Is your poker fashion sense a faux pas or just ace?
STAY COOL! AVOID CLOTHES! One of the problems when a phenomenon like Poker Mania strikes is that every jack the lad site on the worldwide web tries to cash in on it. The internet is now dotted with hundreds of clothing companies trying to sell us all poker shirts and accompanying gross clobber. Most of the shirts consist of orange or yellow background short sleeve numbers in cheap cotton plastered with images of sunglasses, beer logos, casino chips, cards and buckets of fried chicken. Anyone turning up at a serious social poker game wearing one of these shirts is going to receive a variety of greetings.
HERE’S WHAT TO EXPECT If it happens to be a game in Hicksville, South Carolina then “neat choice”! You might just sneak in under the radar between the in-bred, one-eyed small-arms dealer who had a background role in Bowling for Columbine and is planning to enact the sequel “live” with his three second cousins and the county fair pig whose owner lets it drink Budweiser from the bar tap. In Knightsbridge or Mayfair such a garment would be a sure-fire sartorial ticket to the pavement and in Peckham the laughter would make your ears bleed just seconds before the bullets removed most of the offending visuals along with those organs of your body situated directly behind them. So be warned. Poker players may often wear eccentric gear, sometimes Armani and occasionally denims and a T-shirt but they remain cool at all times. Trust me, in a decent “live” game, a cool image is more important than knowing how to launch an effective straddle-raise.
MAXIMISE YOUR CHANCES Mathematics tends to be a reliable discipline so keep the following tip in mind. When you’re lucky enough to be in late position, the odds predict you should always play aggressively no matter what you’re usual playing style may be. So what do you do about this numerical fact as a new player? Simple really: Raise prior to the flop. You may well steal the blinds despite the quality of your hand. If you are “called” turn up the betting heat another notch. It’s a mathematical fact that most hands miss most flops. When your partner next asks what you want for your birthday put in a polite request for an inexpensive calculator with a “combinations” (nCr) button. Read the instructions carefully or look them up on the web. You can use a calculator of this type to properly evaluate the chances of your hand winning almost any game from an odds and combinations point of view. Above all, and to sum up, the equation: LATE POSITION PLUS AGGRESSION=SUCCESS- will be correct eight times out of ten.
