Tag: phua wei seng paul

Want to improve your poker strategy? Paul Phua gives his insights into how to profit from this tricky hand

Pocket Jacks can be a tricky hand to play, especially for amateurs.
As for me, I’m always happy to see a pair of Jacks. It’s true, however, that there is no simple formula for how to play this hand. It depends very much on your position, your opponent’s position, your stack sizes, and whether they are loose or tight.
The problem with Jacks is that this hand is unlikely to improve: as with any pocket pair, there is only a 1 in 8 chance of making a set on the flop. And if an overcard comes, as it will often, there is a good chance you will be beaten. In this case hopefully you can have some reads on your opponent. If you don’t know them very well you can face some quite tough decisions – and there’s no easy guide for how to make them.

Pre-flop strategy with pocket Jacks

If I get pocket Jacks vs. an UTG (under the gun – meaning first to act) raise, I would usually just call. It can depend on his stack size and who my opponent is, but often I would end up just calling, especially if deeper than 50BB. If shorter than 50BB I would usually raise and gamble with him if he goes all-in, since then he may have AQ, or pocket 10s even, unless he is a very tight player. I would usually re-raise vs. a later position raise.
And in a tournament, if I myself am short-stacked with say 25BB or less and I get pocket Jacks, it’s usually a good hand to go all-in with. And if I have 15BB or less I would almost always be happy to go all-in.

Post-flop strategy with pocket Jacks

An overcard to your Jacks will arrive often, and if several players are in the hand, you are likely to be beaten at this point, and you should be prepared to fold. But if only one other player is in the hand, or sometimes even two, don’t necessarily give up straight away.
Let’s say the overcard is an Ace, and someone bets out. Then yes, I would often fold. But what if it’s a Queen? Or a King? Then you have to analyze deeper.
For instance, if a Queen comes, ask yourself: are they the type of player who raises pre-flop with AQ, or are they more likely to have AK? Are they a solid, straight-shooting player who only bets when they hit, or a more creative player who will semi-bluff with a draw? I have made a lot of money with Jacks against pro players by simply calling on three streets. They might for instance bet with a gutshot draw on the turn, then bomb the river when they don’t hit.
You might ask: why do I just call in this situation, and not raise if I think I’m ahead? It’s because if they have a weaker hand, they will fold to my raise, and I lose out on winning more money.
Even when my Jacks are an overpair I often will just call. If your opponent is representing something stronger than you, why would you raise him? If he has it, your money is gone. If he doesn’t have it, he’s bluffing. So this is one of the many mistakes amateurs make.

Common errors with pocket Jacks

Some less experienced players get so worried by pocket Jacks that they have developed an inflexible strategy: there is a group of players who will usually flat-call from any position, and fold to any overcard on the flop; and another group who usually raise extra-big pre-flop in the hope of taking it down straight away, without having to worry about post-flop strategy.
The first group will lose out on a lot of value that Jacks can bring, but at least they won’t get in too much trouble. The second group is in worse shape. Yes, everyone is likely to fold if you shove all-in or make a massive overbet pre-flop. But you won’t make much money from that. And if you do get called, it’s almost always by a better hand. AK will often call here, and you’ll be the slight favourite; but so will QQ, KK and AA, and then you’ll be in big trouble.
The same is true post-flop: some players with Jacks will raise big, even go all-in, if the flop is all low cards. They see it as protecting their hand. But again, they miss out on value when everyone with a worse hand folds; and they lose everything if someone calls with a lucky two pair or a set – or bigger overpair.
So you can see, there is no one easy way to play Jacks, and you must take many factors into consideration. But don’t give up. They are one of the best starting hands, so just try to play them well.

A quick guide to playing pocket Jacks

  • With pocket Jacks, you should usually call an UTG (under the gun) raise
  • You might re-raise vs. a later position raise
  • Only go all-in pre-flop if short-stacked
  • Don’t overplay your pocket Jacks post-flop: often you should call, not raise

 
 

With Liv Boeree and Igor Kurganov giving half their $274k WSOP win to the REG poker charity they co-founded, Paul Phua looks at a different kind of raising in poker – raising money for charity 

In Casino Royale, James Bond has to win a game of poker to save the world. In real life, poker players are also playing their part in saving the world – through charity poker tournaments.
At the World Series of Poker 2017, Liv Boeree and Igor Kurganov jointly won the $10,000 Tag Team Championship, taking down $273,964 in prize money. A nice twist to their joint victory is that the two players are partners in life as well as in poker. As they kissed for the cameras, it seemed a heart-warming instance of love conquering all. Even more touching, however, is that the power couple have pledged to donate half their WSOP winnings to charity.
Poker coach Doug Polk has also proven the worth of his own teachings by besting 130 players in the $111,111 buy-in High Roller for One Drop. It gives him his third WSOP bracelet, but it is also a big win for charity.

One Drop poker

One Drop was started in 2007 by Guy Laliberté, the founder of Cirque du Soleil and a keen poker player. The non-profit organisation aims to provide access to safe drinking water for all. When One Drop stages a poker tournament, 11% of the buy-in goes to worthy causes. Since these charity poker tournaments are played for the highest stakes, that can be a lot of money.
The last $1 million buy-in Big One for One Drop was in 2014. It made $4,666,662 for the charity – just from one poker tournament! That was won by my friend Dan Colman, whom I often play against in high-stakes cash games. (Watch the Paul Phua Poker School video profile on Dan Colman here, and his interview about online poker vs live poker here.)
I have played in several One Drop tournaments myself. I even won the Monte Carlo One Drop last year. Despite the €752,700 prize, I am still down overall, since the two times I have entered the Big One for One Drop cost $1 million each! But that is the beautiful thing about charity poker tournaments. Even when you lose, you feel like a winner. You just think of all the good that can be done with the money you have contributed. I donate to several worthy causes, but with charity poker tournaments I can pursue my favourite passion at the same time.

Other charity poker tournaments

Following in the giant footsteps of One Drop, a number of poker charities have sprung up. PokerStars has done its bit in the past, helping to raise half a million dollars for Hurricane Haiyan relief, amongst other causes. The World Poker Tour (WPT) has held numerous charity events, pulling in celebrity hosts such as Tiger Woods and Mel Gibson. The Charity Series of Poker raises money for a variety of good causes, and is backed by pros such as Mike Matusow, Greg Merson and Mike Mizrachi. The Triton Series, of which I have been a strong supporter since its inception, gives 100% of its profits to charity.
Returning to the WSOP’s tag team couple, Liv Boeree and Igor Kurganov, the $136,982 they are giving away will go to REG (Raising for Effective Giving). This is an organisation they co-founded which encourages poker players to donate 2% of everything they earn to charity. Ambassadors include John Juanda, Cate Hall and Erik Seidel.
Liv Boeree put it well at REG’s launch in 2014: “I’ve been playing poker for a long time and thankfully, I’ve been reasonably successful doing so. With that came a wealth of amazing opportunities the game has given me, from travel to experiences to meeting heroes from many industries. But at the same time I’ve become increasingly aware of a growing emptiness I’ve been feeling, and it’s one I’m not alone with – it’s the question of what we, as poker players, are actually contributing long-term to society.”

Fundraising through poker

Many professional poker players struggle: they overplay, they burn out. Sometimes they take a sabbatical from the game, go travelling, and return refreshed. But perhaps what some need instead is the sense of a noble purpose beyond their own self-interest.
So if you ever start to feel hollow inside as you sit at the poker table or computer screen, consider playing for some higher goal such as a charity. It might just save your game – and the world.
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[dt_sc_h2 class=’aligncenter’]Charity poker tournament organisers[/dt_sc_h2]
One Drop. One Drop poker tournaments donate 11% of the buy-in to the charity, and all players at the WSOP are encouraged to give 1% of earnings.
The Charity Series of Poker. Stages tournaments in aid of charities such as Three Square Food Bank and Habitat for Humanity.
World Poker Tour (WPT) Foundation. Hosts a series of ongoing philanthropic poker events under the title WPT Playing for a Better World.
Triton Series. Donates 100% of profits to charities including The Red Cross and Project Pink.
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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!

Poker is a fun game, but in order to keep playing, let alone make a living from it, you must learn to manage your money responsibly.

Paul Phua explains why you must be a rock with your ’roll

Last week one of my readers emailed the Paul Phua Poker site with a question: “Paul Phua, please tell me: how can someone make a living from poker, how much cash and/or income would they need, and what stakes should they be playing?”
This is a great question. In fact, I will soon be releasing a video of tips from top players including Phil Ivey, and he says in it that managing your money is one of the most important things for beginners to learn. I hope the following insights will be helpful to players wishing to take poker seriously:

Bankroll management

When poker players talk of their “bankroll”, it means a sum of money they have set aside exclusively for poker. It is very important that this money, whether it grows or shrinks through playing, is kept separate from all your other funds and financial dealings. One reason is so that you don’t start dipping into money you should be using to pay important bills. Another is that it enables you to tell whether you are making or losing money at poker.
Equally importantly, your bankroll should be money you can afford to lose without giving you problems in your daily life. We all hope to win, but no one can guarantee to make money at poker – even the world’s best players can simply have a run of bad luck.
How big should your bankroll be? It could be $500 or it could be $5 million. The principle is the same: it’s money you feel you can afford to risk at poker. The only thing that will change, according to the size, is what stakes you are able to play at.

Choosing the stakes

The bigger the bankroll you have, the higher the stakes you can afford to play. This doesn’t mean you have to play at the highest possible stakes – billionaire Bill Gates supposedly enjoys a bit of poker, but only plays at $1-$2 blinds – but it does mean you shouldn’t play at stakes that are too big for your roll. For one reason, you may be playing scared, and that never results in the best decisions. For another, if you play for too large a proportion of your bankroll, just a few unlucky games could wipe you out.
Poker is a marathon, not a sprint. Only once you are making money consistently at one level should you consider moving up to the next.
So where do you start? Typically, the cheapest live cash games you will find in casinos are $1-$2. Since it is recommended that, in No-Limit Hold ’Em cash games, you sit down with 100x the big blind (some might say 200x is preferable in order to maximise your potential winnings from big hands), you would need $200 to play each time; with another $200 in reserve in case you need to rebuy. And since you may lose in that game no matter how well you play, your total bankroll will need to be several times bigger than $400.
Tournaments are a superficially cheaper option. Though entry to one-off tournaments can be anything from a few hundred dollars to many thousands, regular casino tournaments can be found for $50 or so. Bear in mind, however, that only the top 15% or so of players get paid anything at all, and only the top 5% or so get back a significant return; so again, you will need to have enough in your bankroll for many tournaments.
If your bankroll is not big enough for the above stakes, you will find every possible size of cash game and tournament in online poker sites.

Can you make a living from poker?

There’s an old saying about poker: “It’s a hard way to make an easy living.” And that’s never been truer than today, when so many players have understood that they need to read up on strategy. All the same, it is at least possible to make a living from poker. There is no such thing as a professional roulette player, but there are professional poker players!
Most people will start out losing money, until they develop the experience to become winning players. My advice at that level, when you are still likely to lose, would be to spend no more on a session of poker than you would spend on a typical night out. Poker is, after all, a fun game. A lot more fun, in my view, than most forms of entertainment!
Whether you can then convert that experience into making a living from poker, that will depend on you. You will need skill, strategy, an understanding of the odds and of psychology, a calm temperament, the ability to learn from your mistakes. A good start is to follow the above rules on money management – and to keep reading my strategy blogs on Paul Phua Poker, and watching the videos on the Paul Phua Poker YouTube channel.
— Paul Phua

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!

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