by PokerListings.com
The Zone System was first introduced by Dan Harrington in his highly acclaimed book Harrington on Hold’em, Volume II: The Endgame. The system divides a poker tournament into five different zones based on a player’s stack size as compared to the blinds and antes. Each zone will affect your play and correct strategy will vary dramatically as a result. The ratio of your stack compared to the blinds and antes is referred to as your “M.” For example: You have $750 in chips and the blinds are $25/$50 with no antes. This means that you have 10 times more than the starting pot and your M is 10.
The Green Zone: M is 20 or More
In the Green Zone all weapons are at your disposal and you can play in all different kinds of playing styles. This is the place to be but you must be careful to balance your play in a way that allows you to continue building your stack while simultaneously protecting it. You can afford to play in both a super conservative style as well as in a super aggressive style.
The Yellow Zone: M is 10-20
You can no longer play conservative (tight) poker. The blinds and antes are starting to hurt your stack and you must…. read rest of article at PokerListings.com

By Lou Krieger
As poker’s popularity continues to grow in the United States and overseas, experienced home game players as well as those who are new to the game itself, continue to sidle up to casino poker tables asking to be dealt in. Although new and exciting, playing poker in a casino can be confusing at first, and new players are usually full of questions. This is particularly true, and quite understandable, when that newcomer is playing hold’em for the first time, since even experienced home game players may either be more familiar with stud or have played such a wide variety of home poker games that they may never have studied, or even thought about hold’em to any measurable degree.Some newcomers think they know it all. Others ask a lot of questions, particularly when they are attempting to learn hold’em the right way. Rather than simply sitting down and paying for lessons at the table, many new players - in an attempt to fast-track their own learning process - are reading books and using computer software to learn essential poker principles before attempting to put them in action in live games.

Some new players have read so extensively about poker that their questions are quite sophisticated. While these players are the exception rather than the rule, you can usually tell how schooled they are because their inquiries are aimed at sorting out information hierarchically, so they’ll know what’s important and how to apply that knowledge in the heat of battle. Players who haven’t read much about the game, or even thought about it at all, generally….  read rest of article at PokerPages

By Wil Wheaton
During this year’s WSOP, I had the extreme pleasure and good fortune to sit in on a few strategy lectures that Barry Tanenbaum gave in the Poker Stars hospitality suite. I was so impressed, and learned so much from the brief sessions, I hired Barry for a two-hour private consultation to identify and plug a few holes I thought I had in my no-limit tournament game. They helped tremendously — even though I didn’t make it far in the Main Event (my own fault for getting a case of the stupids) I subsequently used Barry’s advice at a Legends of Poker preliminary event and finished 40th out of 395, and in my first WWdN after returning home from the WSOP, where I final-tabled.

In other words, Barry Tanenbaum is The Man, and when he speaks, people who want to improve their game should listen.

Every week, Barry posts a Thought of the Week at his blog, which provides insight into a specific poker strategy or concept, and every week I read it and get one step closer to growing a level in poker.

This week, Barry addresses open-limping in hold’em, and why you should never do it:

read rest of article at Card Squad

Posted by Beck @ Steal The Blinds
I’ve been playing a fair number of low-stakes ($10+1 - $20+2) SNGs lately, and have been meeting with a great deal of success. I can safely attribute much of that success to many of the great posts on SNG play written by other bloggers out there. As such, I wanted to give something back, but couldn’t really think of a topic that hadn’t been covered. Then I hit on the idea of discussing specifically 4 handed play (i.e. when the original 9 or 10 players have dwindled to 4, with only the final 3 being paid) not as in SNGs which start out with only 4 players). That’s where I feel my game is at its strongest, and If I last that long, I routinely go from 3rd-4th place to 1st-2nd place by the time the bubble pops.

Play on the bubble in any tournament, obviously, is a very different dynamic from play at any other point. Everyone is terrified of getting knocked out one off the money, and there are substantial advantages to be gained as a consequence of the simple fact that your opponents are cognizant of the potential to merely fold their way into the money. The last thing they want to do is take a risk which could knock them out in 4th after having spent close to an hour slogging it out in the trenches of a one table war.

The way to take advantage of this timidity is to…. read rest of article at Steal The Blinds

If you know something about poker, you know that you should be folding a lot of your starting hands, right? And what are the best hands, the one you should be playing with? There are a lot of lists available, and some desktop backgrounds to the online poker player.

In the book “Hold’em Poker for Advanced Players” (see below) , David Sklansky and Mason Malmuth divide the starting hands in groups, in a simple but effective way, and we will show our version below.

Before that, let’s remember some poker glossary:

So, JTs = a Jack and a 10 of the same suit. AQo means an Ace and a Queen, with different suits. Axs = an Ace and a small card, like 5 for example, both of the same suit. Pairs are always off-suit, since we only use one deck in Texas Hold’em.

Connectors = consecutive cards, like 8 and 7, which makes it easier to do a straight. Suited connectors are even better, since they also increase the chances of a flush.

Now let’s see the groups. You already know, or will learn right now, that position is tremendously important in Texas Hold’em. The key to success in this game is….  read rest of article at The Online Poker Life