Hi folks,

Just wanted to let you all know about what we have planned for OutstandingPoker.com in the near future.  We’re pretty excited to be expanding and taking the site to the next level.

First of all – I realize the blog updates have been lacking.  People have been asking me for more updates on what’s going on at OutstandingPoker.com and with my game personally.   I’m interested in letting you all know about my own successes in the online realm, as well as where we’re taking the site – so blog updates are going to be much more consistent.

Second of all, we’re looking at adding a new pro to focus on Multi-table tournaments (MTTs) and Sit’n'Go (SNG) tournaments.  Although I started out playing a lot of Sit-n-Go’s in my early online poker career, I have shifted to primarily focusing on cash games.  While we do have a bunch of SNG content on our site, I’ve got requests for more from our members, so I’m in the midst of recruiting new pros to increase our content there.

And finally – I want to annouce our OutstandingPoker.com message board that’s starting to become active.  I welcome all members to post their questions/difficult hands as well as just boast about your successes you’ve had with your poker game.  I get a lot of emails from members sharing their success stories – and I want all our members to share in each other’s success as well.  So please use take a look at the discussion forum and feel free to post anything poker related on there.

Cheers to your continued poker success!

-Tim

I started with a simple $50 deposit on Pokerstars back in the day after I saw Chris Moneymaker win the World Series of Poker on TV. I used to always play with my buddies socially (we were all pretty terrible at that point), and once I got the poker bug I had to try it online.

I initially played $5.50 Sit-n-Gos on PokerStars, and grinded out a small profit playing them over a long period. Once I figured out the basic optimal strategy (play tight early on followed by eventually switching to push-fold mode once you get to less than 15 BB’s or so), I started multi-tabling the $5.50 Sit-n-Go’s by playing 4 at a time. From that initial $50 deposit I never went bust. Once my bankroll was sufficiently large (I think around $500), I switched to playing $16 Turbo Sit-n-Gos (four at a time) and grinded those out. Sit-n-Go’s are profitable because your typical opponents at these stakes are beyond terrible at poker, but once you start moving up and playing with other players who understand the strategy, you jump on the variance train and it’s like playing bingo.

Then randomly I went out to Vegas for a vacation with my buddy and started playing $1-2 No-Limit cash games. I instantly started making money at cash games because the people that play $1-2 NL live in Vegas are also beyond terrible. I ended up staying in Vegas for 4 weeks just grinding out $1-2 No-Limit every day. By the end of the four weeks I was up around $5,000 and the decision to switch to playing online cash games was very easy. I realized that was where the money was to be made.

So I started playing 25NL online with my old SNG bankroll, and quickly moved up 50NL and then 100NL after I started beating them for a decent amount. After watching some big winners online, I realized that the real money was made playing 6max (as opposed to Full Ring 9-handed) with a tight-aggressive style that I still advocate in my videos today. I stayed at 100NL for maybe a month or two, and then moved up to 200NL where I grinded out a large number of hands. I think anyone who is disciplined and dedicated to learning the game can beat 200NL consistently. It took me some time to move to 400NL because the games are a lot more aggressive (I would play 200NL and then add in some 400NL tables when I was feeling good about my game), and eventually I made the switch full-time to 400NL after grinding at least 100,000 hands at 200NL. One thing to say is never feel bad about moving down if you are running bad, as we all run/play bad from time to time. Follow strict bankroll rules, and don’t “move up” to chase losses or stay at a level where you can’t sustain the swings – this is the quickest way to hit busto-ville.

One other tip I have is to remember, that at many points in your poker career, you will run worse than you can possibly imagine. It happens. Play enough hands and you will eventually run terrible for a seemingly endless amount of time. I’ve had up to 20-buyin downswings before. They are tough to weather mentally, but if you stay calm, continue to grind, don’t chase your losses, and make sure you follow a strict bankroll strategy, you’ll be okay.

Nowdays I play a mix of 400NL, 600NL and 1000NL, wherever I find good games with players that like to donate money to my cause (ie. weak passive players).

It’s been a while since I blogged, but I’m going to get back into the swing of things after having spent a while working on building the site and getting it ready for launch.  I’m pretty pleased with how it’s turned out so far, and we’re going to start cranking out the content in the coming months (at least 1+ video per week), so stay tuned for some solid poker videos.  We just launched our OutstandingPoker.com Discussion Forum where we hope to start building our poker community here.  Feel free to post hands or discuss poker strategy, and I’ll try to help you guys out wherever possible.

Good luck at the tables!

Poker can be so streaky sometimes. I’ve had a decent month in February so far, up a few thousand overall with random swings here and then – but finally today I managed to break out of the cycle to score a $3,961 day, playing a mix of $2/4 and $3/6 No limit hold em at Party.

I was splashing around quite a bit today being very aggressive, and I attribute this to the fact that I’ve been playing a fair bit of Heads-up poker, where aggression is absolutely key. I think it’s helped my regular 6max game tremendously, as it’s landed me in quite a few difficult spots that forced me to stretch my mind.

I won’t deny that a lot my money today came from noobs who didn’t really know what they were doing. Take this hand for example:

Hero ($1,485.44)
SB ($1,085.80)
BB ($600)
UTG ($720.91)
MP ($706.20)

Preflop: Hero is Button with Kh, As.
UTG raises to $12, 1 fold, Hero raises to $48, 2 folds, UTG calls $36.

Flop: ($105) 5s, Jh, Ad (2 players)
UTG bets $40, Hero calls $40.

Turn: ($185) 6h (2 players)
UTG checks, Hero bets $133, UTG calls $133.

River: ($451) Th (2 players)
UTG bets $250, Hero calls $250.

Final Pot: $951

My opponent’s play is pretty weak on all streets. First of all, he leads into me with middle pair after I raised preflop. The first problem for him is that all better hands are calling/raising, and all worse hands are folding. I decided to call since I had a read that this player was weak, and I figured it was pretty likely that he had nothing at all or a weak Ace and perhaps he would bluff off more money on later streets. There were no draws to be concerned about. The turn blanks off and I bet to extract value from my opponent from a likely weak-ace.

On the river, the villain makes a fundamental mistake. He has some show-down value, so the best move for him is to check. He is not getting called by a worse hand at all. But he for some reason bets into me, basically giving me his unwanted money. I had to think for a second to determine whether he actually had me beat, but given my read that he was a weak player and his odd line, I figured I was ahead of him a good amount of the time.

My opponent needs to realize that if he checks the river, I will check behind all medium strength hands (such as a Jack or weak-Ace) and only bet my monsters or complete bluffs. There is no value in betting a medium strength hand on the river, as you only get called by better hands, and you still can perhaps win at show-down if your opponent checks behind. You also have the opportunity to snap off a bluff by your opponent if you have good reason to believe he’s bluffing.