by Chris “Jesus” Ferguson
I’m nine months into an experiment on Full Tilt Poker. I’m attempting to turn $0 into a $10,000 bankroll.

With no money to start, I had no choice but to begin playing freerolls. Starting out, I’d often manage to win a dollar or two, but I’d quickly get busted and have to start over again. It took some time but, after a while, I was eventually able to graduate to games that required an actual buy-in. As of this writing, my bankroll stands at $225.96, so I’m well on my way.

Even today, people don’t believe it’s really me when I sit down at Full Tilt’s small stakes games. They ask what I’m doing down here, and often tell me stories about how they turned $5 into $500 or $100 into $1,000. Usually, these stories end with them telling me that they…. read rest of article at Bluff Magazine

It seemed like we hadn’t won a sit-n-go tournament in years. We wondered: Were we getting unlucky or were we just crap? Enter Shannon Shorr, Chip Ferguson, and Joey Michael, three of the internet’s most celebrated sit-n-go specialists, to point us in the right direction. Oh, and it turns out we were just crap.

Bluff: Tell us how you began playing sit-n-gos online and what levels you played

Shannon Shorr: I played mostly on Party as BLUFFforRENT, and I mostly played the Speed $215/530s. [A “speed” or “turbo” sit-n-go is a sitn- go in which the blinds move up more rapidly than they would in a normal one.]

Joey Michael: I play as Newtbuggins on Party and bigjoe2003 on PokerStars. I started playing sit-n-gos in December, 2005. I began with the $55s and moved to the $215s when Party did the software and structure upgrade for their sit-n-gos. Then this May, I moved up to the $530s, and have been playing those ever since.

Chip Ferguson: I’ve been playing sit-n-gos since September 2005. I started playing the $109s, and moved up to the $215s in February, and finally started playing $530s in May. My screen name is z32fanatic on all sites….. read rest of article at Bluff Magazine

By Michael Rome
Poker experts recommend playing in opposition to the table. If players are tight, be more aggressive; if they are aggressive, then tighten up. Although this is a simple and powerful technique, it can be difficult to put into practice. We have all seen the situation in which a whole table is quickly checking or folding. This cycle can last for numerous hands, and when it does, alarms should be going off in our heads. We ought to start playing aggressively — regardless of our hole cards. Instead, we are lulled into the group dynamic, as though in some form of poker trance. Later we think back and realize a bet would have taken down the pot. It is easy to underestimate the hypnotic sway of the status quo. As humans we are cultural lemmings who have a difficult time turning against the tide of the mob. Mark Twain observed that the price of independent thinking is loneliness. In poker, however, we are rewarded for opposing conformity (rewarded in chips, not popularity)….. read rest of article at Bluff Magazine

by Fred Thompson
Many people believe that playing live poker is the only way to play because there are many good tells you can use to gain an edge over the opposition. However, players shouldn’t make decisions solely based on tells. Instead, they should think of each hand as a puzzle, with tells being a small piece. You want to add up different pieces of information to complete the puzzle.The problem with tells is that most people rely almost exclusively on them and end up making the wrong decisions because they fail to incorporate other vital information into their game. Equally important factors are how an opponent is betting, what type of player they are, what their current mood is, and how they’ve played in the past.

Let’s talk about the following tells and how you can use them to exploit the players at your table…. read rest of article at PokerListings.com

by Supermoves
Ok, so you don’t suck. You are now making it into the cash fairly regularly. But for some reason, you’re not winning, you’re not even final tabling. It seems that you make it into the cash, but you just can’t seem to parlay it into a final table run. Well, here are a few suggestions about how to change your game that might allow you to make it a little deeper. Some of these may seem familiar, but some of them will hopefully be less obvious. You make it into the money, but with a short stack: This one may be more obvious, but very likely you are missing opportunities to “chip-up” around the bubble. Say there are 50 players getting paid and 55-60 players left. This is the time when you will run into two types of players; those who play tight to make the money and those who take advantage of such tight play. These players should be fairly easy to identify. Watch how many pots your opponents are playing and watch what types of hands they are showing down. Within 10-15 hands, you should be able to see who is playing tight and who is being aggressive. You want to…. read rest of article at PokerSavvy