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Rivered.co.uk is your one stop shop for everything poker!

Rivered's aim is to stop you getting rivered. We aim to do this by providing you with articles and information online and also by telling you what poker books and videos/dvd's you should watch/read in order to improve your game and stop that dreaded river!

Poker TV

Rivered believe that the advantage to watching poker on tv is that you can see everyone's cards, so you actually get a feel for what players can and can't fold. You also get to see a lot of poker situations and how they play poker without putting your own money on the line.

Poker on TV can be a great learning tool, especially if watching good players, even watching bad players can be a good thing if the right commentators are pointing out where and what they are doing wrong.

Learning Poker on Television

The public's current fascination with poker has changed the landscape in ways that observers of the poker scene would never have imagined just a few short years ago. 1st, droves of new players, spurred by televised tournaments and the fact that seemingly everyday kinds of guys have won life-changing sums of money at the World Series of Poker over the last few years are heading into casinos and cardrooms, just aching to be dealt in. 2nd, those new players who've learned their poker exclusively by watching TV have learned it wrong!

How can that be true? What's wrong with learning from top pros like Phil Ivey, Jennifer Harman, Howard Lederer, and the legendary Doyle Brunson? Won't those bold bets and larcenous bluffs, the kind that seemingly work so well on television for these big-name pros, work just as well in your neighborhood cardroom too?

The sad truth is that they won't work at all. Some reasons might be found in the observations of the late Marshall McLuhan, the University of Toronto professor who first told the world that "…the medium is the message," and revolutionized the way we view and understand communications. Although McLuhan may never have played a hand of poker in his life ¾ I don't know for sure ¾ his observations were spot-on.

McLuhan would have quickly pointed out that TV-watching poker newbies haven't grasped the differences between the tournament poker they see onscreen and a live, 10-player, limit hold'em cash game. Those differences are especially pronounced when the action on TV is no-limit tournament poker that's down to five-handed or less.

After all, when the blinds and antes represent a fairly significant part of each player's equity in a tournament, they just can't sit around and wait for big hands before firing some chips at the pot. If they wait too long, they'll bleed to death. Moreover, in the later stages of a tournament when each player is required to post an ante in addition to the big and small blinds posted by the two players to the immediate left of the dealer position, there's so much money in the pot before the cards are even dealt that if you're not stealing your fair share of pots, your opponents will devour what should have been your share and bleed you dry without even having to make a hand.

Newcomers often don't realize that limit poker, the type usually played in casinos and cardrooms, requires waiting for good hands if it's to be profitable. Newbies who confidently stroll into a casino and play all the hands they see played by their onscreen heroes are likely to lose heavily in these games. On the other hand, the short-handed tournament poker they see on TV ¾ where forced bets can become astronomical and too much patience is a terminal disease ¾ truly demands more risk-taking.

Those who learn their poker on TV also pick up costly misconceptions about tournament poker itself. Large tournaments are multi-table events - it's not unusual for a large tournament such as the World Poker Tour finale to start with hundreds of players at dozens of tables.

If hundreds of players at dozens of tables doesn't seem particularly large, consider the 2005 World Series of Poker's main event. It was so big that the nearly 6,000 entrants had to be divided into three flights of about 2,000 participants each. Each group's first day of play lasted until approximately 650 players remained, thus allowing the organizers to combine the remaining 1,900 players in one room for "Day Two" of play - although the second day's play actually took place on the event's fourth calendar day.

But because of severe time constraints and the need for television to show riveting highlights rather than complete events, only final table action is usually shown. At this point, for the first time in the tournament, players knocked out aren't replaced by those coming in from other tables and the game quickly whittles down to short-handed action.

Moreover, on most shows not all hands at the final table are shown. Ho-hum pots are often edited out so that viewers see mostly thrilling showdowns and little of the action in between. It's like watching the highlights of a football game on Sports Center rather than viewing the entire game. You see all the exciting scoring plays and highlights in two minute's time and you aren't burdened with the hum-drum, boring, routine plays that consume the game's other 58 minutes.

Short-handed, final-table poker strategy lies at the polar extreme of the "selective-aggressive" spectrum, where any hand with an ace in it and any pair should be raised most of the time. If you played that way in a cash game, or in the early stages of a tournament when the tables are still mostly nine- and ten-handed and the blinds are relatively small in relation to most players chip count, you'd probably wind up broke.

By now you can see the danger of applying poker strategies you see on TV to your own games. At a full-table, low-limit cash game in your neighborhood cardroom, it generally takes a lot bigger hand to make raising the preferred course of action. But those seduced by poker on the telly haven't grasped that point ¾ and won't if TV remains their only means of learning how to play.

Players taking their poker lessons from the small screen are likely to play too many hands and, worse, to play them too aggressively.

In tournaments, aggression tends to increase gradually over the course of the event. It's sort of like revving up an automobile engine, except it's done over a much longer period of time. In really long events, such as the $10,000 no-limit hold'em tournament at the World Series of Poker - which takes nearly a week to complete - the experts all have one goal for the first few days; they want to survive.

Most of the top tournament players keep a tight rein on their aggression during the early rounds. They've learned that you can't win a tournament in the early stages and they only hope to put themselves into position to compete for all the marbles later in the week. You can lose a tournament early on, to be sure; but you can't win it until the end stages.

What words of wisdom would Marshall McLuhan impart to new poker players using television as their preferred medium of instruction? He'd very likely reiterate that while the medium is the message, there's often an underlying substance that's better gleaned from other sources.

Article by Lou Krieger of Royal Vegas Poker

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