Lou Krieger

World Team Poker's inaugural event will be held at the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas, May 19, 2010. This one day event will feature 40 of the world's top poker pros, representing eight different countries, on five-man teams. Each team will be captained by a poker star from their respective countries, including Phil Hellmuth, Jr.

Money saved is money won. When we sit down to play poker, we come out swinging with good hands, so we can stack the chips.

It makes us happy. After all, when we drag a pot and display our primacy at the holy game of poker, it's visible evidence of skill, knowledge, cunning, and luck. What's more, our opponents can see it too, and breathes there a poker player alive who is not justifiably proud of a terrific bluff, or an ability to convince an opponent to bet into the stone cold nuts?

In a psychologically demanding game like poker, winning involves outthinking and outwitting your opponents and is a far cry from force-of-will sports like weightlifting, where a desire to push weight always wages war with a countervailing impulse to let go of the damned thing before gravity destroys you.

Selectivity and aggression require players to take a position somewhere between those two extremes to optimize the chances for success. "Do I push, pull, or fold; or do I simply wait and see what develops before committing my chips to the pot?" That's always the
question, isn't it?

In a psychologically demanding game like poker, winning involves outthinking and outwitting your opponents and is a far cry from force-of-will sports like weightlifting, where a desire to push weight always wages war with a countervailing impulse to let go of the damned thing before gravity destroys you.

Selectivity and aggression require players to take a position somewhere between those two extremes to optimize the chances for success. "Do I push, pull, or fold; or do I simply wait and see what develops before committing my chips to the pot?" That's always the
question, isn't it?

When we left you last time the blinds were $1,000-$2,000, the average stack was $80,000, 15 people remained in the tourney, you were on the button with $20,000, and we talked about the need for you to assess your opponents before making a decision.

When we left you last time the blinds were $1,000-$2,000, the average stack was $80,000, 15 people remained in the tourney, you were on the button with $20,000, and we talked about the need for you to assess your opponents before making a decision.

It's never fun being short stacked, especially in a tournament. Being short stacked in a cash game is no fun either, but you have an easy out. You can always reach into your wallet and buy more chips. Of course you might have deliberately bought in to a no-limit cash game for a relatively small amount of chips so that you won't have to make a decision about all of them, because all of your chips represent a sizeable amount of risk every time you play a hand.

Seems like the Millennium was only yesterday, when we watched televised celebrations from one time zone to another before it reached California. The New Year's Eve Party I attended turned into a poker game at the stroke of twelve-the first poker game of the new century.

Sometime after midnight we checked the computer to see if those dire Y2K warnings were true. But we were all still here, alive and well, and able to log on to the internet, and all seemed right with the world.

While the World Series of Poker's main event moves concludes at the Rio in Las Vegas-and it's certainly the biggest and most significant single poker event of the year-it's not the only poker tournament we're covering this issue.

A poker playing friend asked me to comment on two hands he played. Last time we discussed the hand he played in a cash game. This one deals with a hold 'em tournament, and expands on some of the major differences between tournament and cash game play.