Event #57: $10,000 No-Limit Hold???em Six-Handed was yet another event to turn into a 4-day beast.

Three days and thirty hours of poker could not separate the final pairing of Gregory Merson and Keith Lehr.

Yet, incredibly, after a few hours of well-earned rest, the tournament was over after the very first hand of Day 4.

Merson opened to 280,000 on the button, Lehr three-bet to 915,000 in the big blind, Merson shoved and Lehr called.

It was Lehr ahead with As Qd versus the Ks 9s of Merson, making Lehr a 61% favourite to win the hand.

However, fans of Betfair Poker will know how fickle such a lead can be in poker, and this hand was to be no different.

The dealer laid out Th 9h Tc Qs Jh on the felt, and Merson was our new champion, after rivering a straight.

The $10,000 version of this six-handed event is one of poker players??? favourites.

Four hundred and seventy-four players all contributed $10,000 a piece to create a $1,136,197 monster of a first prize for Merson.

It was a great moment for Merson, who came so close to winning his first ever WSOP 2012 gold bracelet, after finishing in 5th place in Event #28: $2,500 No-Limit Hold-em Four-Handed, just a few weeks ago.

Merson took home $70,280 for that achievement, which was easily his highest cash of his career until his monster seven figure score.

Other notables in the money included Shannon Shorr ($455,362), Christopher ?NigDawG? Brammer ($200,502), and Andrew Lichtenberger ($140,351).

Each year one-poker player manages to find that elusive elixir containing the right balance of skill and luck, which takes him or her on a heater of a lifetime. In 2011, the man who found and drunk that bottle was one Erik Seidel. The former Stocks Trader and Backgammon player from New York managed to win an astonishing $6,530,153 in a single year. The win catapulted his all-time earnings to $16,885,167 meaning nobody on the planet had ever won more whilst playing live tournament poker.

During a recent interview Seidel admitted that just prior to 2011 he was considering quitting the game. He was unsure whether or not he could keep pace with the younger generation. Then came his rush of a lifetime and maybe he had answered his own internal critic. But as 2012 started it became obvious that Erik Seidel???s mind was still contemplating a form of semi-retirement. His omission on the world circuit was noticed by the poker world and as we draw into the long hard summer of Las Vegas, Seidel has not yet cashed once in 2012.

Seidel?s absence from the game means he has dropped out of the Global Poker Index Top Twenty for the first time ever. Jason Mercier still remains in the top spot while Seidel plummeted into 23rd place. Newcomers into the GPI this month are online sensation Adam ???Roothlus? Levy, Tom Middleton and Lucien Cohen. The biggest riser is Irish Open winner Kevin Vandersmissen while at the other end of the scale Sean Getzwiller drops 129 places ??? more than anyone else this month.

For more WSOP 2012 news and online poker updates visit Betfair.

Anyone who owns a card room is going to like a gamble and Dusk Till Dawn???s (DTD) owner Rob Yong is no different. Yong and his team recently announced a ??1 million guaranteed prize pool for the recent UKIPT event that was held at the Nottingham club, and at times Yong must have been feeling nervous.

The tournament consisted of three separate day ones (1A, 1B & 1C) but it could have turned into a logistical nightmare as Yong had very little sway on when players would turn up. In fact after the Day 1A numbers were sorted and clarified, the DTD crew were worried that they would have nowhere to seat everyone on Day 1C, with a one million guarantee staring them in the face.
In the end, despite competition with the WPT holding their main event in Vienna, Yong managed to attract 1,625 players and secure his 1 million guarantee and ??210,400 first place. Incredibly only 76 players made it through to Day 3 and one day later the DTD and the UKIPT had a final table of eight ? now that???s how you carve through a field!

When the final table was set it was Iqbal Ahmed who started with the chip lead and ended up heads-up with DTD regular Robert Baguley. Before the event had started Baguley???s highest live pay out was $603, quite startling considering the fact that Baguley went on to win the event for ??210,400.

Follow Betfair WSOP and poker online at Betfair.

There is something about the cloak and dagger of poker that intrigues and excites people. If you lack a general understanding of poker; if your only experience has come from watching television, then you may be forgiven for believing that poker is all about the person who bluffs the most. Amazingly the game is full of people, with a decent understanding of poker, who also believe the cloak and dagger.

This belief in the cloak and dagger accentuates fancy play syndrome. Fancy play syndrome is when you start to make moves where none are warranted. In fact if you want to be a truly great Betfair poker online player, then you need to do the basics well and often. A good example is slow playing your big hands and fast playing your bluffs. This is a really unbalanced way of playing, and far too fancy for its own good.

The basic premise of poker is to get value from your strongest hands. To do this you must bet and so checking to induce a bluff, although it may work on occasion, is often the incorrect strategy. So what if you have smashed top set of aces on a Ad 8h 9c board. What if your opponent does have the case ace and will stack off? What if he has Jc Th and you give him a free card?

Next time you are in the game and you hit the board hard, then move like Speedy Gonzalez with boxing gloves ??? play them hard and play them fast.

No one ever won a poker tournament without a dose of luck. Indeed, if you want to take top spot more often you need to indulge in poker practice on poker sites and try new techniques such as to gamble in spots where you know you have decent equity.

To establish your equity at the poker table it?s important to do some post-game analysis. Once you?ve done this enough you?ll begin to have an instinct of when you?re in a good position to call or raise.

The process of establishing your equity can be broken down into 3 parts: 1) your opponent?s likely shoving/calling ranges; 2) the immediate pot odds on offer; 3) your hand?s equity in relation to both previous points.

Let???s consider this process in action: A short stacked player who raises from the cut-off is likely to do so with a wide range of hands. Their range of poker holdings could look something like this:

22+, A2s+, K5s+, Q6s+, J7s+, T8s+, 98s, 87s, 76s, A2o+, K7o+, Q8o+, J9o+ & T9o.

Continuing the flow of action, the player on the button will certainly loosen up their calling range to reflect cut-off???s wide opening range. Indeed, if their stack is also nearing the 10bb mark they will be likely to gamble in order to get back into the tournament. Because of this a typical range would be:

44+, A2s+, KTs+, QTs+, JTs, A5o+, KJo+ & QJo

Using this information and an equity calculator such as PokerStove, we can see that based on these rough ranges your equity in the hand is 39% when holding pocket eights. In contrast, the button?s equity is 33% and the cut-off?s a lowly 27%. This means calling here is definitely profitable in the long term.

Knowing this dynamic is important because now you can decide whether the pot odds and your equity make a call worthwhile. In this situation you???d need to be getting 3-1 pot odds for a call to be profitable.

In poker you should always have a rough estimate of your equity in a variety of situations. By doing this you???ll win many more tournaments.

If you are interested in improving your poker game, then joining an online training site is one of the methods of choice. When the fad first kicked off BlueFirePoker became one of the sites with most value for money, because it contained some of the online world???s biggest winners. In recent times they have been ringing the changes with the departure of the likes of Phil Galfond and Martin
Fournier but with the loss of quality comes added quality.

The recent addition to the BlueFirePoker stable is Asad "glitteringprizes" Goodarzy. Asad plays all the way up to 50/100 NLHE and will be creating videos, mostly in the 3/6 - 25/50 range.

Glitteringprizes is a 25-year-old high stakes player from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Starting with just a $50 promotion back in 2005, Asad ran it up, making hundreds of thousands of dollars, while never depositing once and thus refers to poker as "one big long freeroll."

Asad has risen through the stakes of online poker thanks in large to a close-knit group of poker friends whom he considers teammates. They all started together and moved up together, and to this day still spend hours discussing hands, strategy, and working hard to improve his game.

After a few years of beating small stakes, Asad found out that Tdogg99, one of the biggest winners at the 5/10NL games lived just down the street from him. Tdogg99 began coaching and staking Asad in the 200NL games and from there his poker career took off.

In 2008, Asad decided to transition into heads up, which is his primary focus today.
Asad will be making theory intensive mid/high stakes HU and 6max reviews exclusively for BlueFirePoker.

Those wanting to experience this level of excitement themselves are encouraged to visit Betfair and check out the latest Betfair poker offers.

Most blackjack tables allow you to play up five hands per round, in which you can stake as many chips as you like on each individual hand.

The best tactic is to play no more than two hands at any given time so you can give you full concentration on them. The more you play, the more you are likely to rush your decisions.

The most obvious reason why you should avoid playing all five available hands in a game of blackjack is the cost. Remember if you do play five hands, it will cost you five times the stake you choose. Two winning hands would then not be enough to show a profit from the round of betting. The fewer hands you play per round, the longer your bankroll is likely to last in your session.

One of the other betting opportunities available to you in blackjack is an insurance bet. This takes place when the dealer has either of the two cards that make up blackjack as his turn card. If the dealer then goes on to have blackjack, you get paid at 2:1 for your stake. If you were to play level stakes, you would still show a profit from the hand if the dealer did go on to reveal the second qualifying card. A lot of players don?t like to take on the insurance bet because there is more chance that dealer doesn?t have blackjack despite having one of the cards needed. They are quite happy to take a risk and continue without the insurance bet. Doing this restricts how much you could possibly lose in any round.

Written by John, a fan of online casino