Getting chips at a live poker room is easy – you hand over money and the casino gives you chips. Online poker rooms are a little more complicated; you need to either set up your bank account or credit card with the room and not all rooms accept all banks or cards.

You could use an ewallet like Skrill or Neteller, but that can add an additional level of complexity for players – and again, not every ewallet is accepted by every online poker room.

The solution to this problem: The Poker Deposit Adviser from BestPokerSite.org. Broken down over more than a dozen payment processing options used by the best poker sites, including credit cards such as Visa and American Express along with ewallets such as MoneyBookers and Click2Pay, the Poker Deposit Adviser provides a simple-to-use reference that saves online poker players a significant amount of time.

Banking information isn’t always accessible from the main website of an online poker room; it’s often buried deep within the page or software itself. Digging through a website to find those details only to realize that you can’t use your payment processing method of choice is a frustrating experience, and it’s one you can avoid by using BestPokerSite.org’s Poker Deposit Adviser.

Playing online poker can be tough enough, with skilled players lurking around nearly every corner.  The last thing players need is to have another thing on their mind when they’re trying to focus on growing their bankrolls, making tools like the Poker Deposit Adviser more necessary than ever.

About BestPokerSite.org
BestPokerSite.org contains information about a variety of online poker rooms. Users will find reviews that cover software, banking and a host of other aspects for over a dozen online poker rooms.

PRESS RELEASE –  Media Contact: Editor /  http://www.bestpokersite.org/

###

No matter which way you go about it, look into free offers before paying for online poker training.  It’s money you could be putting toward poker playing.

The significant departure referred to above is, of course, Phil Galfond.  Arguably the heart of the site since inception, Galfond and the site parted ways a few weeks ago under circumstances that remain somewhat murky.  Whatever the reasons, Bluefire does still retain the impressive library that Galfond built during his time at the site as a real money poker online guru. That is no doubt of some comfort to current members and potential subscribers.  In a further attempt to steady the ship, Bluefire Poker has announced a series of high-profile, high-stakes signings in the days since Galfond’s departure.  Two of the brightest of the bunch are Asad “glitteringprizes” Goodarzy and Adam “ctrlaltdegen11″ Reynolds, long-time NLHE regulars who play a variety of stakes and formats.  While it’s hard to replace Galfond in the pure sense of the word, instruction from proven winners is always a good step in the right direction.

Obviously it will take a bit of time to see if the product matches the hype; after all, winning at poker and teaching others how to win are two different things indeed.  If early videos are any indication then both Asad and Adam should provide popular with Bluefire members, as both seem to have a fresh take on a game that has admittedly gone stale for too many players.

For some, there simply will be no replacing Galfond.  In that case, there aren’t necessarily a ton of alternatives for Bluefire Poker members who are looking to jump ship.  Galfond is a one-of-a-kind talent, and the closest thing you’re likely to find in terms of a replacement likely resides on the Card Runners staff, which has much of the market for marquee pros cornered.  You could also look to smaller, niche sites focused around just one or two pros, but history has shown those endeavors to be rife with inconsistency when it comes to output and quality, so buyer beware.

The point of this article is not necessarily to predict where online poker will be five years from now, but rather to offer simple tips that will help you stay current with the latest poker news without expending much time or energy.

1) Know Your Goals.  This might sound odd, but you need to put a bit of thought into what information you’re actually interested in.  Are you a person who doesn’t want to miss any tidbit –  no matter how small or unfounded –  regarding regulation?   Are you angling for a job in the industry?  Or perhaps you’re just a casual player who wants to know what the latest promotions are. 

The goals you have in terms of information-gathering should have a significant impact on the types of sources you seek out and ultimately add to your reading rotation.

2) Use a Reader.  There is more poker news than you can shake a stick at –  sort of.  What you really have is a lot of sources all more or less saying the same thing, with each source occasionally offering something unique.  That’s a lot of duplicates to cut through, and a tool like Google Reader can help you clear the weeds.

3) Be Selective.  If you were looking for a deposit bonus at Lock Poker, you wouldn’t just Google “Lock Poker bonus” and go with the first site you saw.  You’d click on a few results, evaluate their quality and winnow your list until you found a site you were comfortable with. 

Finding a poker news site should be no different –  before you add a site to your reading list, think long and hard about what purpose the site will serve in the context of both your current line up and your larger goals.

Staying current is vital for those who rely on poker for their livelihood.  With a bit of luck and the tips above, you can make the process of doing so much simpler, quicker and ultimately more informative.

Check out the lobby or the Lock Poker homepage for a full list of the current promotional lineup; three of our favorite ongoing promotions at Lock are listed below.

Royal Flush –  Make the best possible hand in poker and Lock Poker will make it a little better still with a cash bonus.  You need to use both of your hole cards, win the hand and notify support of the hand, but if all of those conditions are met you’ll be getting a bonus that’s worth 100 times the size of the big blind in the game that you’re playing, with a max bonus of $1000.

Not bad for just making a hand.

Deposit Bonus –   You can’t sign up for an online poker room without getting a deposit bonus, and Lock Poker has a solid offer for the first deposit you’re willing to make at the room.  They’ll match the deposit with a bonus of 100% of your deposit amount, with the top bonus you can receive being $750.  The clearance rate and terms are reasonable, and when added to the VIP program the deposit bonus provides a nice rakeback rate.

Get a Lock Poker bonus code 2012 verified to earn the maximum bonus available at Lock when you make your first deposit.

Leaderboards –  It’s great to know that you’re the best, but it’s even better to get paid for being the best.  You’ll get paid for your play in multi table tournaments and sit and go tournaments with the leaderboards at Lock Poker, including a variety of bonuses that bring the total value over $10,000.

That’s just a few of the highlights in the promotional lineups at Lock Poker.  Read a Lock Poker review or log in today to see what else is on tap.

Are you revising your poker spending levels?

This may see a lot of poker players cutting back on the time and money they spend online. If you are a very casual poker player, you may be able to maintain your level of playing but for those players who love the game and would like to play whenever they can, there may be a need to cut back on the money that is spent on online poker games. However, there is no need to stop playing online poker and with a bit of sensible thinking and clever play, you should be able to keep playing online without impacting on your weekly or monthly budget at all.

There are so many free poker options to choose from these days that there is no need to spending a lot of money on poker. This may mean that you have less chance to win money when you play poker but this shouldn’t be your solution out of any money worries that you may have! Poker can be a way to make a living but for everyone who breaks through into the professional world, there will be hundreds more who dream of making it big but fall short. This is why it is important to be realistic when it comes to playing poker and what you expect to get from it. Poker can be an immensely fun game to play and if you are able to enjoy it on that level, it will always be a great past-time.

Play for big poker cash

However, some people will always want to play for cash and big money, which means you need to look at the offers that the big sites provide. Many of these sites will regularly provide freeroll games for their members, which mean there is no need to pay any money to join in. These are the games to play if you dream about winning a lot of money with a minimal amount of outlay. For instance, signing up for a ClubWPT free trial membership can see you playing for some of the biggest prizes in poker without spending any of your own money. This has to be of interest to poker players and could see you changing your life in one evening of poker play!

You don’t need to spend big to win big when you play online poker and with some sensible thinking, you may manage to have all the fun you could ever wish for!

OnlinePokerRealMoney.com offers players a number of resources related to poker, but the bulk of their current focus is devoted to online poker room reviews.

What can you learn from online poker room reviews?
Using online poker room reviews is a great way to get a quick snapshot of a variety of online poker rooms with minimal time and effort.  From reviews you can learn important details about a site that might be difficult to discern from simply visiting the room or downloading the software, such as average real money poker traffic, cashout speed and other intangible factors such as customer support and general quality of promotions.

Could you do the research yourself?
The research involved in accurately depicting an online poker room is actually quite intensive.  Dozens, if not hundreds, of factors combine to create the experience of an online poker room, and correctly identifying and describing those various facets of the room does take a significant amount of time.

It is certainly not an impossible task, but it is somewhat futile given that sites like OPRM have already done the heavy lifting for players with their room reviews.

What else should you do when choosing a site?
No quest for an online poker room should begin and end with reading a few reviews.  While reviews provide a good snapshot, that’s a far cry from direct experience with the room.  You simply can’t predict how you’re going to feel at an online poker room until you download it, log on and play a few hands. 

The general approach taken by poker players is to use reviews to create a shortlist of possible poker rooms, and then to investigate rooms on that list personally.

Using reviews from sites like OPRM and your own experience is a surefire method for choosing the top online poker room for your needs.

It was the rise in popularity of online poker sites that grabbed people’s attention and really started to bring the game into the spotlight. Poker has always been a very popular game but it has been one played in homes and garages across the country and world. It has been a very popular activity for friends to get together and socialise. At times, the poker game was only a conduit to bring people together but of course, some poker players take the game very seriously. This culture still exists but many people didn’t have friends they could play poker with or they would struggle to play poker on a regular basis.

Online poker is evolving all the time

Online poker has changed all this and turned it into a game that can be played by anyone and at any time. This is brilliant news because it means that every level of poker player can join in the fun and spend their leisure time in a positive fashion. There are some players who want to tap into the social context of poker but there are other players who dream of winning a lot of money and grabbing fame and fortune through poker. Winning a satellite event can whisk you away to some of the most glamorous locations in the world to take part in poker games against some of the biggest names in the business. If you hold your nerve and the cards fall for you, there is no reason why you cannot go a long way in these events and perhaps change your life completely!

Practice helps for poker players

You will need to practice and hone your skills if you want to be a winner in this type of event though and this means you should play online whenever you can. This may be expensive but there are always ways to play online poker without spending too much money. There are usually free poker options to consider but if you use poker bonus codes correctly, you can find yourself with a nice bonus when you sign up for a new site.

This is the sort of thing that can make all the difference in looking for a new site and it can help you to make the most of your time online. Playing poker should be fun and even if you are aiming high, you shouldn’t overlook the benefits of enjoying yourself when you log in online.

While free bankrolls are a great way to get into online poker real money games with no cost to you, they are often fairly small amounts of money –  think maybe $10–$100.  They are also often structured in a way that pays you more and more of the bankroll the longer you play.

Those two facts mean that players looking to make the most of a free bankroll should probably play poker with a slightly different strategy than they might if they were playing with their own money.  A few basic tips are below.

Play Tighter –  It’s generally correct to play tight, but it’s especially correct when you have limited funds.  A great place to really tighten up your game in both cash games and tournaments is in early position, or the first few seats to act preflop.  It is very difficult to play even strong hands from this position, so you’re better off playing very tight and saving your chips for the later seats.

Play Lower –  When you bust a bankroll there’s no more bankroll, so you need to play pretty low limits with your bankroll.  You may not be a micro-stakes player, but that’s generally where you should be when playing on a free bankroll, because you’re going to need to save those buy ins for a later time.

Play Less –  You should avoid long sessions on your free bankroll, because long sessions are more likely to lead to mistakes.  Choose the times that you play wisely, and shoot for times when you won’t be interrupted, are well-rested and fed and will be able to focus.

When a player of this stack raises to 3x from the cut-off, if you were to just call that bet, the amount of chips already in the pot is enough to justify a resteal more so than just a flat call. The resteal should generally only be attempted on late position raisers, unless the raiser is a super loose aggressive player who has routinely ignored position when raising. The hands you can consider a resteal with vary greatly; A8 and up, K5 and up, Q8 and up, J9 and JT, and pairs from 55 up are all acceptable restealing hands, so long as you believe you have a reasonable chance of your opponent folding. The range on Kx is wider than Ax simply because dry aces are more likely to look you up than dry kings, so the odds of you being dominated are much lower if you were to be called while holding K8s; only AK, KQ, and possibly KJ are likely to look you up.

The more likely you are to be called, the tighter you should consider making the requirements, unless you’re looking to chip up; a smaller M or an opponent who can make hero calls with less than stellar hands should be cause for caution if you’re making a resteal with the lower end of the spectrum of hands we’ve discussed, pairs not withstanding. The bottom range of these hands are actually not good for stealing as opposed to restealing; by restealing, we’re adding a significant amount of chips to our stack if the steal is successful, and if not, we give ourselves the opportunity to grab a pile of chips and have a manageable M to work with. The same factors that work for our resteal work against our steal though; if the guy with M of 12 folds his cutoff instead of raises, and you raise from the button with K8o for 3x, you gain much less if your steal works, and if one of the blinds comes over the top, can you call with K8?

The trick is, you don’t want to ask yourself these questions; you want to force your opponents to make these decisions instead. You also don’t want to try the resteal against early or early middle position raisers that you have little information on. You can assume that their range of raising hands is going to be much tighter than if they had been in later positions, and therefore your fold equity in restealing is much lower. If the raiser is early, treat the hand normally and only come into the pot with hands you would against a normal raise.

Also, restealing when the antes haven’t kicked in is also less likely to be effective, because even late position raisers are looking to get action more often than when the antes kick in; there isn’t as much in the pot to contest, and therefore their raise represents a hand more often than than when there are antes. Any player that plays tight even when the antes kick in are also bad players to steal from; if they don’t adjust, their raises are just as strong now as they were at the beginning stages of the tournament, and thus should be respected as such. Players that loosen up and raise from the button or CO frequently when the blinds kick in are your most ideal players to resteal from.