Betting Poker Strategy

Evolution of Poker by David Grey

Poker used to be a game that you'd play in your grandma's house in the basement for nickels and dimes, or some people played it at the lodge or places where poker was legal, like Las Vegas or California, where they have cardrooms. Up until a few years ago, most people thought of poker as sort of shady, a game of crooks. They would see the old westerns, where a guy had an ace up his sleeve, and the players were cheating. With the advent of all the poker on TV, though, not only is it not thought of as shady, but it's been glamorized. Some of these young poker players, the Daniel Negreanus, the Phil Iveys, guys like John Juanda, Antonio Esfandiari, they all seem like guys who are in high school or going to college, and the guys who really are in school want to be like these young poker players.

They used to want to be Reggie Jackson or Michael Jordan, but not too many guys are 6-foot-6 and can jump with their head over the basket and dunk it, or hit a home run out of Yankee stadium. But anyone can ante up and look at two cards and play a hand. Poker is within the reach of the masses. Anyone who wants to become a good poker player can become a good poker player. You might not become a world champion, but you can become a winning poker player if you put the time and the effort into it. That's something that can't be said about becoming another Tiger Woods, or Babe Ruth, or any sports celebrity, or Celine Dion.

With poker, though, you can get good if you want to get good. People might want to be on TV, or they'd like to win a lot of money, and they see the way some poker players live. They don't know that not all poker players live the way that Doyle Brunson lives, or Chip Reese, or Barry Greenstein, who has made so much money playing poker that all the money he's won in tournaments in the last three or four years he's given to charity, which is a wonderful thing.

The bright side of poker is people see that it is achievable; it's not a physical talent. It's something that's learned, like learning how to read, learning how to type, learning how to do anything. You can learn to be good at it. Now, there's a big difference between being good and being great, and not everyone gets great, but anyone can get good at poker.

People see that, and they want to get as good as they can get. Most people don't have aspirations of playing in a game in which you can win or lose $200,000 in an eight-hour period, because they might not be able to breathe if they had $50,000 of their own money in a pot waiting for the last card to be turned over. They might just actually suffocate right at the table. So big games are not for everyone, but tournaments are a way for people to make a big score off a little money.

It's been done the last couple of years by two guys who were Internet qualifiers and won the World Series, Chris Moneymaker and Greg Raymer. One started with $40 and walked away with $2.5 million. The other started with satellites and got in and won $5 million, so it's not impossible. Last year, at the World Series of Poker, there were over 4,000 people who got in through online qualifying.