Ruff Poker Blog
Learn Train Dominate Poker

In the few years since I switched from playing poker as a source of income to writing about poker as a source of income I have probably penned at least a dozen articles on this theme, and the remarkable thing is that each time I do, the advice changes! Whether this is because poker is [...]

While I was never a world-beater as a poker pro -something I managed to pull-off being for about five years-I did learn many valuable lessons in those years, and perhaps the most important lesson I learned was either stick to live poker or online poker! If I played a lot of online poker my live [...]

Last night during my PokerStars Home Game league game I got to talking about ICM with another player who really couldn’t wrap his head around what I was saying in the chat-box. So this morning I shot him an e-mail with the equity calculations for the situation from the previous night’s tournament. Considering I felt [...]

When PocketFives absorbed the now defunct Poker Pwnage to create their online poker training site Pocket Fives Training, they added a number of top MTT players from their site to Poker Pwnage’s already impressive roster. One of the new coaches added was Kevin “1S$ckDisea$e” Eyster, one of the poker world’s top tournament players both live [...]

While there are numerous lists covering the best poker books, and the best Holdem books, very little attention has been given to Pot Limit Omaha (PLO), both in terms of the amount of written content covering the topic as well as the publicity these books receive.
Considering PLO’s current rise as the second most popular form [...]

In Part 1 of this series I took a look at one problem that afflicts many new players; seeing monsters under the bed -or in non-poker terms; narrowing your opponent’s hand-range down too far and constantly fearing you are up against the nuts. In this column I will look at another problem that afflicts beginners [...]

A lot of new poker players who have read a book or two seem to want to prove their ability by “reading hands” -something they learned about in the book they purchased for $10-$20-but all too often they make the mistake of choosing too narrow a range of hands their opponent might be holding.
Sometimes they [...]

Over the years my Sit & Go strategies have changed very little, with basically the only changes being that I have loosened up a little bit in the Early Stages -mostly due to structure changes by the poker sites-and slightly upping my aggression during four and five-handed play. But overall my thinking on optimal Sit [...]

In days of old it was big things that made the difference between winning and losing poker players; players either knew pot odds, the chance of making a straight draw, and starting hand rankings or they didn’t. In today’s poker world the emphasis has shifted to the little things in poker, as the overwhelming majority [...]

In days of old it was big things that made the difference between winning and losing poker players; players either knew pot odds, the chance of making a straight draw, and starting hand rankings or they didn’t. In today’s poker world the emphasis has shifted to the little things in poker, as the overwhelming majority [...]