Online Poker has been a huge hit on the internet for the last couple of years, but I only discovered it a week ago. I tried once before and didn't like it at all (well, probably because I quickly lost all my dough). Turns out I wasn't playing the right game.

The big thing in the world of poker right now (offline and online) is Texas Hold'em Tournaments. That's a game of Texas Hold'em (obviously), in which you pay a certain amount of money to get into a table (usually 6 or 10 players), everyone receives an equal amount of chips, and you play until all players but one lose all their chips. The winner or winners (the people who where the last ones playing on the table) split all the money.

Let me tell you - it's one great game, not at all what I thought.

There's also a "multi table" version, where you have much more players (100 up to 600) that play on many tables and as some get eliminated, players are moved to other tables until the total number of tables decreases and eventually, again, only one player remains in the game. In the multi table tournaments usually the players that placed in the top 5 (up to the top 50, depending on the initial number of players) split all the dough.

I've been a bit hooked for the past week.

Here's why it's so attractive:

(1) The game is very positionally sophisticated - the strength of your current position ("hand") is affected by many factors - your chip count, other player's chip counts, stage of the game, size of current pot, the order in which cards were dealt and bets were made, number of other players currently in the game. And I'm not even mentioning the actual cards you hold (that matters), the cards the other players hold (matters as much) and psychology.

(2) And still it's very simple too. You can teach the rules to a five-year-old. Monkey that is.

(3) It's very exciting. Because you're up against other actual people (not A*-driven aimated shapes, you bloody geeks), you're always pretty close to being eleminated, and every decision you make is very weighty - it's a real adrenaline rush.

Sad thing is, I cannot make money playing it. I can just barely even out. And that's probably true for you too, if you care to know.

But it's a lot of fun, so try it.

There are tons of sites that offer the game, most are very similar. Thousands of people play at every given moment. I play at Betfair, which is very good.

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Get in touch: pasha at cohai dot co