4 colour playing cards

in

Well then. Ever since I've started playing poker online, I've come to really appreciate the 4-colour deck. For those who haven't seen them, the clubs are green and the diamonds are blue ... making it easy to distinguish the different suits for flush purposes. I have considered for awhile looking around for one, but everytime I couldn't find any. But now I have. These were linked to from the PSO forums - and I immediately pounced on them. I ordered a set for myself, and Darse wants a set as well. I also took the opportunity to order a standard set as well to add to my collection of nice plastic cards. Gotta love them.

For those who gawk at the price, consider for a moment what you get. You get a set of cards that will last a *long* time. They are beautiful cards that will endure a lot of punishment before they show any sign of them. They're even washable so if they get dirty you can just clean them off and use them some more! Really, I don't think you can go wrong. Plus - if you're playing any serious game, a non-marking card is always nice.

I can't wait for these cards to get here!

Heraldk

Esks Win!

in ,

What a wild weekend. Friday night was a pretty calm night as I pretty much just stayed home and watched the hockey game (an exciting game between the oilers and flames ending in a shootout Oiler win... yay!). I also won another $75 player poker that night. Full tilt has been an awesome room for me this week.

Saturday morning I had to be up to get to first aid training. I needed a recertification, so this was the second of two training sessions. Thankfully, its over now - the course definitely isn't all that exciting. The best parts were laughing at the acting jobs of the people in the St John's ambulance videos. Some of their "painful groans" were really funny.

Saturday evening my parent's had Diane and I over for dinner - an offer I couldn't refuse. One of our family friends was up from Calgary and so her and my mom and my sister all went to the Opera that night after dinner. Elizabeth got a chance to see my condo on the way and she seemed pretty impressed :)

Diane and I spent the evening together. We had intended on going to see Harry Potter, but ended up missing the show we wanted to see so we just hung out. Its pretty wonderful to spend an evening with my sweetheart :)

Sunday was crazy busy. Elizabeth, mom, Diane and I all went to the UofA mixed chorus dress rehearsal for their yearly Christmas concert. I understand its tradition that they put on a show at Strathearn United Church every year before the actual concert at the winspear. It was pretty cool to watch. Then, we wandered down to Rutherford house where we had a lovely little lunch.

After that, Diane and I parted ways with the rest of the group and went south to join Leanne and Jon's grey cup party. It was a pretty intense game and there were many moments where we were on the edge of our seats hoping that the esks could come back. Next year's grey cup has little chance of being this exciting!!

Afterwards we needed to leave so I could get the car home, but it was a very fun party and a super exciting game to watch. I'm still amazed at how it all turned out!

All in all, a busy weekend. Now I'm tired and need to sleep :) But I have to get through today first!

Heraldk

+EV

in

Wow was tonight ever an awesome night for poker! I played for a couple hours this afternoon and had a pretty non-descript session where I won about $22 or so. I then wandered off and watched the football game (esks are on their way to the grey cup! hoorah!). Then I came back and started winning money. The players tonight were just TERRIBLE. And wonder of wonders ... I got cards to cost them money. It helped that I was hitting everything in sight. I hit several straights, flushes and sets throughout the session. Even when someone sucked out on me with his flush after I hit a set of eights, the hand afterwards I punished a guy with pocket kings.

Beautiful.

All told, after I had received my next $20 bonus increment from full tilt's deposit bonus, I was up over $120 after only a couple of hours of play! Insanity. So today I made $140 playing poker. Sweet deal!

Heraldk

Successful Poker Party

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Well I'm glad for all the people who were able to make it to my poker party on Saturday. It was quite the event! We held two tournaments, the first before dinner and the second afterwards. The first was a full 10 people and the second was 13 people large! Congrats to Curtis and JR who won each respective tournament. Also, congrats to Kepi and Curtis who made the money in both tournaments. I think (hope) that everyone had fun. The food everyone brought was amazing and it was nice to have people over finally. I hope to hold more parties soon.

Heraldk

Poker!

in

Well, its been awhile since I last talked about poker. So I guess I will have to now won't I? For the record, I've been playing online poker for almost a full year now. I started playing .5/1 tables, and it didn't take more than a couple months for me to do better than break even. I lost about $30 at party poker whilst getting my chipset, and then I broke even (not counting the sweet $300 bonus) at the gaming club. After that, I started making money at each site I played playing .5/1.

I've since started trying to move up in limits to 1/2. I'm sad to say that I have not had near the same success here as I did at .5/1. I think part of my problem was that I got myself into a little bit of a downward swing, and then frustration would cause me to lose more than I should have. This happened at a couple of sites and its taking me awhile to analyse my game and read some more about the game before I started to feel like I've got my game back. Now, I'm almost finished digging myself out of the hole I made, and am feeling a whole lot better about my game. Hooray!

Keeping this in perspective though - my downward swing was not dangerous in any way. It was only endangering money that I had won at lower limits. My neteller account holds the money that I've won - the money I initially deposited is sitting safely in a USD savings account, and I don't expect I'll ever need to pull money from it again.

I find myself wondering what people think of my poker habit. There's a lot of people out there who view and gambling as a negative thing. I can't quite imagine what Diane's mom would think, for instance, if she knew how much money I was wagering in online poker. I'm not too sure if it matters that I'm up around $1400 US in a year's worth of play (not counting my winnings in that CPT event in January, nor does that count the several hundreds of dollars worth of PSO gifts). I don't think it even matters that I'm taking a studious approach to the game - an approach that requires some heavy reading. The underlying problem though is that Poker is gambling, and thus it is bad. Its odd, and even more odd that it kinda makes me feel guilty for playing. And yet, that guilty feeling has no practical basis!

I guess the main thing is that poker will never be more serious for me than it is now. At the moment, its a fun game that I can spend some of my free time playing and studying. I think everyone in my situation ponders the idea of playing pro ... but that is way too far outside my realm of reality that there's no way I'd ever consider it. I'm pretty sure that the game would lose its fun value the instant it became a job. Plus, I like to do other things besides play poker :)

Oh, and I hit a royal flush the other week. Its about time! I'll post a screenshot sometime soon.

Heraldk

A sweet run of cards

in

Well playing poker today I got myself into a little bit of a jam. Down about $27 and not too happy about it - the day had been very up and down. Sometimes up, sometimes down. I was ready to call it a day when at one table I get dealt, in sucession: ATo, QQ, KK, AA, JJ, and AKo.

Wow talk about good starting hands. Unfortunately, while I did make money on the last 4 hands, I lost a couple pots with the first two hands. But still ... sweet starting hands eh? :)

Heraldk

Life Lessons from BlackJack

in ,

This is a really neat post from a guy who learned to count cards. He talks about the differences between novices and experts at the blackjack table and compares that to the differences between successful people and unsuccessful people in life. Its a really neat article and I'd take some time to read it. It really is true for a lot of things - a similar comparison probably could be done with Poker, for instance. Have a read, and let me know what you think!

Heraldk

Another Successful PSO Promotion

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The poker rewards continue to come in for me! Last night I finished up the requirements for yet another PSO promotion at Poker Rewards. I deposited $400 to max out the %50 bonus they were offering. During the time that I played those hands, I won $57 and now will be cashing out a total of $657 when I get home tonight. Not bad for a week worth of playing poker huh? Not to mention the fact that I'm getting another 6000 points towards purchasing a new 19" LCD monitor at Bestbuy! I need 32000 points to get $400 in Canadian Best Buy gift certificates ... this latest installment of points brings me up to just shy of 24000 - so I've got a little ways to go yet!

Hooray for PSO and its awesome promotions!

Heraldk

PSO new promos!

in

PSO announced two new promos yesterday, and its pretty exciting. The first of the two promos is the big one ... Noble Poker. I started playing at this site through a link from PSO because they were offering a gigantic bonus of 100% of your initial deposit up to $500. PSO has decided to make the noble poker promotion a full normal promotion where you can get a set of free poker chips, or a free poker table, or free gift certificates or ... What's better is the deposit bonus has improved to 100% match of up to $800. Crazy! The bonus money seems to be a tad bit harder to clear than before, but the competition at the site is certainly fairly weak and the bonus is really profitable. To give you an idea how I've done so far, I still have $120 of my bonus money to clear but my account is well over $1100 - and I only deposited $490.

PSO is being nice to those of use who did the no-promo link from them. They are giving each of us one of the standard promo gifts in a retroactive motion and I am really appreciative of that! So I'll take my 6000 PSO points that will go towards my new computer monitor I'm saving points for!

The second promo is a site called Poker Rewards, and it is another standard promotion. Once again, a nice easy 6000 PSO points to add to my collection. I'll be getting my new computer monitor any day now!

Heraldk

Poker Source Online

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I've been playing online poker for the past several months and have done really well at it. The dazzling popularity of poker these days has brought millions of people to start playing poker and there is nowhere as convenient as playing online. Tons of people who think that what they see on the WPT is how the game of poker should be played sit down with large amounts of money convinced that they too can win large amounts of money. Poker is a game of skill. However, the majority of people who play do not gain the skills necessary to win consistently at it. I like to think of a lot of these players as people who are not playing poker, but rather treating the game as a VLT (video lottery terminal). It is many of these players whom I make a fair portion of my money from with my much more solid understanding of the game.

Anyways, that's a short editorial on the state of poker these days. What I'm going to talk about here is the promotions offered by a web site called Poker Source Online. The short story is that this website offers free gifts for signing up for online poker through them. There is no catch to this ... you simply create an online account at PSO, sign up with one of several poker rooms (9 of them in fact) and choose the gift you want. You deposit some money, play the required number of hands and they send you your gift with free shipping to anywhere in the US or Canada.

Pretty sweet deal huh? Here's the list of stuff I've got from their promotions: - 2 five hundred count 11.5 gram clay composite poker chips in aluminum cases - 1 padded rail texas hold'em style poker table top with cup holders - 1 Poker Genie tournament timer - 1 deck of KEM plastic playing cards - Amazon.ca gift certificate worth $90 with which I bought 4 poker books: Theory of poker, small stakes hold'em, internet texas hold'em, and texas hold'em for advanced players. - A couple cut cards and a chip rack to hold some cracked chips (which were replaced) - 1 copy of Poker tracker software

That's right - a pretty nice list of free stuff eh?

The question probably on your mind is how can they do this? Its pretty simple. Online poker rooms make more money by having more people playing on their site (the more tables they have, the more rake they collect, the more money they make). What they do to get people to come in is they pay affiliates to send people to their poker room. Almost every poker room imaginable has affiliate programs - but many of these affiliates simply spam people to get more referrals. PSO does it differently - they offer free gifts to the people they refer and take only a portion of the referral money for themselves. Combine this with excellent customer support and a rapidly growing list of satsified customers, PSO is the most successful online poker affiliate in the business.

So how does the process work? There are several different options for PSO, the main ones being the straight forward promotions. There are a couple of side promotions also that you may be interested in so I will describe each in detail. If you sign up for any of these, please use my referral ID Heraldmk - I'd be very grateful if you did and it makes no difference to the gift that you get.

Instant Bankroll

This promotion is one of the most popular ones. The premise is that you start your first real money poker account at Party Poker and PSO deposits $75 of free money into it for you. Once you've played 500 raked hands, you get another free $25 bonus and are free to do with the money as you please. This is an excellent way to get yourself an initial bankroll to do the rest of the PSO promotions without putting your own money at stake. What's even better is you can start up a Neteller account and transfer that money around without ever needing to provide a credit card number!

Anyways there are a couple caveats to this promotion. First of all, you must not have an existing real money poker account. Secondly, if you want to do the frequent flopper program or one of PSO's normal promotions at party poker (see below), then you can't do this promotion first or you won't be eligible for the other promotion you are interested in. If you want to check it out the web site is http://www.instantbankroll.com.

Normal Promotions

Normal PSO promotions are ones in which you select a gift, deposit some money and play a certain number of raked hands or acquire a certain number of "points" at the poker room before PSO sends you your gift. There are currently 9 poker rooms you can do these promotions at, and if you don't have accounts at any of them yet, you should be eligible to do them all (each for a free gift!). Possible gifts include free poker chips, free poker table tops, free WPT dvds, free KEM cards, free gift certificates, a free copy of poker tracker, or lastly PSO points which you can save up to get even nicer gifts.

The current rooms are: Party Poker, Pacific Poker, Absolute Poker, PokerRoom, Paradise Poker, Bodog, Gaming Club Poker, Golden Palace Poker and Ultimate Bet. These represent almost all of the biggest poker rooms available on the internet right now, and if you're going to play online poker, chances are you'll pick one of these rooms anyway so there is no real reason *not* to go through PSO to get free stuff!

If you want to do one of these promotions, go to http://www.pokersourceonline.com and follow the instructions. Be very sure that you follow all the instructions - and if you have a question, ask it in the forums before you sign up. There are a couple of crucial steps in the process that if you screw up, PSO cannot fix and will not get paid for you so they cannot give you your gift. The process is simple and there shouldn't be any problems if you follow the instructions.

Frequent Flopper Program

This program is for people who plan on playing lots of poker. At several rooms, you can get 27.5% of your rake back in either PSO points, or at some rooms in cash. Sweet deal for those of us who really like online poker and play on a regular basis. PSO point rooms are Party Poker, Ultimate Bet, and Aztec Riches. Cashback sites are Absolute poker and Carribbean Sun. These programs are amazing for people who play a lot of online poker because 27.5% of your rake is a very large amount of money in the long term! To register, go to http://www.frequentflopper.com.

FreeWSOP

How sweet would if be to go to the world series of poker for free? Instead of choosing a free gift, you can get a entry chip into a small freeroll tournament where the 1st place prize is a full paid package to the world series of poker. Yep, you heard me right. They only have one freeroll tournament left so if you want to get in on this, you're going to have to move fast. If you've been dreaming of playing in the WSOP, you should definitely check this out. http://www.freewsop.com.

If you have any questions, the PSO guys are extremely helpful and very good about making sure your questions are answered. So if you are interested in playing online poker, you should definitely check some of these promotions out! You'll be happy you did.

Heraldk

Poker-esque

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Like the rest of the world, I've been sucked in. The game of poker is taking the world by storm and there is an amazing array of people who have become interested this intriguing game of strategy and gambling. Why is it so interesting to me? I have to admit that I find gambling fun. The problem is that I hate losing - and any money gambled at a casino is not money you can expect to have very long. Poker represents to me a chance to gamble with money, but also to have the potential to win money in the long run.

I started playing poker for money in November when I heard about the poker promotions offered at Poker Source Online. For those unfamiliar with the site, its an affiliate site with many online poker rooms that offers free gifts for signing up with them. They have the best customer support I have ever dealt with and bend over backwards to try and make sure that you get the gifts you are promised (as long as you follow the instructions). To date, I have received several hundred dollars worth of free stuff from them. If you want to play online poker, there is no reason to not sign up through these guys! I will post later about the PSO promotions and the details on what they offer later so stay tuned if you are interested.

Anyways, I started playing for real money due to this online promotion through PSO and since then I have never looked back. Most players who start making money at poker go through an early learning transition phase where they lose some money before learning the mistakes they made. My transition phase was not very long - I lost about $30 in the first PSO promotion I did, and then broke even on the second PSO promotion. From there, I started making money playing poker online! To date, I'm up roughly $1300 US since November of 2004. Not too shabby for someone who just started playing poker at these low limits!

That monetary figure does not include an amazing run that I had in January. PSO sponsered me and several other people here in Edmonton for the Canadian Poker Tour. I had only been playing poker for money for a couple months at that point, but due to a good run of cards, some good coaching from a local expert, a little skill (I hope), and a lot of luck, I made the finals and finished in 6th place for a prize of $3490 canadian. It was an incredible rush, and I really want to be able to do it again - but unfortunately, even though PSO sponsered me in the followup even in Calgary, I was unable to repeat my performance. Maybe I'll get another chance at it later!

So poker has been awesome for me so far. I'm really quite enjoying myself and the best part is that I can gamble with my money but win money in the long run - which beats blackjack or roulette anyday!

Heraldk