While we wait for this film to be released, there’s a new poker movie out that’s appropriately titled “Poker Face.” Now I’ll warn you that – unless you speak Greek – you’re going to be reading subtitles the entire time. Assuming this isn’t a big deal, Poker Face looks like it’s worth watching at least once.

A couple of Greeks named Alkis Kourkoulos (Adiavrohos in film) and Evi Saoulidou (Niki) are the stars of this movie, and the plot centers on Niki’s desire to take down the incumbent champion Adiavrohos. As their rivalry develops, viewers are given a few cliche poker tips by Niki when she says the following:

Rule No. 1 – Wait for the right moment to make your move.
Rule No. 2 – Learn to smell the bluff from kilometers away.
Rule No. 3 – When you go busto, get in and play again.
Rule No. 4 – Don’t play the cards, play the opponent.

Long story short, don’t look to go from a win rate of 1bb an hour to 10bb an hour just by watching this movie. However, Poker Face does look like a pretty well-produced film, and it definitely should provide some nice entertainment value – at least judging from the Poker Face trailer we’ve put below:

Apparently, this matter goes much deeper than just a bunch of pious monks committing what many would consider vices – at least according to Buddhist monk standards. The poker players were from a major South Korean Buddhist sect called the “Jogye,” where there’s currently a power struggle going on within the 10 million-member group.

Seong-ho, who was booted out of Jogye as a casualty of the power struggle, made sure to take a stab at the current leadership of the sect by saying, “Basically, Buddhist rules say don’t steal. Look at what they did, they abused money from Buddhists for gambling.”

Seong-ho has spent much of the past two years trying to wrestle leadership away from the current leader, Ven. Jaseung. Jaseung vowed that there would be repercussions for the high stakes poker monks’ actions as he said, “We deeply apologize for the behavior of several monks in our order. The monks who have caused public concern are currently being investigated and will be punished according to Buddhist regulations as soon as the truth is verified by the prosecution.”

So far, six of the eight monks involved were forced to resign following the story breaking. If only they would have stuck to online poker! Assuming you’re not a Buddhist monk and you’d like to play some online poker, why not sign up right here at Carbon. By creating an account and making a deposit, you’ll be eligible for a 100% Carbon Poker bonus worth up to $600.

Study Questionable Hands/Decisions after a Session

One of the quickest ways to improve your play is by dedicating more time to post-session studying. This is especially true when you run into questionable hands and decisions during a session, and aren’t sure whether or not you made the smart play. That said, make a note of these hands and look them over later.

Try Tightening up your Range

Many times, players’ cash game losses can be attributed to playing with too loose of a range. More specifically, they fall into the trap of thinking their opponents are frequently bluffing or playing with a loose range themselves. The likely scenario though is that they’re playing the cards as they are, and/or playing off your tendencies. In any case, slightly limit the range of hands you’re playing for a while and see if this makes a difference.

Invest in Poker Training

One more thing that we’d like to mention as far as improving your cash game play goes involves poker training. Sites like DragTheBar can be instrumental in helping to improve your play, and it’s definitely worth the $30 monthly fee to watch videos and instructions from top online poker pros. Furthermore, it’s an even better deal when you consider that there’s free poker training available through Carbon. Taking this into account, you should definitely try poker training out at least once in your life.

Getting to the main point, Carbon has added some more impressive events to their tournament schedule. Dubbed the “7 Weekly,” these tourneys give players a chance to compete for major prize money every night in a variety of different events. That said, here’s a quick look at the 7 Weekly schedule (all times are server time):

Monday @ 19:00 – $15,000 Guaranteed NL Hold’em Freezeout tournament, $60 buy-in

Tuesday at 19:00 – $15,000 Guaranteed NL Hold’em Heads-up, $109 buy-in

Wednesday at 19:00 – $25,000 Guaranteed “Midweek Monster” NL Hold’em, $60 buy-in

Thursday at 19:00 – $15,000 Guaranteed “Thursday PL Omaha”, $109 buy-in

Friday at 18:00 – $15,000 Guaranteed NL Hold’em Short-handed tournament, $109 buy-in

Saturday at 18:00 – $15,000 Guaranteed NL Hold’em Turbo tournament, $109 buy-in

Sunday at 16:00 – $20,000 Guaranteed HORSE tournament, $215 buy-in

If the buy-ins for these poker tournaments are a little out of your range, don’t forget that there are plenty of satellites running for each event. To play in these satellites, make sure to sign up at Carbon Poker – which puts you in line for a 100% Carbon Poker bonus up to $600 – then visit the lobby. Once here, go to the Tournaments and Satellites tabs, which will bring up the full list of satellites.

No matter whether you’re an Omaha specialist or just somebody looking to work on heads-up play, you should find a 7 Weekly tournament that suits your tastes. More importantly, you’ll find a ton of money available in these events, which could give your bankroll a major boost!

How it happened

As usual, this past week has seen a lot of high stakes poker action at StarWorld Hotel’s Poker King Club. Blinds were sitting at around USD $1300/$2600 (HKD $10,000/$20,000) at the time of the $3.8 million hand.

Dwan was dealt A-T while a random Asian businessman held an A-2 combo preflop. Usually this kind of action is nothing to get excited about, but the A-T-2 flop made things a little more interesting with both players holding a two pair.

With such an aggressive game going on, both players thought their two pair was top hand, and they got all of their money into the middle. Both the turn and river had no effect on either player’s hand, thus leaving Dwan with a massive USD $3.8 million (HKD $30 million) pot.

Is this the Biggest Macau Pot Ever?

As with any live cash game, most of the accounts at these tables are a little sketchy since you don’t exactly have a team of reporters standing nearby. Furthermore, the players themselves are pretty tight-lipped about what happens in the Macau Big Game, so it’s hard to get a 100% accurate story.

In any case, several news outlets have verified Tom Dwan’s $3.8 million pot, which is truly impressive. Essentially Dwan earned more money in a single poker hand than most people will earn in their lifetime. And the big question revolves around where this hand ranks all-time in the Macau cash games.

Based on everything we’ve reported in the past, this pot would be much larger than the one Sam Trickett won last month. For our money, Dwan’s USD $3.8m hand is probably the biggest that Macau has seen thus far.

Taking this into account, you might be very interested to know that Carbon Poker is currently running lots of WSOP satellites. Some of the common Carbon Poker WSOP satellites that you’ll find include $11 and $60 events, which enable you to win coupons for the main $530 WSOP qualifier. And it’s definitely worth making it to the WSOP ME, as you’ll see below.

$64.5 Million up for grabs

The primary reason why you should be interested in Carbon Poker’s 2012 WSOP satellites lies in the fact that the 2011 WSOP Main Event offered a massive $64,531,000 prize pool. With such a huge amount of money available, it’s no surprise that eight players were turned into millionaires through this poker tournament.

The biggest winner of them all was German Pius Heinz, who took the 2011 Main Event title along with $8,715,638. What’s interesting about Heinz is that he was merely a semi-pro before tasting WSOP greatness, which shows that you don’t have to be a superstar to win the Main Event.

How to play in the Carbon Poker WSOP Satellites

If you want to follow in Pius Heinz’s footsteps and play poker in the 2012 Main Event, you should first sign up at Carbon and create an account. By doing this, you’ll also be eligible for the potential $600 Carbon Poker bonus. Once you’ve created an account, visit the Carbon lobby and select the Tournaments and Satellites tabs to find WSOP satellites. There are going to be plenty of qualifiers running up until the WSOP Main Event in July, so make sure to check out the Carbon lobby between now and then.

Getting to the point at hand, fold equity is especially important in poker tournaments as the blinds increase. After all, most players’ tournament life hangs in the balance at this stage, and they’re not going to call raises with ATC. Of course, the reverse happens too where deepstacks can be overly-conservative, which leads to a lot of folding. Keeping this in mind, let’s discuss a couple types of tournaments where you gain extra fold equity.

Turbos

In general, there will be a ton of scenarios where you get fold equity in turbo tournaments. The blinds are increasing rapidly in turbos, which leads to a lot of short-stacked play among everybody. And the better you understand fold equity in these events, the better long-term results you’re going to have.

For instance, if you’re in a super turbo where everybody starts off with 20bb, it won’t take many blind levels before the average stack is a short stack. At this point, having an 8bb stack isn’t that bad because of the fold equity you get by raising in various situations. Assuming you were on the button preflop in an unraised pot, and the blinds had stacks of 6bb and 9bb, you could no doubt get some fold equity here.

Deepstacked

People often say that you should play fairly conservatively in deepstacked poker tournaments – especially in the early stages. However, there are plenty of situations where you can gain some fold equity in the early going when others are playing conservatively.

For example, if everybody’s starting with 200bb in a deepstacked tournament, and you’ve got some really tight players to your left, you can get a lot of fold equity from the cut-off and button. Just be careful not to bet out too much when stealing in these deepstacked situations before the risk could be much greater than the reward.

You can get good fold equity in any type of poker tournament, but you should especially be mindful of this concept in deepstacked and turbo events.

Royal Flush Bonus Details

As long as you’re dealt a royal flush in any real money Texas Hold’em game, you’ll be paid 100x the big blind ($500 maximum). So if you were playing $2/$4 No-Limit Hold’em and were dealt a royal flush, that’d be a $400 bonus! Now some people might say, “Well it’s pretty rare that you’re dealt a royal flush.” However, you also have to remember that if you keep playing online poker, you’re eventually going to be dealt this hand.

Qualification Specifics

It’s worth mentioning that there are a few qualifications you must meet in order to win the royal flush bonus. First off, you need to be on a Texas Hold’em cash game table – tournaments don’t count. Both hole cards must be used in completing your royal flush as well. Assuming you use the Deal It Twice feature at Carbon, only the first dealt turn and river cards count towards the flush. One more thing to note is that you need to email Carbon support within 24 hours of your royal flush hand.

Additional Points

Once Carbon Poker’s support department has been notified about your hand bonus, the last step to receiving the money is earning it. You’ll get $1 of the royal flush bonus for every 30 VIP points you collect. Keeping in mind that Carbon awards 10 VIP points for every $1 in tournament or cash game rake generated, this isn’t real hard to do. As long as you play poker fairly consistently, you’ll have no trouble earning the bonus.

Don’t forget that if you’re not already a member of Carbon, you can sign up here and get a 100% Carbon Poker bonus up to $600 just by creating an account and making a deposit.

General Strategy on Tight Tables

The basic idea behind playing against tight players is that you should be folding to their raises more, while looking to raise more often yourself in unopened pots. As for the latter, opening the pot with raises is good because A) tight players are more likely to fold to aggressive moves when they have marginal hands, and B) a re-raise in this situation means that the tight player likely has great cards, thus allowing you to get out of the hand easily.

The overall advantage to playing against a tight player is that their actions are more transparent than loose players. For example, if they check-called on a flop where a flush draw is present, then they raise big after another suited card hits the turn, you can reasonably assume that they made a flush. The drawback to having tight players as opponents is that winning money off of them is generally a drawn-out process.

Example of playing Tight Players

In order to illustrate what playing against tight players is like, let’s say that you’re holding Qd-Jd on a board of 4s-5s-Th; here you have nothing, and if a tight opponent bets out before your turn, a fold is seemingly in order here. After all, it’s likely that this player has an overpair like jacks, queens, kings or aces, and they want to protect it.

However, if the player isn’t totally knowledgeable on value betting, you could always consider calling the raise here, then betting big if a third spade falls on the board. The logic is that the tight player would likely fold with this scare card out there, thus letting you steal the pot. Keep in mind though that not all tight poker players are the same, and semi-bluffs like this won’t always work.

However, James Calderaro did make things interesting at one point when he grabbed the lead while play was three-handed. After Darren Elias busted out in third place, the heads-up match came down to Calderaro and Cunix, with the chip counts as follows:

Calderaro – 5,610,000
Cunix – 3,970,000

The 3-2 chip advantage wasn’t much of a lead for Calderaro – especially with a skilled opponent like Shawn Cunix sitting across from him. Using lots of aggressive play and preflop 3-bets, Cunix was soon able to grab the lead from Calderaro and continue applying pressure. The final hand saw Cunix go all-in with pocket 3′s, while Calderaro hesitantly pushed his remaining stack in with Jd-Td; the board was 7s-5h-3d-9c-6d, which gave Cunix the hand and the victory.

Following the impressive win, Shawn earned $400,600 and a $25,000 WPT Championship seat. This title goes along nicely with his other notable poker tournament finishes, which include the following:

1st place in 2008 WPT Championship $3k Hold’em – $127,370
2nd place in 2008 WPT Borgata Poker Open – $193,800
6th place in 2009 Festa al Lago – $168,970

In all, Shawn Cunix has $1,222,676 in live tournament winnings. As for how the 2012 WPT Jacksonville final table fared, you can take a look at this below. Also, don’t forget that if you’re interested in becoming the next big WPT champion, you can often find satellites for these events at Carbon Poker. If you haven’t already signed up at this site, make sure to do so and get yourself a 100% Carbon Poker bonus up to $600.

1. Shawn Cunix – $400,600 and $25,500 WPT Championship seat
2. James Calderaro – $236,560
3. Darren Elias – $147,850
4. Daniel Buzgon – $94,624
5. Tony Dunst – $66,532
6. Will Failla – $54,704