Mastering poker – there are many sources for learning poker.  I have been trying to master the game of poker for quite a while.  I have tried using many online strategy guides, and found several to be effective in improving my game and my understanding of poker.

Several of the most comprehensive guides I found, provide information regarding all aspects of poker and especially helped my online poker.

They contain well written information that deals with all aspects of poker.  They include the popular games like Texas Holdem, Omaha and Stud – also rules and strategy articles for the less popular games such as Razz or HORSE.

I hope to find more poker guides, written by poker professionals.  For basic game rules I use Wikipedia, the world-famous knowledge sharing platform, but it just doesn’t cut it when searching for more advanced poker strategies.

Mastering the game of poker by reading online strategy articles, takes a lot of your spare time, but once you have found some useful material, your poker will improve.

Have you ever played in an online blackjack tournament?

Its all very well sitting in the comfort of your home and playing blackjack against the computer, when you’ve had enough you log out and go and do something different… like maybe putting your feet up, cracking open a beer and catching up on your favorite game.

But when you play an online blackjack tournament you have to have a good strategy and most importantly stamina.  You can’t just cruise in and out of the game when you want to, or when you are tired  and have had enough.

To give an example to put it into context… an online blackjack tournament is like running a marathon.  Sprint off in the beginning and you won’t finish the race – you have to pace yourself.  Do enough in the beginning to keep up with your opponents, examine their play and strategy, test them and then out sprint them at the end. 

Pacing yourself is key to winning.  Take the betting steady in the beginning and then up the pace at the right time to get ahead and drop the other runners behind.  Knowing when to do this will come with time and experience.

For those of you that have played blackjack tournaments what would you say is important for success?

Mastering Blackjack supports responsible gambling.

After my last blog post called “Are you prepared to lose?” posted on 4 Feb, I have received a number of requests to say more about responsible gambling.

I think that everyone should do their part if they want to see gambling laws lifted.  It is because people have not gambled with responsibility, that laws have been put in place to control gambling.

There are organisations that are getting together to oppose the UIGEA and other anti-gambling State law.  These organisations should also be working on the cleaning up of the gambling image and ensuring people take responsibiliy when they gamble.

I believe that all casinos and all online casinos should support responsible gambling programs.  Users should be monitored for signs of abuse and excess.  They should have the necessary specialists to call on and council people if required.

Do you look to see if the site that you are playing blackjack on, supports responsible gambling?  You should do this and then only support the sites that support responsible gambling.

We have to take the first step and show that we are responsible citizens.  It is no good just leaving it to the government or to someone else.  Its someone else’s problem, or someone else is to blame…

I would like to officially say that Mastering Blackjack fully supports the need for responsible gambling and so should everyone in the gambling industry.

Are you prepared to lose everything when you play blackjack?

When you walk into a casino or play your blackjack online, are you prepared to lose all your chips?

I was chatting to a friend who is an investment advisor and he is struggling because people don’t trust the markets anymore – can you blame them?  The first thing that he does is ask people whether they are prepared to risk losing all their money.  He does this to help determine their risk profile.  Do they like to take risks and are they gamblers… or do they like a steady income with low risk?

Now of course with the current stock market situation, no-one is happy that they went for the “high risk – maximum return option”… which ended up turning into the “no return – lose everything option!!!!”

Age also comes into it because if they are near retirement then they can’t risk losing their investments… although it seems like that hasn’t stopped some people from taking huge risks and losing their retirement savings.

Mastering blackjack tries to advise you to maximise your returns playing blackjack.  But one thing you have to be prepared for is losing all your chips.  It is good practice to only take into a casino, the money that you are prepared to lose for that evening.  Or to deposit online what you are prepared to lose.

Be honest with yourself…. I know its hard but try…

We never want to stop when we lose everything, the first urge is to reach for the wallet and go and try again…. “I know I can win this money back…. if only I get the cards and get lucky…”

It is best to prepare yourself for loss, after all blackjack is a game of chance and anything could happen.  Then when loss happens you accept it and go home or log-off.

Or… of course you could keep improving your blackjack skills and reading the mastering blackjack blog so that you don’t lose as much….

We all went off to watch the latest Bond movie the other night, ‘Quantum of Solace’.  Yes I know it has been out for ages, but we just never had a chance to see it.

I was very disappointed that there was no gambling in this Bond movie, after the previous one – Casino Royale.  I suppose that it might have been overdoing it a bit by having gambling in this one too, but still it would have been nice.

In fact to be honest most of the time I was a bit confused during the movie, because it had been so long since I had seen its predecessor Casino Royale, that I couldn’t remember the detail of the plot.

Watching Quantum of Solace was like watching a sequel to Casino Royale, but if you couldn’t remember what happened in the first movie then you were a bit lost for the second one!

So now I have got out the DVD of Casino Royale to go back and see what happened again and piece together the pieces.  Then I’ll have to go back and watch Quantum of Solace again to put more pieces of the plot together….

Clever marketing, you end up seeing everything twice just to follow what is going on…

Then of course they leave it open ended, with unsolved mysteries so guess what… there is another Bond movie coming along with Daniel Craig doing his stuff…