Smack Dog Blog

If you want to find the best online poker sites to play poker at, then look no further than PokerSense.com.

Find out all the top poker sites currently running, as well as the best online poker sites with qualifiers for winning seats at this year’s 2008 World Series of Poker. You can also bone up on your poker skills - Texas Holdem and otherwise - at the PokerSense.com Poker School, giving you every opportunity to win those coveted 2008 WSOP seats.

You’ll learn the basics on how to play all the usual suspects in the poker room - Texas Holdem, 7 Card Stud, Omaha, etc. You’ll learn about pot odds and poker hand ranking, as well as brush up on all the essential poker lingo. And you’ll get a great heads-up on all the stiffest competition at the event with the Poker Player of the Week feature - at the time of this writing highlighting none other than “The Professor” Howard Lederer’s own sister, Annie Duke.

Get updated daily on all the latest international and US poker news at PokerSense.com. Review daily schedules of all the best freerolls and tournaments running, including: time, poker room, and even the prize pool. You can also sign up for the PokerSense.com newsletter and receive all of this information as it’s updated, delivered straight to your email inbox.

It only makes sense for a poker site to offer benefits to its visitors above-and-beyond those offered to the general public. That’s why when you play poker at one of the best online poker sites featured at PokerSense.com, you not only find out about all the top-dollar poker bonuses and poker bonus codes around, but you can even avail yourself of some extra-special poker bonuses available only to visitors of the Poker Sense site. You’ll even discover some handy poker bonus tips for clearing and claiming those VIP poker bonuses.

Ever since the US government stuck its nose into the business of online poker, learning which sites are US poker player friendly and which aren’t is now at a premium. That’s why PokerSense makes sure to provide you with a comprehensive list of simply the best online poker sites that accept US poker players, among them: Absolute Poker, Bodog Poker, Full Tilt Poker, PokerStars, and UltimateBet.

In addition to a reporting of the maximum poker bonus available to US poker players at these sites, PokerSense also provides an in-depth review on each of them, detailing the software, accepted deposit and withdrawal methods, compatible systems, loyalty programs, limits and rake, customer support, as well as a summary of the essential pros and cons of each US poker site.

PokerSense.com gives you more than your average poker portal. How many, for example, will tell you the size of the player pool at cash games during peak periods? That’s good information to have. As is a lot of what PokerSense has to offer the discriminating poker player. For becoming the best and most successful online poker player you can, visit PokerSense: it’s common sense.

Well I tried my hand at some $3/6 Limit at Full Tilt tonight and was shot down by a joker who called down with terrible hands. Every time this player was delt a small pocket pair he called me down and in some instances raised me even though there were over cards on the board.

This kind of play is just maniac like and I can’t handle it. I can’t handle it so much that it cost me $120 tonight at FT.

Oh well, tomorrow is an other day and I will no longer be frequenting the 1 v 1 tables. From now on I am sticking to the 6 man limit tables for good.

Let’s Gamble.

Well, I came up with some cash at Full Tilt Poker the other night and decided I would try to play a little $3/6 limit there along with playing my usual $3/6 limit game at Absolute Poker at the same time.

While the night at Full tilt was about a wash, the games at Absolute put a hurting on me from start to finish.

Even though I was able to stay even at FT, I took a $75 loss at AP. This was largely due to every time I made a hand on the river, I was gunned down by a bigger hand made on the river. This was not simply a case of me paying for my mistakes by chasing down a hand either. In all instances, I had the best hand going into the river and had made the correct read. Just a case of bad luck running into some players calling me down with nothing. What can you do? Nothing. It happens in poker either online or live.

Well, I will be back at the tables later tonight to see what SmackDog can do.

If you haven’t heard (which really translates to: if you’ve been living under a rock), it may excite you to know that three of the most recent World Series of Poker main event winners came from PokerStars.com WSOP satellite qualifiers. That’s right, while it proves on one hand that any person who plays online poker at home can end up winning millions (not to mention killer bragging rights), but it also points to the odds being heavily tipped towards PokerStars being the site those winners come from!

So if you were wondering why one online poker room would get its own third-party informational site devoted solely to playing (and winning!) at its tables, now you know.

So what will you find at PokerStarsMarketingBonusCode.com? Lots, actually. For starters (no surprise here), you’ll find all you could ever want to know about the PokerStars Marketing Code. It’s a 100% bonus but only goes up to a maximum of $50.

However, if you’ve committed yourself to claiming that $50 bonus, then the last thing you want to do is overlook one of the requirements you must fulfill in order to redeem it. And that’s where Poker Stars Marketing Bonus Code comes in, detailing exactly what you need to do in order to cash out on your PokerStars Bonus Code.

More than just a resource on the PokerStars Bonus Code, the Poker Stars Marketing Bonus Code site also provides an in depth PokerStars Review, exploring every aspect of the PokerStars site, including its software, game play, promotions and (other) bonuses, support, deposit and withdrawal options, and PokerStars tournaments.

And speaking of PokerStars tournaments, that’s one element of the PokerStars poker room about which PokerStarsMarketingBonusCode goes into extreme detail. From freerolls to Sit ‘n Go’s to freezeouts, PokerStars offers online poker players every type of tournament under the sun. And PokerStarsMarketingBonusCode.com reports on all of them.

And it isn’t just Texas Holdem tournaments you’ll find at PokerStars either, explains PokerStarsMarketingBonusCode.com. You’ll also find PokerStars tournaments in Omaha, Razz, H.O.R.S.E. and others. Check out PokerStarsMarketingBonusCode.com to get the skinny on all of them.

One particular PokerStars highlight features in both the PokerStars Review and on the PokerStars Tournaments page of PokerStarsMarketingBonusCode.com is the PokerStars Sunday Million, a weekly poker tournament like no other - with a guaranteed prize pool of $1,000,000. That kind of tournament is its own bonus!

And before you U.S. players shy away from the site for fear that, like at so many other poker sites, you’ll be turned away, fear not! As PokerStarsMarketingBonusCode.com makes abundantly clear, PokerStars welcomes U.S. players to its tables. So come one, come all! First to PokerStarsMarketingBonusCode.com, then on to sweeping the tables at PokerStars!

Okay, so we get it - you already know how to play online poker perfectly well, thank you very much. What you’re most interested in is finding the best bang for your buck from the online poker sites. In short, it’s all about the poker bonus. And boy (or girl), does EasyPokerBonuses.com have the poker bonuses for you!

With poker bonuses as its central focus, it should come as no surprise that EasyPokerBonuses does more than reveal which sites have the best poker bonuses and what the poker bonuses are at the various top poker sites online. Easy Poker Bonuses, in keeping with its name and stated mission, also reveals how to redeem each of those poker bonuses.

Just as every poker site offers a different poker bonus, so too does every site have different requirements for what you have to do in order to claim that money, and Easy Poker Bonuses lays all of that out for you, nice and easy.

This may very well be one of the most underrated poker portal features online today, as many people sign up at poker rooms based on the attractive poker bonus offered, yet have no idea that they have to do anything special in order to cash in that money (much less what those crucial steps are). That’s why it’s so fantastic to have Easy Poker Bonuses saving you the trouble of losing out on the poker bonuses you have coming to you by advising you in advance of exactly what’s expected of you in order to take that free money home.

According to EasyPokerBonuses, the PokerStars Bonus Code, for example, is incredibly easy to redeem as - unlike the Full Tilt Poker Bonus code, for example - you don’t even have to contribute chips to the pot in order to earn the poker points that help you claim the bonus.

It’s hard to find a poker bonus that can compete with the Bodog Poker Bonus Code. Bodog gives you 110% on your money. That’s a 100% bonus (up to $500) plus an additional 10% in instant cash. This is just one of the 10 easiest poker bonuses to clear that Easy Poker Bonuses features (not to mention one of the choicest).

What’s more, Easy Poker Bonuses presents another type of poker bonus altogether that so many poker portals seem to overlook, and that is the No Deposit Poker Bonus. This is an especially mouth-watering type of poker bonus as (like the name says) it does not require you to make any deposit at all in order to qualify for a bonus. All you have to do is sign up with the site! Easy Poker Bonuses features several poker rooms that offer these No Deposit Poker Bonuses - now that’s free money if ever free money could be found.

The long and short of it is, EasyPokerBonuses.com in and of itself is one of the best poker bonuses around.

Niche Poker is on the scene and poker will never be the same again. What’s so great about it? Well, for starters NichePoker.net is about everything poker, online and off. Where most poker portals leave off, with content only about online poker, NichePoker appreciates that sometimes you like to play offline as well. And its makers want to see you do as well at offline poker as they want you to do online.

The savvy strategy articles at NichePoker.net include titles like: “How NOT to Play Poker Sixes”, “How Studying Hand Histories Can Improve Your Play”, and “How to Play Small Pocket Pairs”. The article on “How to Decide When Your Poker Session is Over” alone, in fact, is worth its weight in poker chips.

And the lessons don’t stop there - as Niche Poker also offers tips and advice on winning at Omaha, Seven Card Stud, and many of your other favorite poker games. Niche Poker will even teach you to hone your Tournament and Heads Up playing skills.

NichePoker features reviews of some of the best poker sites to play at, with its far-and-way favorites clearly being Full Tilt Poker, Bodog Poker, and PokerStars. As such, Niche Poker gives its players the best bonus codes, referral codes, and marketing codes available to poker players online.

The Bodog Referral Code offered at the site, for example, is a whopping 110% up to a generous $500. That actually breaks down to a 100% bonus and 10% in instant cash. You’ll be hard pressed to find a sweeter deal around than the Bodog Referral Code.

The Full Tilt Referral Code, meanwhile, “only” gives you 100% on your money (no 10% instant cash bonus, sorry) but ups the max bonus to $600, pitting the FullTilt Referral Code and the Bodog Referral Code neck-and-neck for the best bonus you can find.

Now, the PokerStars Marketing Code may not be as enticing as the two aforementioned poker bonus codes (with only up to $50 max on your 100% bonus) but with some of the best action of any online poker tables, playing at PokerStars is its own reward.

One other site, not yet mentioned, that NichePoker.net also rates highly is Party Poker, and in line with NichePoker’s penchant for giving its visitors the choicest poker bonus codes for whatever sites it checks out, the Party Poker Bonus Code is pretty nice too, at 30% up to $150.

Niche Poker even sponsors its own poker tournaments. Recently NichePoker.net gave away a Nintendo Wii in a freeroll tournament. Sign up at NichePoker.net and find out when the next special freeroll is announced. Subscribe to the NichePoker.net RSS feed too and have all the latest poker stories delivered straight to your email inbox or posted automatically on your website.

With poker strategy articles, poker room reviews, and poker bonus codes galore, there’s very little you can’t find at this site about your (and our) favorite game.

Well, I decided to play some $3/6 Hold’em this morning while I did some work on the computer. This session was marked by wild play from opponents which resulted in a very up and down day at AP.

I started the session with $100 at the table. On 4 occasions I was beaten down to under $20. On 3 of those occasions I was able to battle back and get my bankroll almost back to the original $100. However, all good things had to end.

On the final hand of the day I was delt Q 10 and was able to flop top 2 pair. However, the turn revealed a K which worried me. Sure enough after I was forced to put all my chips in the pot the other player turned over a straight and crushed my 2 pair.

I did get good playing value out of my $100 as the session lasted over 2.5 hours, however, that does not help my bankroll at AP. Word of advice though… if you see me at the tables at AP you should stick around because I have been in a giving mood lately.

Let’s Gamble.

I have found over the past year that playing less poker has actually increased my win / loss ratio. This sounds strange, but it has in fact allowed me to play less and make more. I attribute this largely to the fact that when I do play poker now, I am more focused. The longer lay offs in between sessions have left me more relaxed and not worrying about daily fluctuations in my bankroll.

If more players would play less sessions, but play more focussed sessions I think that they would see the benefits of this strategy I have recently adopted.

On that note, off to the tables!

In a matter of 30 minutes Carbon Poker managed to turn my $25 into $725 and then magically turn it back into $75!

I was playing Carribean Poker when I hit a 4 of kind with the jackpot playing on a $6 hand. This boosted my funds up to over $300. I then started playing $25 hands and quickly boosted my funds to over $700.

However, within 15 hands I had lost it all and was quickly reduced to $75. AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

Thought I was going to be a lock for casino win of the day, but my own greed got in the way. I should have cashed out. Then rebought back in for my original amount to avoid losing all my winnings. Damn! Will I never learn!

Quick Smack Dog lesson. If you more the quadruple your winnings. CASH OUT and BUY BACK IN WITH ORIGINAL WINNINGS!

Let’s Gamble,

SmackDog

Well the morning started out rough at Absolute Poker, but ended on a high note to bring the SmackDog back to even for the session.

The day started out with me taking a loss of about $75 playing a couple fixed limit hold’em games at Absolute. However, I decided to try my luck at the sit n go tournaments that I once had good luck at back in the day.

This proved to be a good move as I won my first 2 $11 tournaments I entered to take in a net profit of $62! I then entered one more $11 tourney and finished just outside the money as my pocket aces got cracked by a flush draw on the river.

Overall, I finished the session up $5! Hahaha, better then a poke in the eye with a stick.

Let’s Gamble,

SmackDog