Caribbean Stud Poker is gradually gaining in popularity as compared to its stud twin: Texas Holdem mainly because it is an easier game to learn and you can play it face to face and still enjoy.

Originating in the Caribbean and based loosely on five card stud poker rules, this game offers a fan alternative to traditional table games with an opportunity to place a side bet and hit a big jackpot too. Some of these jackpots are progressive and you can win millions of dollars if you break those machines or tables.

What is Caribbean Stud? It is not a traditional poker game in the sense that you play against the other players and the best player wins the pot. Caribbean stud belongs to the family of games including Pai Gow poker, Let it Ride and Three Card poker for example, where your opponent is the dealer and your goal is to form a better poker hand than the dealers hand. However, basic knowledge of traditional poker hand ranking is required.

The Rules of Playing Caribbean Stud:

1) The game begins with the players placing an ante bet at the same amount as the table minimum on the ante circle on the table.

2) At the same time, you should decide whether to place an additional side bet for the progressive jackpot.

3) Then, the dealer deals each player five face down cards plus four face down cards and one up to himself.

4) After looking at your cards, you should decide whether to fold or to call. If you decide to call, you should place an additional bet double the amount of your former ante bet.

5) After all the players have made their decisions, the dealer shows his hand. In order to qualify in a Caribbean stud poker game, the dealer must have an ace and a king or better. If he does not qualify, you will be paid back your ante bet but the call bet is a push.

6) If the dealers hand qualifies, he compares hands against each of the players individually. If his hand is better than yours is, you lose both your ante and your call bets.

7) If your hand is better than the dealers hand, you would be paid even money for your ante while for your call you would be paid according to a paytable. The paytable can vary from one casino to another. Generally, US casinos pay out 50:1 on a straight flush; 20:1 on four of a kind; 7:1 on full house; 5:1 on a flush; 4:1 on a straight; 3:1 on three of a kind; 2:1 on two pairs and even money on one pair or less. In case your hand and the dealers hand are even, both ante and raise will push.

One of the reasons that Caribbean stud poker is so popular is the option of placing a one dollar side bet and winning a large progressive jackpot prize. In order to qualify for the bonus payout you should have a flush or better. For a flush, you would be paid a 50 dollars bonus and in order to win the jackpot that usually resets from 10,000 dollars, you must have a royal flush. However, your chances to hit a royal flush are estimated as about 650,000 to 1, therefore I would recommend skipping it.

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If you want to make money from poker then there are a few steps you need to take. You don’t become a top professional poker player overnight. It takes a lot of hard work and dedication, just like any other profession.

First of all you obviously need to be completely familiar with the rules of the game so learn them off by heart and practice on the practice tables online for play money until you’ve learnt all the intricacies of the game.

When you feel you are ready, you can start playing at the real money tables. I always suggest starting off playing at the low-stakes tables in order to minimise your initial losses, but you should be aware that in many ways it can be harder playing at these tables because the play is so loose.

For example, it’s quite easy to bluff a good player, but bad players will often keep betting. Also the poker fish at the lower stakes tables can be very unpredictable and therefore difficult to read.

As you gain more and more experience you should see a gradual improvement in your play, but this alone will rarely get you to the top. To help you achieve this aim you should educate yourself as much as possible by reading poker tips and strategies from poker professionals. Whether it’s poker books or simply forums and websites, there’s plenty of good quality information out there if you’re prepared to look for it.

Try and learn from the best, ie those players who have reached the very top, so I’m thinking here of people like Phil Hellmuth, Doyle Brunson, Dan Harrington, David Sklansky, etc. This way you will learn some invaluable tips and strategies that will help improve your own game.

By gaining experience and constantly educating yourself you should improve over time and should hopefully start consistently making money from poker. The next step is to focus your efforts on only playing one type of game, and really try and master that particular game. This is much easier than dabbling in different forms of poker and playing different variants of the game all the time.

Of course not everyone will become a poker pro by following these simple steps outlined in this article, but by gaining experience and learning as much as you can about the game, including top tips and strategies used by the professional players, you are giving yourself every chance of becoming a good enough player to make a regular income from playing poker.

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Author Resource:-> James Woolley is a regular poker player and the author of a poker blog which contains the very latest internet poker tips plus details on the top internet poker sites.

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So, what is your hobby? Do you like playing cards? Have you yet discovered the amazing world of online poker rooms? In truth, there is nothing more wonderful to card players than online poker. This has become a hobby to many poker players.

Online poker room gambling popularity emanates from the ease and convenience of this type of gambling. It is way much easier to gamble in an online casino than in an actual brick and mortar one. The gambling software creates an almost effortless game. You are assured that you won’t even miss your turn. You would be prompted when you need to place a bet, even suggests the amount that you should bet. You would even be asked if you want to fold, which you could do so if you feel like your hand is not good enough. This is why a lot of people are getting addicted to online poker gambling.

The Benefits of Online Poker Gambling

Poker software are being constantly developed and improved to meet customers demand and satisfaction. You can choose your games and play only those that you love. You can play with a limit, no limit or within pot limit. If you are confident with your game, you can for high stakes. You can even switch from one game to another. It doesn’t even matter when you log on to play, there are games 24/7 and there are seats available.

What Should You Remember When Playing Poker Online?

The hitch on online gambling is that you can’t see your opponents; such that it would be difficult to gauge their reactions. You won’t be able to see their body language. You won’t see them fidget, get excited or frown. This makes winning a little bit difficult. To ensure your chances of winning, there are some things that you have to remember when gambling and playing poker online.

1. Play free poker games first. Before jumping into a poker game, be sure to sit out a few hands to get a feel for the online poker room gambling site. You would also get used to the game. This is especially important since online poker is faster than your traditional poker game.

2. Start with low-staked gambling. Unless you are pretty sure that you’d fare well in a high-staked poker game, do not risk your money in one. Again, feel your way through online poker and online betting by starting with small bets.

3. Earmark your fund. Before you jump into a game or a tournament, determine first what you can afford to lose. If at some point in the game you lost that amount of money, do not go any further.

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Most folks when asked about what constitutes a really good poker player will respond with such qualities as calculated thinking, talent, lack of risk aversion and so on. The one aspect most mentioned by all, however, is psychological toughness and endurance.

The term tilt is one just about everyone has heard of and refers to a change of course in the game at a downturn. Tilt represents a specifically poker-related mental and emotional state, one where the player is irrationally influenced into making moves he never would have made in his normal play. Quite often, in this tilted condition, the player begins a sudden phase of loose-aggressive play or can turn into an unmanageable maniac, or many other weird undesirable deviations from his usual method of play. At times, fear is behind the tilt and the player becomes tight-passive. Whatever the tilt origination, the player is headed down the road to defeat.

The wise player will avoid being tilted in the first place rather than attempt to undo the damage it will inevitably cause. The best way to avert this type of disaster is to gain a thorough knowledge and understanding of the game of poker. You need to familiarize yourself with what distance and dispersion mean in poker to enable you to more easily get through the tough times. In many aspects of life, not just at the poker table, knowledge of mathematical statistics and the laws of probability will lead to a firmer grasp of reality.

Even a simple comprehension of statistics will help you to realize that specific combinations do not always result in specific results of success, e.g., AQs in combination come with a 68% chance of success which can result in a loss of one out of every three deals.

As we all know, knowledge in itself is not enough to always be of assistance. One can be in total awareness that odd things occur and that you can handle the situation. But a long train of bad cards can upset the coolest cat and the lucky morons become even more annoying at this point. Despite your coolness, in spite of yourself, you may find that you are running completely amok. This is tilt, my friend, and you must ride it to the best of your ability without becoming completely unhinged.

So besides theoretical knowledge, you might try another means to avoid the tilt and that would be an awareness of your personal triggers or hot buttons that when pushed send you off into the cosmos.

You must have a clear idea of an event to gain any control over it. You must be able to recognize such an event coming on before it hits and brings out the demons in you. Do not go with falling blindly under the spell of the tilt, observe yourself prior to, during and after the event and this insight will help you avoid the sensation of impending doom and can be more easily dealt with.

Now that you have gained clear insight into your triggers and your resulting behavior, you will be able to identify the tilt as it is looming before you and handle it in a more cool and controlled manner.

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A year before Barack Obama launched his presidential campaign, a reporter asked him if he had a hidden talent. “I’m a pretty good poker player,” he said. That talent, nurtured by his maternal grandfather and then in a low-stakes weekly game with Illinois politicians, is one Obama shares with a host of previous presidents. Yet, only two of them played for serious money, and both were remarkably successful.

Dwight Eisenhower played Stud and Draw for sizable stakes as a young army officer because he needed the money. But he got so good that by the time he reached the higher echelons of the military, he decided to give up the game because he was leaving so many of his tablemates broke.

Eisenhower had learned to play as an eight-year-old in Abilene, Kansas during hunting trips with a guide named Bob Davis, who made him memorize the odds of completing various draws. “He dinned percentages into my head night after night around a campfire,” Ike recalled, “using a greasy pack of nicked cards that must have been a dozen years old. We played for matches and whenever my box of matches was exhausted, I’d have to roll in my blankets and go to sleep.” As an upperclassman at West Point in 1915, he attended “cadet dances only now and then, preferring to devote my time to poker.” He used poker winnings to pay for his dress uniform as well as gifts for Mamie Dowd, a wealthy Denver debutante. Those gifts included her engagement ring, which she accepted on Valentine’s Day, 1916.

Eisenhower was not only a strong player, he was dedicated to keeping the game honest. While stationed at Camp Colt in Pennsylvania, he learned that a well-connected junior officer had used a marked deck in a Stud game. Capt. Eisenhower told him to resign or face a court-martial. When the cheater’s father and Congressman requested that he be allowed to transfer to another unit, Eisenhower firmly explained that no officer could be effective in the field without personal integrity. Even though a more senior officer eventually greased the way for the transfer, Eisenhower never backed down.

While stationed at Fort Meade under Col. George Patton, Capt. Eisenhower continued to dominate the action among his fellow officers. Their highest-stakes game was reserved for bachelors and married men who could comfortably afford to lose. One player who ignored this rule wound up losing so much to Ike that he was forced to cash in his wife’s war bonds to make good on his I.O.U. Eisenhower reluctantly accepted payment, but he felt so guilty afterward that he conspired with others in the game to lose the money back to the man. “This was not achieved easily,” said Eisenhower. “One of the hardest things known to man is to make a fellow win in poker who plays as if bent on losing every nickel.” He then persuaded Col. Patton to ban poker at the fort, if only to keep the same fellow from squandering any more money. The sour experience was enough to convince Eisenhower that, as an officer, “I had to quit playing. It was not because I didn’t enjoy the excitement of the game – I really love to play. But it had become clear that it was no game to play in the Army.”

Any kind of gambling was an anathema in East Whittier, the Quaker suburb of Los Angeles where Richard Nixon grew up. But it didn’t take long for Nixon to become a ruthless poker player when he joined the Navy in World War II. “I found playing poker instructive as well as entertaining and profitable,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I learned that people who have the cards are usually the ones who talk the least and the softest; those who are bluffing tend to talk loudly and give themselves away.”

While serving in the Solomon Islands, Lt. Nixon was invited to a small dinner party for the celebrity pilot Charles Lindbergh, who was testing prototype planes for the Air Force. Instead, he attended a poker game he had previously agreed to host. “In the intense loneliness and boredom of the South Pacific, our poker games were more than idle pastimes,” he wrote, “and the etiquette surrounding them was taken very seriously.”

Nixon liked to compare notes with other strong players, and persuaded one expert, Jim Stewart, to coach him on Five-Card Draw strategy. Nixon’s term for such preparations was “war-gaming.” He began to make serious money playing tight-aggressive poker. He was “as good a poker player as, if not better than, anyone we had ever seen,” said one fellow officer. “I once saw him bluff a Lieutenant Commander out of $1,500 with a pair of deuces.”

By the end of the war, Nixon had won $8,000, a genuinely whopping haul in the forties. Upon discharge, he used it to bankroll his first congressional campaign. In November 1946, he defeated the popular Democratic incumbent Jerry Voorhis, in part by accusing him of being a draft-dodging communist. Four years later, he defeated Helen Gahagan Douglas, a three-term congresswoman, in a mudslinging race for the U.S. Senate. After Nixon claimed the attractive former actress was “pink right down to her underwear,” she retorted with a nickname that stuck: “Tricky Dick;” an unfortunate handle for a politician, of course, but one that any poker stud would be proud of.

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Many poker sites for US players operate as completely free sites and serve as tutorials to the game, helping those interested to pick up the game significantly quicker by offering tips and tricks to improve their odds.  Of course, not all of these tips translate to an excellent player in a live setting, as online poker is in many ways an entirely different animal. 

Much of a live game is dependent on picking up other players physical subconscious cues also referred to as tells, while being aware enough of your own actions to give few tells to other players, or at least purposely incorporate some as a means of fooling your opponents.  The online version of poker, without sitting across from another player at a physical table, relies much more on non-physical tells such as betting patterns, chat box, speed of play and player reaction time.

After online poker USA started to catch on the biggest websites have employed different strategies to increase traffic to their sites.  One such strategy has been to collaborate up with a live poker tournament, allowing the winners of an online ‘satellite’ tournament free entry into the big live competition. 

The winner of the 2003 World Series of Poker, Chris Moneymaker, won entry to the competition via one of these satellite tournaments and essentially turned the world of poker competitions upside down.  Since his great upset to the Poker world, the numbers of poker players online has dramatically increased as well as the number of contestants in live tournaments who gained entry from online poker tournaments, a few of which also went on to win major tournaments.  Thanks in large part to Chris Moneymaker and the unfolding of the world of online poker, the allures of this game once monopolized by a much smaller number of key players has won many new followers and improving players.

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