Tag: paul phua poker

Paul Phua introduces the first in an exciting new series of videos for the Paul Phua Poker School YouTube channel featuring some of the world’s top pros

If you want to improve your poker and become a winning player, there is no better place to start than by watching strategy tips from the top pros. Phil Ivey, Dan Cates and Dan Colman have very generously given up some of their valuable time to film this video for the Paul Phua Poker School – and with these high-stakes cash and tournament players, “valuable time” is not merely a figure of speech!
Phil Ivey is a ten times World Series of Poker bracelet winner, and one of the most fearless and creative players of the game. Dan “Jungleman” Cates passed the $10 million online cash earnings milestone nearly three years ago. And Dan Colman has graduated from internet poker (he rose to fame in 2013 as the first hyper-turbo player to win $1 million on Pokerstars in a year) to take down $28 million in live tournament play.
The Paul Phua Poker School YouTube video team caught up with these players at the Triton High Roller Series in Manila this February, and their tips for beginners are just as insightful as you would expect. And it’s not only beginners who can benefit from their strategy advice.


Phil Ivey tells players that “an important thing is to be able to manage their money”. This is very true: many a player has gone bust by moving too quickly to levels they cannot really afford. For more detailed advice, see my previous Paul Phua Poker School blog on bankroll management.
Dan Colman recommends that you should “get out of your comfort zone”, and “play in difficult games”. This may seem strange: why choose a difficult game if you can find one with poor players instead? But this is something I myself did when starting out in poker. I challenged myself to play with some of the world’s top pros in high-stakes cash games, not because I arrogantly thought I could beat them, but because I humbly felt I could learn from them. If I have any skill at poker (and Phil Ivey has been kind enough to say that “Paul Phua is probably the best non-pro I’ve ever played poker against”), it is thanks to learning from the best.
And if you do find yourself up against more experienced players, Dan Cates’ advice in the video may prove especially valuable. He says, “The first tip for beginners would be to play tighter than they think.” Unless you are sure you can outplay everyone else around the table, you should pick your poker battles with care, going armed with only the best starting hands.
Those are just a few of the useful tips in the video that will improve your poker game. Watch it now to discover more, and subscribe to the Paul Phua Poker School YouTube channel so as not to miss new videos in the series. It’s free!
 

The recent success of the Lengpudashi poker AI in China, on top of Libratus’s victory in January, adds fuel to the skill vs. luck debate and may have implications for the legal status of poker, says Paul Phua

Last week a team of poker players in China were resoundingly defeated by “Lengpudashi”. Meaning “cold poker master”, Lengpudashi is the new, even more improved version of the Libratus AI (Artificial Intelligence) programme that I wrote about back in January.
Not surprisingly, this latest AI victory has been big news: people have worried for years that robots equipped with AI will take over human jobs. Now not even poker is safe. Though computer programmes long ago proved their superiority in the classic skill game of chess, until now the bluffing and intuitive elements of poker – its very human elements – had made it hard for a machine to master.

Skill vs. luck in poker

But there is one interesting aspect to this story that people don’t seem to be talking about. Any poker player will tell you that poker is a game of skill; that a pro like Phil Ivey may lose several pots to an amateur through misfortune, but let him play a thousand hands, and Ivey will surely come out on top. The law, however, does not always see it that way.
In many countries, poker is legally classified as a game of chance, which places it under the more restrictive legislation reserved for gaming. It’s the reason why online poker is illegal in America (except within certain states). It’s also the reason why, in England, poker pros do not have to pay tax on their gains – they are classified as winnings, just as in a lottery, and not as earnings.
For many years, people have tried to demonstrate scientifically what we poker players know from experience to be true: that poker is a game of skill, albeit one in which luck plays a significant part. As the renowned poker expert David Sklansky puts it, if only luck was involved, everyone would get to the river and show their cards, letting random chance decide the winner. Whereas, in fact, an analysis of a million PokerStars hands by the software company Cigital in 2009 showed that 75% of them never made it to showdown.
There have been other studies. Levitt and Miles, for instance, analysed the results of more than 30,000 players in the 2010 World Series of Poker, and found that players classified as “skilled” earned an average return of 30%, whereas unskilled players on average lost 15%. Set against that, a 2012 study by the Journal of Gambling Studies found no difference between the performance of skilled and unskilled players out of 300 participants, and argued from this that poker is a game of luck – though others have countered that this study only took place over the course of 60 hands, which may not have been long enough to allow skill to assert itself over luck.
Suffice it to say that luck vs. skill has been a hotly contended issue, with very important legal consequences hanging in the balance. Does the success of Libratus and its successor, Lengpudashi, finally provide the missing argument to demonstrate conclusively that skill is the determining factor?
No doubt it will take hundreds of thousands more hands to prove. Perhaps a human champion will yet emerge, like John Connor in the film The Terminator, to take on the machines. Or perhaps the cold, hard, application of science and probability, allied to an ever-improving computer programme that learns from its opponents and gives off none of the human tells, will implacably defeat even the best and brightest of our current poker generation.
Either way, no doubt legislators will be following the development of this poker AI keenly. And as for us human players, the lesson we can draw from Lengpudashi is that it’s more important than ever to brush up on our poker skills.
So keep reading my strategy blogs at Paul Phua Poker, and subscribe now to the Paul Phua Poker School YouTube channel, so as not to miss my exciting new videos featuring tips from the top pros.

With poker millionaires Charlie Carrel and “Xavi666” making headlines for their big wins, Paul Phua explains why it can take years to become an overnight success.

Two players deserve particular congratulations this week. One is a player from Panama known by his online name of “Xavi666”, who has just won over a million dollars in the PokerStars Guaranteed Sunday Million tournament. He is the 200th poker millionaire created on the online poker site.
The other is the personable young player Charlie Carrel. He proved a good ambassador for the game of poker when he was interviewed on a Channel 4 series in the UK called How’d You Get So Rich? It’s not often poker stories cross over to the mainstream media, but many national papers reported on the TV programme’s featurette on how Charlie Carrel turned his initial online stake of just £10 into £3 million.

The reason these stories have attracted so much attention is that they feed into a common dream about poker: that it’s an easy way to get rich quick.

The most famous example in poker history is when humble accountant Chris Moneymaker turned a $39 investment on PokerStars into $2.5 million in 2003. He entered a $39 satellite tournament, which got him into a $600 satellite, which won him a seat in the Main Event at the World Series of Poker – at which this gifted amateur won the whole thing.
But the truth is, all these players have put in a lot of work behind the scenes that you don’t see. I touched on this subject before in my blog on The Iceberg Illusion. Take young Charlie Carrel. He told the TV presenter Katherine Ryan that he started off at very low stakes, playing for 16 hours a day to improve his game, while living with his grandmother. Having studied Maths, Further Maths and Physics at A-Level, he made a detailed study of all the odds. He applied sensible bankroll management, only moving up to a new blind level when he was sure he had mastered the one he was on.
As to Xavi666, after winning his PokerStars million he said that “finally everything came together”. In other words, he had been working and playing hard to reach this point.
There’s a couple of old sayings that I find very insightful. One is, “It takes years to become an overnight success.” The other is, “The harder I work, the luckier I seem to get.”
What they both mean is that every time you see an actor, musician or poker player suddenly become famous, or seemingly “get lucky”, the chances are they have been perfecting their craft, unnoticed by the general public, for many years before that. When opportunity knocks, they are ready for it.
Certainly when I started at poker, I treated it as a challenge, something to work at. I had fun, of course, as I love the game, but I also had the desire to learn and improve. I regularly sat down to marathon high-stakes cash games with some of the world’s top poker pros, not because I felt I would “get lucky” against them, but so that I could learn from their strategy. That was nearly a decade ago, and I still analyse every big hand at the end of a big poker session to see if I could play it better if faced with a similar situation in the future.
So think about it. Are you going to play poker just for fun, staying in more pots than you should do with poor odds of success, in the hopes of getting lucky? Or are you going to play for fun and for profit, improving your game and learning new strategies over time so that, when you do get your shot at a big tournament, you have the skill and experience to become the next “overnight success”?
If it’s the latter, there is good news: some of the poker pros I often play with have kindly agreed to share their top tips and strategy advice with you, my loyal Paul Phua Poker School followers. There’s quite a line-up to my new video series. We have two big Dans (Cates and Colman), as well as Phil Ivey. Discover the full list of names and watch the trailer here.
So if you do dream of becoming the next Xavi666 or Charlie Carrel, a good first step is to go to the Paul Phua Poker YouTube channel and subscribe, so you don’t miss any Paul Phua Poker School videos. It’s free!
 

Do you want to watch poker tips and poker strategy advice from Phil Ivey, Dan Colman, Dan “Jungleman” Cates and many more top Texas Holdem players? Of course you do!

Hi, it’s Paul Phua here with some very exciting news. My new series of “Tips from the pros” and “In Conversation” videos is almost ready for you to watch! Three months ago I released a series of poker videos on my YouTube channel, and I noticed that the two “Paul Phua In Conversation With Tom Dwan” videos were the most watched, with more than 20,000 views.


So when some of the world’s finest poker players joined me in Manila this February at the Triton High Roller Series, I asked my video team to capture some of their best poker tips and strategy advice. Which poker pros will appear in the video series over the next four months? Watch the trailer video on this page, or read on:

Phil Ivey. That’s right, Phil Ivey! Phil is an incredible player, absolutely fearless, brilliant at reading his opponents. He has ten World Series of Poker bracelets and nearly $24 million in live tournament cashes, even though he primarily plays high-stakes cash games.
Dan Colman. Dan Colman ranks above even Phil Ivey in the list of the ten biggest live tournament earners, having defeated Daniel Negreanu heads-up for a massive payout of $15.3 million in the Big One for One Drop at the 2014 World Series of Poker, only a few days after his 24th birthday. This February he won the 2017 Triton Super High Roller Series Manila HK$ 250,000 6-Max Event, and then, just two weeks later, he won the Aria $25,000 High-Roller as well.
Dan Cates. Also known as Daniel “Jungleman” Cates, after his online poker name, Dan passed the $10 million online cash earnings milestone nearly three years ago. His famously aggressive playing style has made him one of the most formidable heads-up and shorthanded players in the world.
Timofey Kuznetsov. Playing under the name “Trueteller”, Timofey Kuznetsov is another online poker specialist. He hit the headlines in 2015 for a marathon 30-hour high-stakes heads-up session against Phil Ivey on PokerStars during which they played nearly 5,000 hands, and last week he was revealed to be the biggest online winner of the year so far.
Winfred Yu. As President of the Poker King Club, Winfred Yu runs the world’s highest-stakes cash games, in Manila and Macau. He is, of course, a terrific player himself, and has been active on the poker circuit for more than a decade.
Wai Kin Yong. Poker is in Wai Kin Yong’s blood – he is the son of the businessman and high-stakes player Richard Yong. In November 2016 he took down one of the biggest prizes in tournament poker (over $2m) at the Triton Super High Roller Series Main Event in Manila.
Rui Cao. Rui Cao emerged nearly a decade ago as one of France’s strongest players. He built his reputation online as “PepperoniF” before challenging the Macau high-stakes cash games as far back as 2011.
Go subscribe now to the Paul Phua Poker YouTube channel, so as not to miss a thing. It’s free!

I know a lot of my readers are amateur players, practising at home to perfect their game so they can place bigger bets and play bigger tables.

Paul Phua gallery image 9
deck of cards

For that reason, a lot of the stuff on my website is given over to advice on strategy and tactics of play. However, there is one important aspect of poker I haven’t discussed yet – the cards themselves!

The deck you use to play poker won’t necessarily make a huge difference to your success at the game, but I thought it might be interesting for me to tell you a bit about the different types of card deck out there, what brands are being used by pros in casinos, and which might be best for your home play.
A standard deck has 52 cards – a tradition that has been around for more than 500 years. There are more than 80,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 different outcomes to the order of shuffle of the 52 cards. The fact that number has 67 zeros means you are extremely unlikely to get the same arrangement twice.
In a casino, it’s pretty standard practice to have more than one deck of cards to hand – this is a good idea in any poker game because if one deck gets damaged or marked, you can switch to the back-up. A marked deck can give an advantage to any player who can spot the marks. In poker rooms, the two decks will usually be two different colours so they are easily distinguished. Most of the cards you buy online will come in sets of two decks and have these contrasting back colours.
For a game at home, I would recommend changing deck every two hours or so. That’s because even an undamaged deck can become marked with fingerprints, or food and drink stains – common for games at home.

However, if a card becomes visibly damaged you should change it immediately.  Players can track the damaged card. If you’re hosting a mini-tournament make sure if that you have a couple of packs per table.

Quite often in professional games, a player might ask for a “new setup”, which is them asking if the decks can be changed. Usually this is because they feel they have had a bad run with the deck of cards currently in use, and want to change their luck with a new pack. I am quite superstitious so I understand – but it can slow the game down quite a bit if you are changing deck every other hand!

When you are thinking about which cards to buy it can be quite overwhelming – there are so many brands and types of deck that you can buy online.

The two basic types of playing cards are 100% plastic cards and paper cards which have then been coated in plastic.
Casinos will always use the 100% plastic ones – and these are the type I prefer to play with. However, coated cards are the more common – they are the sort you will find at a supermarket. However, they are not durable enough for sustained play, and get marked or scuffed much more easily than plastic ones. So if you are going to play quite a bit of poker with your friends, I would go for the more expensive but better value 100% plastic cards.
Professionals use them. Casino dealers like them because they deal nicely and slide smoothly across the table. At a pro-table a dealer will usually use a machine to shuffle the deck, but at home these plastic cards shuffle nicely in your hands and carry a good weight.
It’s not too hard to find plastic cards online, and you can even find the same brands as they use in professional tournaments – which can be useful practice if you are working your way up to your first competition! The brands used most often in casinos are Kem, Copag, Gemaco and Modiano. Kem are probably the most popular because they are used on the World Series of Poker and the World Poker Tour.
One thing a lot of people ask is whether there are different rules for a standard size or design of cards in different countries, but in my experience the international standard is 63.5mm X 88.9mm with regular denomination, suit, and court cards.
But, as I said before – the cards should be your tool to win. It’s useful to have a couple of good decks, but if you are going to invest in something to improve your game, it should be your time.

Hello Paul here again,

 

In Chinese culture we talk a lot about luck. Much more than in the West. Objects. Dates. Actions. Behaviors. Numbers. Even buildings! They can be lucky or unlucky. It’s a big part of our lives. And for an Asian poker player you can imagine that the way the numbers and suits fall on the table is something I think about a lot. Is it luck?! Maybe!

 

But success isn’t the same as luck. You can make a good job of bad cards. And a bad job of good ones. My website is full of advice on how you can make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, a phrase my English born teachers taught me back at school in Malaysia when I was young. 

 

So through poker – and my wider business life in fact – I know that success doesn’t just come just from being lucky. Far from it. I wrote recently about the reasons I thought had been successful at Poker. But that got me thinking about a wider question. What makes a person successful in life? (I have been in a philosophical mood recently, maybe it’s because I am getting older!). 

 

And then I came across a cartoon while I was looking on the internet. Or one of my friends sent it to me I can’t remember. It was called the Iceberg Illusion. We don’t get many icebergs in Malaysia! But it still made a big impression on me and I understood well the point it was making. 

Iceberg of success by Sylvia Duckworth
Cartoon by Sylvia Duckworth ©

Success is something that is easy to identify. When a runner wins gold in the 100 meter race at the Olympics. When you get top marks in an exam at school so you can go to university. But the reasons for that success, how it was won, are often hidden from us. That’s what the cartoon shows very well. 

 

Persistence. Failure. Sacrifice. Disappointment. Good habits. Hard work. Dedication. 

 

Some of the best poker players I know have experienced or do on a regular basis all of those things. 

 

Persistence. When they were young they kept joining games even if first they got beat. They would work out why they had lost, learned from their mistakes, got better so they stopped losing so much. But that first knock, or second, or third, didn’t put them on the floor or make them walk away. It only made them want to do better next time. Which they did. Persistence is key.

 

Failure. A lot of good players have been brave enough to ask other players for advice when a hand didn’t go so well. They learn from failure and don’t get beaten by it. This is something I have found very important myself. 

 

Sacrifice. I have been lucky in life. That I fully accept. But I know that if you want to get good at something, anything, you have to really work at it. Cards, math, running, whatever. There are no shortcuts. Rarely do you see a purely natural talent. Lots of the best players I know, and the most successful businesspeople too, have dedicated so much time to learning that they have had to say no to other things. A night out. A holiday. It’s the price you have to pay to be really successful. 

 

Hard work. If you want to know what the outcomes of a hand could be when you are chasing a flush with a suited pair on a wet board it helps to have played that hand thousands of times. You learn the patterns. It becomes a natural part of you. Hard work brings experience. Which brings, often, success. 

 

Dedication. When I started out in Texas Holdem I played very long games. These were often 24 hour games, even longer sometimes, with no break. I liked them because I found I could concentrate for longer than my opponents. They would have a good 23 and a half hours, but dropped their concentration for half an hour. In that short half hour period they might make some bad decisions, some bad bets, and that allowed me very often to win the pot. Now I am not saying that you should all play 24 hour games. They are not for everyone! But if you are dedicated, concentrated and stick to your task, you can often come out on top. 

 

Good habits. The guy who won the Aussie Millions in January, who had never played in a cash tournament before, was drinking orange juice throughout the tournament. No whisky for him! More and more players nowadays don’t drink alcohol at the table. In fact don’t really drink at all. They are so dedicated and want to win so much they won’t put themselves at a disadvantage. Especially the young players which is interesting. You might think they would live fast and play fast at the table. But no. They are serious now! I said above that when I started out in Texas Holdem I played very long games. This wasn’t by accident. I would work on my concentration. My mental strength. And also my fitness. I used to go swimming during tournaments and long poker sessions. It would help a lot. I was fit and it helped me gain an advantage over people who weren’t in such good shape. It’s harder when you get older but I still try to get the right amount of sleep and stay trim. Good habits are important for success. 

 

So thank you Sylvia Duckworth for this good cartoon. I think there is a lot of wisdom in the iceberg. 

I was asked the other day at a Texas Holdem poker tournament how I was able to become the poker player that I am now even though I started playing Texas Holdem at a pretty late age – only in my 40’s. It got me thinking. There are lots of things. Here’s a list of them in no specific order…

  • I was lucky in that I started play Texas Holdem with a bankroll. Most players start out with just a few dollars’ stake. If you are a beginner, you will pretty much always lose more than you win at the start. You have to get quite a lot of miles under your belt, played thousands of poker hands, made a few mistakes, and learned from them, before you can turn the tide. And if you don’t have much money and lose it can take a long time to get the confidence and game experience until you start winning as a habit. So, I accept that I was very lucky to have had a successful career as a businessman beforehand that gave me a bit of money. So that when I lost, as all beginners at Texas Holdem do, it wasn’t too much of a problem and I didn’t get too downhearted.
  • I am very calm under pressure, even when there is big money on the poker table. You can’t make good decisions if you aren’t calm. In business l learned how to deal with pressure. That’s useful for me at the poker table, particularly with some of the big hands I find myself in nowadays.
  • I am fit. Not as fit as I was though. The younger Phua Wei Seng Paul was very fit – swimming both before and after games! Physical and mental fitness are very important. Mental fitness has come naturally to me after so many years in business, particularly in the junket business. If a junket customer isn’t happy, you have to learn how to deal with it. You have to have an agile and patient mind.
  • Since I started when I was older, I had the benefit of life experience. As you grow older, you learn to deal with situations that are quite similar to those that have come before. You learn to recognise them. You get more patient when you are older too. That’s very useful in poker, particularly in cutting your losses when you are having a succession of bad beats.
  • I’m a humble person. I never tell myself “Phua Wei Seng Paul, you are a great player!” – pretending I’m better than I am. I am honest about my abilities. There are better players than me. There are worse players than me. I’m still learning the game. Even today, in my mid-50s, I still have so much to learn. If you have the time and the dedication you can use your humility and willingness to learn and move forward.
  • Learn from Texas Holdem poker players who are better, and from yourself. During big tournaments, after I have finished playing for the night I will go back to my room and have a beer before I go to sleep and think. I will write down the games where I don’t think I played at my best level, or I didn’t make the best decisions. So, the next day I will go and see some poker pros who are there playing with me and ask them, “what would you have done in this situation?” You improve a lot that way. It is human nature to think you did the best you could. It’s hard to admit weakness to yourself when you are around the card table or at the casino. But a neutral observer can evaluate you better. Not many players think this way, but I think more should.
  • If you want to play in big games, for big money, you have to make an effort. You have to learn, think differently, recognise that this is a serious business. That’s what I did. When I realised the sort of money that was needed to buy into these games, perhaps $200,000, I said to myself, “wow, this is no joke!” So I read books. I watched a lot of videos from the big tournaments, cash games. I spent hours and hours on YouTube.
  • I used to have a very good memory when I started. I trained it. Now I am older, it’s not so good. I have to learn to win using different methods. There are lots of ways to skin a cat luckily!

#phuaweisengpaul, #paulphua, #pokertips

One of the world’s best poker players, Tom Dwan, met up with Paul recently to play a few hands and talk about the game.

It’s part of our “In Conversation” series where Paul chats to some of the best Texas Holdem players in the world. In this video, Tom and Paul discuss the art of “trapping” in poker.

One of the things you hear discussed most in the poker world is bluffing. When to do it, how often, with how many chips, which player does it the most? All sorts of questions commonly asked on this site by players starting out in poker. But what about its opposite counterpart, trapping? You never really hear it discussed much at all.
With bluffing, you are trying to convince your opponent that you have good cards when in fact you don’t. The means — making big or emphatic bets to give the impression you are confident in your hand. The end game – to scare them away from the hand so you can take the pot for yourself. Trapping an opponent in Texas Holdem poker is the opposite. Here, the aim is to persuade your opponent that they aren’t in fact very good, that you are only barely staying on in the hand more out of hope than expectation. The reality, though, is you have a hand that is very strong. So the aim is to get as many opponents to stay in the poker hand so you can win money from a player who has a habit of betting aggressively. There are lots of ways to do it. Perhaps you might come across as uncertain, or you play slowly and cautiously, perhaps you only play with small bets at the beginning of the hand. Paul Phua doesn’t always recommend this though because keeping lots of players in the hand can sometimes blow up in your face after the flop when your opponents’ bad hands can turn into good ones.

Here Tom Dwan and Paul Phua talk about whether Trapping is a good idea for amateurs or not.

The American poker mega star Tom Dwan met up with Paul Phua in a casino in the Philippines recently to play at a tournament in aid of a cancer charity in the country.

They managed to find some time though to have a chat for the Paul Phua poker website. Watch their conversation on “trapping” here, where Tom Dwan poses the question about whether beginners trap enough, or too much. But in the second video in our “In Conversation” series, Paul and Tom talk about the role of players’ nationalities in Texas Holdem poker. Can you make generalisations about an opponent’s style of poker play based on the country they come from, or on other factors like age and profession? Does a player from Germany for example play in one way, and a player from China navigate their way around the poker table in another? Do old players bluff more or less than young ones? Does a banker have a specific tell? Although generalisations are never the whole truth, even so, Paul and Tom thought, yes, they are often accurate! Watch the video – it’s a lot of fun.

Paul Phua may not have won the big prize at this year’s 11 million Euro first prize Monte Carlo One Drop, but he got a great second best. On the last day of the four day event – one of the richest on the poker calendar – Paul Phua won the €752,700 pot on Monday’s re-entry poker game. He beat a field of 12 other players around the poker table, coming out on top against Mikita Badziakouski from Belarus in a final heads-up battle. It’s Paul’s second biggest ever win in tournament play. At one stage in the game, Paul Phua sent professionals of the standard of Andrew Robl and Tom Marchese to the spectator rail after a three-way all in.

Over 11% of the poker tournament buy-ins go to charity – all the money raised goes directly to One Drop’s water-access projects. For more on what One Drop does – visit https://www.onedrop.org/en/.