Rakeback has become an important bonus feature for many online poker rooms. If you’re the type of player that wants cash as your VP bonus, rakeback is the way to go. Not every poker room will offer it, and only a couple of the big player sites have it. Most online poker rooms offer around 30% rakeback, and some will go as far as 50%. Sun Poker and Interpoker will give as much as 50% if your rake is big enough.

The big players that offer rakeback are Full Tilt Poker and Carbon Poker. Full Tilt will give you 27% and Carbon offers 30%. PKR is a 3-D poker room that will give you 30% of your rake back. Make sure you go over the rules of any poker room before you decide to play. Your rakeback percentage increases depending on how much you play at many of the sites.

I’ve seen lots of players that pretend to be females online. These guys just post a shot of their girlfriend and then use a feminine name. I can’t see this being a big edge, but at the lower levels it could certainly save you a bet or two. If the picture of the girl is attractive enough, some players will take it easy on her during play. Many of these players posing as females will even flirt with other players, and pretend to be inexperienced.

Any table image you can present to opponents can be used to your advantage if you plan it out enough. Many male players tend to underrate female players, so they will have that advantage for awhile anyway. If some chick outplays me in a pot or two, you can bet that I’ll be playing her as hard as I play any other opponent.

1. Have enough money to support yourself. I don’t recommend moving to Vegas to play poker unless you’ve been able to accumulate a sizable bankroll to live on.

2. Get a sponsor to fund part or all of your play. Even someone willing to stake you is good, but you have to pay them a share. Any sponsor wins are all yours.

3. Have a Plan B. Many professionals have had to try a couple of times before they were able to win enough to survive. Have something to fall back on just in case.

4. Study the game and practice thousands of hours of play. You need to be an experienced player who understands the game at all levels, or you’ll go broke fast.

5. Promote yourself at every opportunity. Recognizable poker players get sponsorship deals. Promote yourself by teaching, writing or making television appearances whenever possible.

The explosion in the popularity of poker the last few years has seen everything that can somehow be attached to the game marketed and sold. This includes books, games, calendars, cards and even poker camps.

It may seem like a novelty idea, but poker camps have become very popular and are big business recently. A number of professional poker players either run their own camp or are affiliated with one in some way. Howard Lederer helps run Poker Reality Camp, Camp Hellmuth is run by Phil Hellmuth and even Doyle Brunson got in on the act with his son Todd Brunson in the Super System Poker Camp. One of the most popular and well-known camps is the WPT Boot Camp run by the same people that produce the World Poker Tour.

With a wide range of admission fees (from as low as $1,500 to as high as $3,500 and up), is it worth shelling out the cash? It’s worth noting that anyone who thinks they can’t learn a few things from a poker pro is a fool, and deserves to keep making mistakes at the table. Internet message boards indicate that most poker players (novice or experts) find the camps well worth the time and money because of the close interaction with the pros and the close attention paid to skills that are actually helpful at the table. If you do have a couple extra grand, attending a poker camp may be a good investment to improve your game and win more cash.

The job of an FBI spy catcher is not an easy one. Ever realize a person was lying to you just because they took a breath a certain way or lifted their eyebrow ever so slightly?
Joseph Navarro has. For more than 25 years Navarro worked espionage cases for the FBI, becoming a world-renowned expert in non-verbal behavior and earning him a spot on nearly every U.S. spy investigation between 1993 and 2003- including those of notorious moles Aldrich Ames and Robert Hansen.
Now retired from the FBI, Navarro brings his keen eye to the poker table and shares some of his secrets with players eager for an edge in play.

“Poker players lie all the time,” Navarro says. “They pretend they are strong when they are weak or weak when they are strong. The truth is they can all be read. You can have a poker face, but I’ve yet to see someone with a poker body.”

“When you are feeling good — or have a monster hand — your body will manifest what it feels,” he says. “You get happy feet. Your feet begin to bounce up and down like a kid going to Disney World.”

Navarro teaches players to observe and collect behavioral information from the minute they sit at the card table. When players are confident, they tend to use their hands more and claim more territory at the table. When they have good hands, they generally look down at their chips.

“While you can’t control the cards you are dealt,” Navarro says, “you can make them win.”

Re-buy tournaments exist to drive up prize pools, while keeping the number of players low. They’re a dream for the casino, but not every player likes that format of tournament.

If you decide to play in one I would suggest that you bring at least two or three buy-ins. Remember that the prize pool is bigger, so your investment can be bigger.

A good way to start your re-buy event is not to play any hands until the blinds have passed by you once. As soon as you pay big blind, you can re-buy and become the immediate chip leader at the table. What you don’t want to do is play too aggressive early on because you have the option to get back in.

Utilize any add-on options you may have, which are common at re-buy events. Chips are power in tournament poker so make sure you maintain a stack until the re-buys are finished.

It’s no secret that the aggression level is a little cranked up online compared to a live game. In any aggressive game, position is one of the most important factors.

Position is important in any poker game because last position holds the advantage of knowing what everyone in the hand is going to do before they have to act. If everyone folds to you and only the blinds remain, a raise will often allow you to win the blinds.

Last position holds another big edge because many flops miss the players in the hand. The button can pick up the pot with another timely bet. Aggressive players will often bet into you when you have position on them, and this allows you to slow play big hands undetected until you decide to turn the tables on them. Many online players will continually bet into you and you can just let them dump to you.

With 21 events completed, the WSOP Player of the Year Race is shaping up to be one to watch. The current leader is a seasoned professional named Tom Schneider. Tom has been a force on the tournament scene since 2002 but was always a bridesmaid, cashing often but never winning the event, until this year’s 7-Stud bracelet win. He also had a fourth-place finish in the $2500 HORSE event. His lead isn’t very big though; his 155 points are only 20 more than the second-place player, who happens to be a WSOP legend.

Humberto Brenes is on Tom’s heels with 135 pts and three cashes of his own this year. Humberto has had 48 WSOP cashes (no, that’s not a misprint) and has two bracelets of his own. He had eight cashes last year alone, and is my early favourite to win the race this year.

Next is Russian poker star Alex Kravchenko, who also has three cashes so far this year. The veteran has earned over half a million in tournament cash and is a real threat to win, because he is so diverse in the poker variations he can play at a top level. He is alone in third place with 120 points.

The 21-year-old sensation named Steve Billirakis has continued his solid play since he won event #1 of this year’s tournament. He has cashed twice since then, and is currently tied with John (Razor) Phan for fourth place in the WSOP standings with 110 points.

Other notables are Greg (Fossilman) Raymer in sixth place and Phil Hellmuth in seventh, both only 50 points off the lead. Phil has won his 11th bracelet, and Allen Cunningham has won his fifth this year, leaving them with105 and 100 points respectively, and a good shot at winning this race too.

Names like Chris Ferguson, Phil Ivey, Gavin Smith, and Erik Cajelais are all sitting at 75 points with lots of events left to be played. It’s still anyone’s race to win, and it’s going to be exciting to see who is able to do it.

For more WSOP news, check out the Bodog Beat.

Jennifer Tilly is playing for all the marbles in the $5000 No Limit Holdem game at the 2007 WSOP

It continues to be a history-making year at the 2007 World Series of Poker. In the opening week, the youngest WSOP bracelet-winner record as well as the non-main event field-size records were smashed, and two more records came crumbling down this week.

Phil Hellmuth guaranteed himself a spot in the WSOP history books when he won the main event at only 24 years of age back in 1989. Since then Hellmuth has been a consistent winner at the WSOP and proved this week he may very well be the best poker player alive in the world today. Heading into this year’s WSOP, Hellmuth shared the record for WSOP bracelets won with Doyle Brunson and Johnny Chan at 10. Hellmuth passed both poker legends this week by winning his 11th WSOP bracelet in the $1,500 No Limit Hold’em tourney. The win was even more impressive because Hellmuth outlasted a huge field of 2628 players. That was the largest field in any tournament that Hellmuth has won.

The win gave Hellmuth his 59th career WSOP cash finish, which puts him five ahead of the next player in line. He’s also gaining on T.J. Cloutier for the WSOP final-table record. Cloutier has made it to 39 WSOP final tables in his lifetime, while Hellmuth’s total now stands at 38. Don’t be surprised to see Hellmuth reach or even eclipse that mark before the 2007 WSOP comes to an end.

While Hellmuth was making his record-setting bracelet charge, the best female poker players in the world were coming together to set their own record. The $1,000 No Limit Hold’em Ladies Only tournament kicked off earlier this week with a record-setting field. There were 1286 women packed into the Rio’s Amazon room when the tournament began, which surpassed last year’s record-setting field of 1128. (Read that story here!)

The largest women-only poker tournament ever played was won by Sally Boyer, who cleared $262,077 in what was her first-ever WSOP tournament. With the number of female poker players increasing every year, it might be too long before a woman takes home poker’s ultimate prize – the WSOP $10,000 World Championship main event.

Is this year stacking up to last year’s numbers?

With all the fuss about America trying to criminalize internet poker, a lot of people are interested to see how this year’s WSOP is lining up against previous years. The biggest tournament on the planet will certainly be the place where we will learn if the game has begun to either decline, levelled off, or continued to grow.

Well, so far there hasn’t been any dramatic result to report. Some numbers are up, and some are down. It’s a bit tough to compare because the structure of the tournament changed so much this year, with the addition of so many new events.

Nonetheless, here’s a list of events that have been played in previous years, as well as this year, with the entry numbers:
Game                            2003     2004     2005     2006     2007

$1,500 NL Hold’em - 531         831         2,305      2,776      2,998
$1,500 PL Hold’em - 212          363         1,071      1,102         781
$1,500 Limit Hold’em - 346     608           699       1,068        910
$1,000+Rebuys Hold’em- n/a 538           826           752        844
$2,000 NL Hold’em -     407     834     1  ,403        1,919      1,531
$5,000 7-Card Stud -     96      144            192           183        180

Totals                                        3,318      6,496        7,800     7,244

So looking at those numbers, one could say that the tournament has started a decline, or at least has levelled off this year.  But those stats are a bit debatable because they don’t give the entire picture of this year’s tournament because there are more events being played now, with some of them overlapping.  The first event this year was the biggest tournament ever played (except the last two WSOP main events).  So to this point the numbers are good and are not showing a dramatic decline that many predicted.  If this continues, overall entries for the tournament will grow because of the extra events, which shows an increase in overall attraction for the WSOP.

But even this good news doesn’t change my opinion that the Main Event numbers will be down from last year.  The WSOP is not taking any third party entries from online sites that provide American action.  These sites have driven the numbers up in previous years through satellite entries.  Therefore, these sites are forced to reward their players with the cash for the trip, giving the player the option to keep it instead of letting it ride in the Main Event.  And many will do just that.  I expect a total number of somewhere between 5600 and 6000 – but who knows? Last year’s record could yet be broken.

Hey… you can bet on who you think has what it takes to win the 2007 WSOP Main Event. Get your 2007 WSOP odds!