This may sound like a complex type of product for the retail buyer, but it is much more simple than it sounds. In fact as far as decision making is concerned, these products are simpler than regular financial products indeed. But first let us explain what these so-called binary options (also called digital options) are.

Let us say the price of gold is $1700 and you believe that next month the price will be above $1750. Previously there was not much you could do to make a trade representing this view with a limited potential loss. Buying gold itself meant that you could lose a lot if the price dropped, so this is a risky trade and the risk reward is not favorable. But with a binary option you can take this exact bet that the price will be over $1750.

In fact you can buy a digital option that will give you a profit if the price of gold effectively closes above $1750 next month. If it does not, than you lose the value of the option as you were wrong with the bet. Alternatively some binary option brokers will pay you a minimum amount if you are wrong, such as 15% of the bet.

There are a number of advantages of these novel financial products.

For one thing there are only two possible outcomes, either right or wrong. So you do no need to worry about selling or keeping your position, it will expire automatically. On the other hand if you buy an asset the tough question is always when to sell it. If the trade is profitable it might be easier to sell, but in case of a loss it can be hard to sell and to admit being wrong. Loss aversion is a well know psychological phenomenon affecting traders, but binary options avoid this issue.

Nowadays everyone can easily trade binary options on the Internet. It is simple to open an account and to make a deposit, and these platforms offer tons of tutorials and education material so that you learn the ropes before jumping into the water.

As some of you may know I have basically been a Limit Holdem player for most of my time playing. I decided to adventure into the realm of big bet poker as opposed to a fixed betting structure. At the moment I am playing 6 max games, for the simple fact that usually there are more tables going than full ring games.

So I might be kind of missing a step by starting out a completely new game at shorthanded tables. However I am playing low limits to get started and my experience at least from limit holdem is that a lot of players in shorthanded games play considerably looser than full ring, to the point that they open up their game too much and play too many marginal hands.

If i can capitalize on that it will hopefully be pretty profitable. My only real exposure to the game so far has been Ciaffone and Stuart Reuben’s books, along with about 20K hands at the $10 and $25 tables. I just found out today that Rolf Slotboom’s was shipped so I should have that soon, which I’m looking forward to reading it as well.

Not sure how into what I am getting into, but if nothing else I have my own place to vent about poker. I play poker mostly as a hobby, my feelings are it is better than sitting in front of a TV for a few hours. Archery is my other hobby, I have shot competitively for a number of years. Although this year I won’t have the time to dedicate to shooting like I have in the past. Hopefully next season I won’t be as busy. Either way, I have been debating whether or not to start Omaha, guess we’ll see how it goes.

Alright since this is supposed to be based mostly on Omaha, I have to have this in here, so I don’t need to go hunting for it. It is not mine and it might be posted on here too. But I believe it was taken from someone else’s poker blog. But I get a kick out of it every time I see it, so without further delay.

This game is really scummy, and well above what I can afford to play. My entire bankroll is riding on this one session going well. This is Teddy CIA’s place, where they only play Pot Limit Omaha, the most sophisticated game in Europe.

Then you are surely going to hear about her in the nearest future. Recently she has become the most famous, high-profile, New York lawyer after making a gambling debt worth $1 million. The most interesting thing about this case is that Taveras has made this debt using the money which she had stolen from her clients. Today she wants to regain the money by suing the casinos for making her addicted to the whopping $20 million, all-night gambling marathons.

This ill-fated event proves that the U.S gambling industry instead of being banned should be immediately regulated as is the case in other countries such as France. There if you use a code marketing pokerstars, you get a 100% bonus for playing at pokerstars.fr, and this is perfectly legal. Regulation in the US would help make the online casinos fair and responsible for their clients. Ineffective tracking of gamblers who frequently visit land-based casinos would finally go out of date.

But Taveras will probably get nothing. The lawsuit has just been filed. Now only time will tell whether the judge will have the courage to announce a settlement. Many people cannot believe that such an event accomplished a case in a court.

Taveras harbors a grudge against casinos that they did not stop her from bankruptcy, though they had seen how much and how frequently she did loose. As far as we know some of those gambling sessions took place during the whole night. But Taveras naively thinks that she can accuse the casinos of not protecting her form herself, even when she wanted to commit a suicide.

Although people enter the game on their own responsibility, the casinos should take care of their players, and try to protect them; hence there is a grain of truth in Taveras’ claim. But there is no excuse for playing at the casino with stolen money. Therefore it seems that the lawsuit should be thrown to the bin right away.

Those people who have a weak personality and who easily get addicted should treat Taveras’ story as a warning against gambling.

The Internet technology is not like most of the ill-informed politicians consider it to be. It is sophisticated enough to provide its users with an effective systems that would prevent the underage and solve most of the gambling issues.

And the idea of this strategy, in a nutshell is that you aim to play your best in every possible situation without the knowledge of the distribution of the rest of the cards in the deck. Winning a blackjack hand significantly depends on your skills, the effort that you wish to invest in it and the circumstances of your play.

A simple blackjack strategy played well is far better than a more advanced strategy played with errors. Also you need to appear like a relaxed, normal player and not like a card counter. If you want to be a successful blackjack player, master basic strategy, so to cut the house edge.

Most players start learning by referring to a basic strategy chart. This strategy chart shows you how to play your first 2 cards based on the dealers up cards. The basic goal of blackjack is to beat the dealer’s hands without going over 21. The first and foremost rule of a supreme blackjack strategy is that you should always consider the dealer’s up cards and just not your own cards while making a decision. That is, you musn’t take a card if you have a low hand because if the dealer also has a very weak hand he could just as easily bust.

The blackjack strategy that comes second in priority list is the soft hand. A soft hand occurs when you are dealt an ace. An ace determines your decision to hit because it can count as either 11 points or 1 point towards your total hand. Obviously hitting on a soft hand is less risky. To increase your chances of winning when you are dealt a strong hand, you have to take advantage of it as it is your only means of offsetting the house advantage. Casinos vary the rules related  to what kind of hands you can double down. Splitting of pairs is also a very important strategy because it maximizes your odds of coming across as a winner.

As a general rule for beginners, never split 10’s or 5’s and always split aces and 8’s. Splitting pairs is by far one of the simplest blackjack strategies you can capitalize on. If you deviate from the optimal basic strategy at all because of hunches, fear, intuition, bad experiences or simply adapting the incorrect basic blackjack strategy table for the game you are playing, your expected losses at the blackjack table will significantly increase.

The blackjack basic strategy is a mathematically proven formula and indicates the best decision – hit, stand, double split or surrender that a player can make in any situation. The intermediate blackjack strategy instructs a player how to wager such that his winnings will increase, regardless of how each players hand happens to come out. The advanced blackjack strategy enables the player to take advantage of profitable situations by placing larger wagers on hands he is likely to win.

But what is luck? Is there a scientific definition of luck?

According to the specialists in statistics, whether the misfortune of having cancer or win the lottery, it is always a random event.

Sometimes statisticians are unable to model the causes of an event: when you flip a coin for example, a frequent reference in online gambling like in the ‘coin flip’ lingo used in poker, you do not control how the coin is flipped. It is always an admission of helplessness.

Luck does not exist then? For the scientist the answer is clear: there is no such thing as luck, and ‘good luck’ does not mean anything. Each time you play the lotto, all combinations have a chance to get out. If some win, it is simply due to chance. Winning the lottery is simply living one event among several million possible.

In the scientific sense, this should not happen. But how do we explain extraordinary events, either positive or negative? We are constantly faced with an infinite number of possible events from which very few occur, but they are the ones we are talking about. Take the September 11 attacks. Some people went to the World Trade Center that day without planning for it. Should we conclude that they have had bad luck? Probably not.

These events have struck because of to our vision of reality, as we naturally focus on the number of deaths and not on the number of people who remained alive. The difference between luck and chance in the way of seeing things.

In the game of lotto, people talk about random chance when the jackpot is awarded to an unknown, but talk about luck if it is assumed that the winner was ‘chosen’. Luck is in the domain of belief and faith. It is reassuring to think that we live in a regulated system rather than in a world dominated by chance, but the vision of science is quite different.

Lucky or not, everyone can win. Can luck be caused? In genetics, it is observed that the species that survive are the ones taking risks. Luck can be courted, and playing is the only way to win. By the way use the pokerstars bonus code 2011 and there is no need for luck to make money with it.

But a bettor who knows horses well has more chance of winning than one who plays the birthday of his grandmother. Is there therefore a rational way to play? Of course! But certain rules must be respected. Most importantly stop believing in good fortune and assess the risks of events when you play online casino games. Then, you will not be surprised by the outcome, either way.

Right now I am playing at Carbon Poker where I got a great rakeback deal. Since I cashed out about $50k over the last six months, I have hardly any money online. I made a $900 deposit which I have run up to $5k now at Carbon Poker. My goal is to grind it back up to about 10k and then get back on Full Tilt Poker soon.

If I get frustrated grinding NL200 and I am crushing it, I will probably just wire over $20k to full tilt to start there playing again. I am considering high stakes ring games again, I think it will be hard but doable. I think I can put in enough hours to make a good profit, I do not know if I can deal with the swings and playing that many tables profitably.

But if i do go to the full tilt high stakes tables, I only need a small win rate like 0.5 pt to make $130k a year. Which is pretty decent, considering my win rate over the last 200k hands 8 tabling is like 2.5pt. I really think its doable for me. I just need to get some more practice in, I will probably be 12 or 14 tabling towards the end of the year and using pokeredge.

As far as my Hold’em ebook goes, I have been working on it a little bit. I have my writer Mike working on it a lot more than me. At the moment it does not make sense for me to work full time on it, so if I can grind a good earning consistently more than I am paying my writer, I am not losing a lot of money. Hopefully things will start picking up, once there is more content I will probably start to market it more. We also managed to get a killer interview with an excellent poker player, and this will add a lot of value to the ebook

Catch you all on the flip side,

The point is: the hours can be achieved even if they aren’t all at once, and you shouldn’t try to push the issue and force out hours, but find a way to comfortably put them in. I’m pretty sure I still have the record for laziest poker pro, clocking in at around 16 hours a week, trying to make it 20 now. I play at lots of sites and lots of limits, and even have a large portion of my pokertracker hands at another computer, so no sample size is really very significant. Full Table? Shorthanded? I really forgot how to play well at a full table thanks to the massive amounts of shorthanded I’ve been playing.

I played about 2 hours of $10/$20 (6 max) on 3 tables at PokerStars. I finished up $406. I struggled for quite a while but was able to make a nice profit near the end of the session. I think I might just put in 1 more short session tonight. I am doing more than $15/hr four tabling (almost 4tabling, sometimes i just play my regular 3) the NL$50 tables. I wonder if I could have this winning rate and the $400NL tables….that would be nice.

Basically I took $200 from my job and deposited on Paradise Poker and slowly lost it. I then deposited $260 on Party Poker and slowly lost it. I I then deposited $200 on Party Poker again and in very very large part thanks to studying PLO more seriously, I was able to start turning a profit and building a bankroll. It should also be noted that I am not as good as this makes me seem, I’ve been running very well for about 2 and half months now. Solid is really not a good definition of my play in anything but multi table tournaments when my table isn’t playing tight. I play more hands than the fish and I put in more bets than the maniac.

Poker is a very complex game obviously. Because poker is a game with a great deal of combinatorial complexity, most poker analysis is done by making a variety of simplifying assumptions.

In the case of the Jam or Fold problem, the game is restricted to a heads-up action in the preflop round. The action of the first opponent is limited to to either folding or raising all-in. Likewise, the second opponent is only given the option of either calling the all-in raise or folding.

Under these restrictions an exact solution to the problem can be formed. The solution consists of an attack matrix for the first opponent, and a defend matrix for the second opponent. The usual formulation of the Jam or Fold problem is as follows:

• The first player is in the small blind
• The second player is in the big blind
• The blinds are 1/2
• The raise is expressed in terms of big blinds
• Both players may choose to play any hand

The solution to this problem can either be solved directly using minimization techniques like the simplex method, or iteratively where updates are done in a way to ensure that both matrices eventually converge to a stable solution.

So an exact solution to the Jam or Fold problem exists. However, that solution is still an approximation. If any of the actual game parameters deviate from the assumed parameters optimal strategy will differ to a lesser or greater degree. Even if everyone folds to you in the small blind, the distribution of cards has been skewed significantly. The presence of a player who has entered the pot voluntarily will make a Jam or Fold solution inapplicable.

If the two players have over 30 big blinds to play out the hand with, the solution again becomes impractical. You are forced to open with a very narrow range of hands, which denies you many good opportunities to play hands which are clearly profitable.

In practice, Jam or Fold can be used as an effective opening strategy when a player’s stack shrinks to a level between 10-15 big blinds or less. For example, if you have 10 big blinds and can open with a Jam from late position, you should consider using a solution to the Jam or Fold problem as a guide in choosing your action. Likewise, if you are in the big blind and facing a Jam from a late position short stack, you might want to consider whether or not to call based on a Jam or Fold solution.

Without a doubt, the recent scandal concerning two popular online casinos has grown to a very big size as all media are paying much of their attention to Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet.

Both poker rooms involved in the scandals are licensed from the Kahnawake Gaming Commission. In detail, for everyone not fully familiar with the issue, the KGC operates outside of the scrutiny of Canadian law and as an alternative is a way for the Mohawk tribe to receive enormous levels of revenue.

The recent scandal has begun when the Washington Post published an article in which they highly criticize the KGC, soon after, even the Sixty Minutes TV program also included several elements of very strong criticism for the unknown real nature of the Kahnawake Gaming Commission’s licensing and directives.

The truth is that unlike many other online casinos and for sure the licensing jurisdictions, the KGC seems to be pretty mysterious an what is more, even refuses to answer some of the very basic and general questions concerning the way that the Commission simply operates.

Moreover, even such information as the number of workers in the KGC are not known. Frank Catania, without a doubt, has a long standing and respected reputation among the whole online casino gambling industry. In fact, this year Catania accepted the KGC’s appeal to investigate the two online casino poker scandals. Furthermore, Catania’s results was the statement of a player for the Ultimate Bet scandal.

What is more, Catania came across some additional information. For example that the Kahnawake Gaming Commission is a small run operation with only three board members and a very secretive way for the selection and regulation process. However the Commission has not announced any additional information about the amount of employees who work for the KGC.

While we can’t tell you all of the details (since nobody knows), we do know that the three guys mentioned above, as well as some other big name pro’s have gotten together to create some of the sickest prop bets of the year. First off, Daniel Negreanu and Phil Ivey have some sort of bet on who will win the most bracelets this year. Beyond that, for each bracelet won the loser owes the winner $200,000. With Negreanu winning his first bracelet of the year in the $2000 Limit Hold’em event #20, Daniel not only collects $204K for his win, but another $200K from Ivey! In the words of Daniel Negreanu “Me-1, Ivey-0?.

According to PokerProp.net, Ivey also has a bet with Ted Forrest ($500,000 rumor) that he’ll win 2 bracelets this year. With other players, Phil is reported to have huge bets that he’ll win one bracelet this year. The dollar amounts are sketchy right now, but apparently Phil has been taking bets getting as low as 1.8 to 1 odds that he’ll win a bracelet. Other reports state that he’s getting as ‘high’ as 2.5 to 1. Either way, those odds are pretty terrible for Ivey and with 22 of the 54 events already over, Ivey’s going to need to pull a rabbit out of his arse….or stick or horseshoe in it.

What we know for sure: There are lot’s of high-stakes prop bets going on this year. Phil Ivey’s wife is gonna be pissed when she can’t buy her new Gucci bag. Daniel Negreanu will buy it for her.

What we don’t know….yet: The exact dollar figures. The size of the sledgehammer Ivey’s wife is going to use on his McLaren. If Ivey will be renting a room from Negreanu or Forrest.

What we want to know: Everything, are you kidding me? The prop bets are what make the WSOP so much fun! Although we hate to perpetuate those who use prop bets, costumes, and general retardedness as a way to make it on TV, we do want to see all the prop bets, costumes, and retards…..on TV.

So, if you’re planning on playing in one of this years televised events, wear your Peter Griffin fat suit, get the Pink Panther tattoed on your forehead, or bet your future children on what card is coming next! We don’t care that it’s at your own expense, that’s not our problem. Be a man and claim your 15 minutes of fame, no degenerate poker player can keep his wife forever anyway!

Want to get in on the action? You can at the Bodog Sportsbook, where there are a multitude of fun prop bets you can bet on. You can bet on which player will last the longest in the $50,000 HORSE event, what blogger will win the most money during the main event, or a wide variety of other prop-bets as well. You can also bet on which former Main Event Champion will last the longest in the Main Event. Anyone for Jerry Yang at 16:1? I didn’t think so. What’s especially funny in this particular prop is that 2002 Main Event champ (ugh) Robert Varkonyi isn’t even on the list. You’d think the Bodog would clean house with this pick eh?