking notes on your play and believes you to be a fish worth hooking. It is possible to basically follow you around the poker site and play at whatever table you decide to hit. I didn’t think this was the case with rs03rs03 as I’d previously taken notes on this player to the effect (more…)

When playing poker online it is important to gain as much of an advantage over your opponents as possible. Due to the nature of online poker you obviously can’t rely on a physical tell such as a twitch or a rub of the face. However, due to the privacy of playing online you can take notes on your opposition – not something that would go down well in a bricks and mortar casino!

Taking notes by hand is fine, but all poker sites now have a feature whereby you can take notes on particular players of your choosing and the record will be stored for you. Whenever that player pops up on a table you will be able to review all your prior notes.

It is clear that taking notes can be an extremely useful mechanism for attempting to gain an (more…)