Doug Tales

Here is a hand that in large part defined the winner of the WSOP 2017 Main Event when Blumstein flopped a set and Hesp turned two pair. Without a doubt, Hesp is going to lose some chips on this hand.

Poker is a game of relative strength. We are not trying to make the strongest hand possible, we are trying to beat the other players that are in the pot at showdown. When I see players get [...]

The vast majority of my students are retirees or will soon retire. As their poker prowess grows, they comment that people at the table “misunderestimate” them, and give them credit [...]

We train in poker so that we can make the right decisions. Many of us dedicate a huge amount of off-table time to this game. It reminds me of a cheesy 90’s motivational poster of a wrestler [...]

In a recent session with my student Shiner, one of his opponents started to exhibit a betting pattern. I picked up on it, and decided on an adjustment. Shiner missed it initially. Can you find [...]

I just looked at buying a quad-plex in Las Vegas so that Kat, Comrade Vape and I could form a little poker commune. We want to be within two miles of the office (the Strip) so that pretty much [...]

We often think of semi-bluffing as an attacking move. Plan A: I can get them to fold or Plan B: Suck out. A third reason is deception on other hands. Let me tell you about a hand I just played [...]

We have all heard the rule about “Only set mine if effective stacks are X times the size of your call.” I suspect we have all heard different versions of this where X varies from 10 [...]

I hate losing big pots, but if they encourage me to study a spot until I grok it, then that buy-in will not have died in vain. Let me start with saying, I screwed up this hand. I was seduced by [...]

I recently hit a nice milestone at my favorite card room, the Mirage in Las Vegas. It is not the only place I have played, but it is my favorite and most consistently profitable game. I love the [...]