Tom Dwan - Durrr

I've recently been thinking about who I really admire and love to watch play poker. As a kid you always have your favorite action hero, football player or actor, someone that you like the idea of being someone you could emanate.

I always saw myself as a Maverick style, adventurous, risk taking wild child so you may imagine that I'd be more of a Stu Ungar fan or some flash, extrovert, loud, ostentatious young pro. However it surprised me when I found myself thinking that if I had to pick my favorite poker player right now it would be the rather plain looking, softly spoken Tom Dwan aka Durrrr.

When you first lay eyes on Durrrr the man that you'll see looks decidedly normal even boarder line geeky. If someone pointed him out and said he was a train enthusiast or has seen every episode of Star Trek you probably wouldn't doubt them.

But you see that's just it, he's understated (thinking about it, maybe not the best choice of picture to illustrate his understated, low key style). Much like an Aston Martin compared to a Ferrari, (one day that DB9 will be mine!!) the Italian machine snarls and grabs attention with it's normally flamboyant coloring and attention grabbing design, whilst the Aston is just that little more reserved with it's understated style yet still a very capable beast.

For me Durrr may in fact be one of the smartest poker players out there. He learnt the game whilst only in his teens and in no time at all found himself in the biggest games going. He doesn't have the mouth of Mike Matuso or the brat like character of Phil Helmuth yet everyone still knows who he is, all this and he's never even won a WSOP event.

It seems now that every time I watch poker on TV, he's there or whenever I pick up a poker magazine there's an article about him in it. His latest $1,000,000 challenge open to all comers has indeed made many headlines where even the likes of the great Phil Helmuth have already declared that they will not play Durrrr. Helmuth (the often self proclaimed greatest tournament player) went as far as to say that Durrrr is the best player under 30 right now and may even be the best player there is. I think the man has done a terrific job of marketing himself and knows precisely what he's doing, all this and clearly a talented player.

Whilst searching google for the latest news on what Durrr is upto at the moment I stumbled across a site that really sums up what a great job he is doing with his self promotion. The site is simply called Tom Dwan and if you want to know more about the guy then you should check it out.

Durrr clearly loves playing heads up poker and here is an amazing heads up poker course with some insane videos on how to crush the games.

Good Luck

Broker

Full Tilt Is Easy To Beat

OK so the title may be a tiny bit misleading in as much as you have to do some work to make money fromFull Tilt but as long as you're willing to learn then there is a second income waiting to be had at the low stakes games on Full Tilt Poker.

I love the simplicity of this site and the absolute plethora of games that seem to be running endlessly. Myself and a few fellow players have got together to bring you guys a blog filled with free poker training videos which will show you exactly how to find the weak players then how to exploit them.

The site/blog is called freepokertrainingvideos.com which is a bit of a mouth full but does what it says on the tin.

There will be five coaches at the moment making tutorial videos. I have made and will continue to focus on micro - low stake, 6 max to full ring cash games. Agexg113 will be making small stakes cash videos focusing on playing a loose/aggressive style for anyone wanting to learn a more exciting style of play. El Wayneo is our resident, micro stake sit and go expert. He has fantastic results in these games with one of the best graphs I've seen. He wins consistently and will show you how to do the same.

We also have two more coaches who are in the process of making videos, one will focus on heads up poker and the other will be specialising in multi table tournaments.

The videos are free so all we ask in return is that you become a fan/follower of the site or better yet, link to it if you have a site/blog of your own so that we can continue to bring you free poker training videos.

Enjoy

Moving The Bankroll Challenge To Full Tilt

Hey Guys, as the title says, I'm moving the bankroll challenge over to Full Tilt Poker and I wanted to give you the reasons why I've decided to do this.

So firstly Minted Poker is great in terms of all the fish on the site as well as an amazing poker rakeback deal where you'll get paid weekly, straight into your poker account. However the downside of the site is the low traffic which to be fair was never a problem back in England as I could get games easily between 11am - 10pm. However now that I'm in Thailand, I can nearly never get any games during the morning/early afternoon which is really slowing the challenge down.

So I have decided to move over to Full Tilt simply because there are games going 24 hours a day and if you love to play Texas Hold'em then you'll never be lost for a game here. The downside of course is the fact that the rakeback drops to 27% but I think that'll be made up for with the volume of games going.

So I've really been enjoying playing heads up poker but this presents another problem. Full Tilt heads up games start at NL50 which I wasn't rolled for. I shipped my $626 accross and thought about just grinding it out on 8 tables of NL25 on auto pilot and then realised that most of my profit and enjoyment in this challenge simply came from playing really bad players on the heads up tables. This is when I decided to play the HU games but I had to set myself some pretty strict rules in order to churn out a profit and not risk going broke.

Firstly I only play against players that sit in with $20 - $30 and who simply appear to have no clue how to play. I am practicing extreme table selecting and bum hunting. As soon as a player seems to have a clue what they are doing or playing a short stack too aggressivley, I simply quit them and find another bum.

I've played around 1500 hands in this way, so far and with pretty good results. The sample is too small to put much stock into but I'll keep you posted with a new graph, every week.

The bankroll is up to just over $800 now and the four figure milestone seems just around the corner. I'll be making a bum hunting video shortly, as soon as I have logged a decent amount of hands. I'll be demonstrating good table selection and adjusting to the different types of fish that you'll find and how to best exploit them.

The pictures here are of my heads up poker results since just making the move to Full Tilt.

I'll keep you guys posted.



Good luck

Brokerstar

Hand History Converter For Everleaf Gaming

As most of you know, Minted Poker is on the Everleaf Gaming network. There are many sites on the Everleaf network and many people have been asking me, how I use poker tracker on everleaf.

Basically I use a hand history converter that I found on the 2+2 forums which converts the hand history into a readable format for poker tracker. The hands get converted from everleaf into Pokerstars format then you can upload them to your poker tracker. The best part of this is that your HUD on poker tracker 3 seems to work just fine which gives you a huge edge on most of the other players at the table.

Another thing to notice in the picture above is not only the fact that the heads up display (HUD) is working fine, but if you look at the actual stats of the players (super high Vpip's), the fish on Minted Poker are in abundance. The sheer volume of fish is the main reason that I opted to run my $50-$5000 Minted Poker bankroll challenge there.

The converter can be downloaded here. On the right is a screen shot of the program. Simply locate your hand history which you'll find in your 'my documents' section then create an output file to send the converted hands to (which is where your poker tracker will find the hands to read).

You will need Java in order to run the program. If you do not currently have this installed on your system then you can download Java here .

You will notice from the stats of the players on everleaf gaming that they tend to be very loose, in most cases extremely loose so I have made some free poker videos to demonstrate an easy way to exploit this huge leak.

The program is not without a few bugs here and there but from my experience it really is the best solution for using programs like poker tracker and holdem manager on Minted Poker and the everleaf gaming network.

I hope this helps you guys crush the the very easy games on Minted poker, if you have any issues with the setup of this software then feel free to leave some comments on the blog.

Good Luck at the tables.


Brokerstar

Back In Action On The Minted Poker Challenge

OK guys I've just moved into my new house which is a really nice little place, with great internet access, swimming pool and right next to the beach.

I love it here but it is time to now get back to work. The $50-$5000 challenge has been very much put on hold until now.

I've got all of my stats together and made a graph using poker tracker 3 and an everleaf hand history converter.

As you'll be able to see I have only played about 11,000 hands and made $405 which just goes to show what a big deal the Minted Poker rake back is. So as of today I am going to play for a couple of hours a day, either one table of heads up NL20 or four tables of 6 max NL20, just depending on what takes my fancy, until I get to $1000.

I'll keep you posted on my progress and will be making some more free poker videos for Tagpoker where I'll show you exactly how I play and the thought process I go through in order to build a roll from the ground up.

Good luck at the tables

Broker