Phil Hellmuth Blows Up On Poker After Dark Part 3 of 3

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Poker School

Phil Hellmuth Blows Up On Poker After Dark Part 1 of 3

The Perfect Home Poker Game

• Ok so the chips are on the table, the beers are in the fridge you have your finest pair of all black sunglasses on stand by… so, is that all the bases covered for your home poker game? Well no is the simple answer. Don’t worry though this article gives you all the info to help you on your way to having a fine night of poker.What’s the Buy-In and what are the Stakes?

  Ok this is the most important part of the whole evening. Get this wrong, and the night may turn sour very fast. Make sure you set your limits before you start and don’t change them. Keep it friendly; remember the idea is to have a good night not to make it so your mate Terry can’t pay the rent.

  Set the blinds, amount of re-buys, and structure (limit, no-limit or pot limit) before you start. Make sure everyone is happy.

   Equipment

  This sounds easy but trust me something will be forgotten if you don’t double check everything. You will at least need all the items on this list to make sure you have a decent game.

  Cards x 2 decks minimum (one always gets damaged)
  Pastillion x1 this goes at the bottom of the deck so no one knows or can see the bottom card.
  Dealer button x 1
  Chips

Keep your players happy – if you want to be seen as a good host, make sure that you keep the players happy with a few pizzas and a good stock of beer. As a host collect a small flat fee from each player at the start of the night to cover food and drinks and this is a good way to keep everyone happy while not shelling out too much of your own money. Remember that a happy poker player will often spend (lose hopefully) more money than an unhappy one.

Poker Budget Management Explained

The good thing about poker these days is there is always a game to be found online regardless of your budget, but not every player stays in their budget range. The problem for a lot of players is that a large majority of people still look at poker as 30 minutes of gambling – but these sorts of player will tend to deposit a certain amount and put the whole lot at risk in a mater of minutes.

So what should we do?

Well, different people deal with this principle in different ways – personally, if I know I have a certain budget to play with, then I like to stick to a few (in my opinion) helpful rules. Say I have a certain amount as my bankroll for one day, in my first game I will look to put between 20 to 25% at risk. So lets say I’m risking 25% in my first sit down, and assume things went badly, so I’ve lost the 25% of my initial budget.

Ok, so I’m down but I’m not out, at least I’m managing my funds, and giving myself the best chance to get back in the game. So now we must go out to play again with 75% of your initial budget remaining – so in order to ensure I last a few more games, I’m going to set myself 25% of what I have left to play with, so even if the worst were still to happen in this game, I’ll still have over half (56.25%) of what I started with, rather than nothing.

However, obviously saying that you’ll lose (at worst) 43.75% of your budget in two games is a worst case scenario – we’re hoping that, with our help, you aren’t losing at all and you’re on your way to becoming a poker shark!

So on this second stage of play, let’s say I’ve had a good win and increased my bankroll – now, rather than go and risk all my winnings, I’ll apply the same rules to what I can risk in the next game. This will mean that regardless of the result in the next game, you’ve still got a good portion of your winnings.

Trust me when I say that small profits are much better than big losses.

Keep this up and you will be making a tidy profit in no time, and even if you fail to win – and with the help on this site in our video lessons section or the information in our blogs, you shouldn’t – then the amount of game-play you will get for your cash, and level of experience will no doubt increase.

How long could, say £100 last on a 25% scale?

So, sticking to this rule we’d get 11 games out of our money – however, this is a real worst case scenario, but does show that for this money you’re getting a lot of gaming experience. Obviously, if you’ve been working through the advice we’ve been giving out, for free, in our videos, blogs or help-sheets, then you really shouldn’t be losing 11 games in a row anyway.