By Mike Caro
People read books. People read books on poker. People read books on poker and they study and study. People read books on poker and they study and study and then they sit down for their first cardroom experience. Then what?I’ll tell you then what. Then they most likely have chosen to seat themselves in a $1-$2, $2-$4, or $3-$6 limit seven-card stud or hold’em game and nothing seems the way it was promised. What good does it do to know about check-raising, about reraising aggressively to get extra value, or about tricking your foes?

What they don’t know might hurt them. Those foes don’t even know that they’re in danger of being check-raised or what it means when that happens. They don’t understand why a medium-strong hand is OK to play against a single raise, but often not OK to play against a reraise. And they aren’t likely to be tricked, because they don’t have a firm understanding about what a nontrick play should look like.

Instead of going into casino poker games unarmed, as was necessary years ago when no credible books laid out winning strategies for cardroom poker, lots of new players today do something very smart. They decide…. read rest of article at Poker Pages

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