Golden Touch Blackjack Speed Count Course

The Bottom Line

Blackjack is a game of skill. By learning to count cards a player can gain the edge over the casino. Speed count is the easiest counting method developed to date. In two days you can learn how to get the mathematical edge over the casino. It is 70-95 percent as effective as the High/Low and KO counts. It can be used in blackjack games with any number of decks. If you are a basic strategy player looking to take the next step to gain the edge then speed count is for you. 

 

Pros

• Easiest Blackjack card counting method that you can learn.
• Gives you a mathematically marked cards verifiable edge over the casino.
• Can be learned in two days, not months or years.
• Speed Cout Book Available
• Course is on DVD

Cons

• Limited number of classes available around the country.

Description

• The full two day course teaches you the seven elements needed to get the edge over the casino.
• Speed Count is the easier to learn than other card counting metohd.
• Speed Count gives you 70-95 percent of the power of other counting methods such as Hi/Lo and KO.
• Utilizes a running count that does not require cancellation, division or multiplication.
• Teaches you how to get more comps at less risk.
• New optimal basic strategy (OBS) that provides built-in camouflage.
• Learn the count by actually playing in simulated casino sessions at the table.
• Predetermined bet sizes based on count make your decisions automatic.
• Teaches you money management, bankroll considerations for all levels of play

Guide Review - Golden Touch Blackjack Speed Count Course

I attended the two day course and was surprised with the ease in learning the speed count method. In the past I have studied the Hi/Lo count but had difficulty utilizing it in the casino. I switched to the KO method but found that I could not sustain it for long juice cards. I learned the speed count in two days and was able to easily use it at the casino. The course is very hands on. You learn by playing and practicing at the blackjack table with other students in a simulated game situation. If you can learn basic strategy then you can learn the speed count. The course also taught about the money management principals and bankroll considerations needed to succeed. It explained how to utilize the comp system to add to get even more from the casino. Because of the built in camouflage it is possible to play without even being detected as an advantage player.
The speed count was independently tested by two of the country’s top mathematicians who test casino games. Both verified that utilizing the speed count does give the player and advantage.
Using card counting can give you the edge when playing Blackjack but there are no guarantees. Card counters do not win every time they play. This course gave the students realistic information about the expectations of playing blackjack as well as the risks involved.
If you are serious about Blackjack this is the course for you.
If you are unable to attend a Speed Count course, the complete information is available in the Golden Touch Blackjack Revolution book and also on The Speed Count DVD.

 

Daily 3-Bet: ElkY FTW, Girl Fight, Dwan Cracks Phil

The PokerListings Daily 3-Bet is a series of three fiercely-contested one-on-one matches to settle the mid-afternoon poker news battle once and for all.
If you have an idea for a great 3-Bet piece, just drop us a note in the comments below.
It’s an all-NBC National Heads-Up Championship 3-Bet today with Daniel Negreanu making his Heads-Up picks, some hilarious Twitter trash talk and the best NBC HU clip of all-time.

1) Negreanu Predicts ElkY to Win NBC Heads-Up

His time?

So Daniel Negreanu may not be actually marked cards playing the NBC National Heads-Up Championship but that hasn’t kept the one-man media machine from taking an interest in the contest.
Negreanu posted his predictions based on the recently released draws for the heads-up tournament on Full Contact Poker today.
For the most part Negreanu was pretty conservative in his guesses and didn’t really offer any huge upsets.
His potential final four is pretty online heavy, however, with Chris Moorman, Andrew Lichtenberger and Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier as well as Liv Boeree.
Boeree might not be a bad choice actually as women have historically done very well in this tournament with Vanessa Rousso finishing second in 2009 and Annie Duke winning it all in 2010.
In the end Negreanu went with ElkY to win it all for the $500,000 first-place prize.
ElkY is a very solid pick considering he made the final four of NBC heads-up in 2009. Also, he's insanely good at poker. Check out the rest of Negreanu's picks on Full Contact Poker.

2) NBC Heads-Up Ignites Trash Talk on Twitter

Tweet-master Erik Seidel

With NBC Heads-Up set to start later today some of the contestants have already started to needle each other on Twitter.
Maria Ho, Gaelle Baumann, Chris Moorman and Justin Bonomo all had some choice Tweets but Erik Seidel razzing opponent Tom Dwan over the amount of time he spends in Macau was highlight-reel worthy.

Five Common Beginner Mistakes Part 2

You'll never be a successful poker player if you don't wrap your mind around the fact that every mistake you make costs you money.
This article, the second of two, details three more common mistakes beginners tend to make.If you missed it bring yourself up to speed with part one of this article.
Part one went over searching for coin flips and overplaying your hands; although these are both costly mistakes, they're by no means the only ones that cost beginners money at the felt.
Not only should you take steps to avoid making these mistakes; you should try to force your opponents into making them.
3) Drawing on Dangerous Boards
When you play a drawing hand, you're playing to hit your draw, and stuff the pot when you do. You don't play a drawing hand to hit, and check.
Therefore, once you hit your draw (flush draw, or straight draw) you're committed to putting money into the pot infrared ink
. This money will be anywhere from a small amount to your whole stack.
When you pay for a draw on a dangerous board, sometimes hitting is the worst thing that can happen to you. The simplest example of this is drawing to a flush on a paired board.
Once you hit your flush, anyone willing to put big money into the pot has a very decent chance of having a full house.
There is nothing worse than paying to draw dead, and chunking off your stack when you think you just hit a good card. When there is a real chance that hitting your draw will leave you with the second-best hand, you want to keep the pot as small as you can.
Unless you can somehow get a read that your hand is best, you never want to assume or hope.

The man who needs no introduction.

2) Playing on Scared Money
Doyle Brunson says "The key to No-Limit ... is to put a man to a decision for all his chips." In other words, you have to be willing to put your opponents all-in, and make an all-in call yourself at any time.
Many beginners are playing poker on a short roll, or without a roll altogether. Because of this, these players are playing under the knowledge that they simply cannot afford to lose the money they have in play.
This is known as playing on scared money. If you're unable and unwilling to risk your entire stack, your opponents will use that fear to run over you.
To play poker successfully, you have to disassociate the money in play with the money in your checking account. Losing a full buy-in at a No-Limit table should be no more difficult to you than buying a hamburger.
Obviously you would have preferred not to have spent the money, but you got to do what you got to do.
Until you're truly able to disconnect from the money you need to put in to play, it's not possible to play trick cards No-Limit poker correctly. Play games within your roll, and go into the game with the correct mind-set to play proper poker.
Remember, making money is a byproduct of winning at the game.
You do not go to a poker table with the intent of making money; you go with the intent of playing a high-quality game. Money is just the way players keep score.
1) Illogical (or Transparent) Bet Sizing
If the bets you make give your opponent an obvious picture of the hand you're holding, then your opponents will never make any mistakes. If your opponents are never making mistakes, you're not going to be making any money.
Lots of beginners will think of only one aspect of betting, ignoring all the others. As a result, their bet sizing becomes a detriment rather than an asset.
Imagine if you have a decent hand, such as two pair on the flop. You're first to act, and have to decide how much to bet. Lots of beginners will only think of the first aspect of bet sizing.
"I want my opponents to call my bet so I can make money on the hand, so I should make a bet small enough to make sure they call me."

Isaac Haxton plays while wearing his predator suit.

You bet $10 into a $60 pot. You successfully completed your single objective, but now you're giving all your opponents 7-1 odds (or better once other players make calls in the hand) to draw against you.
In reality, your bet size has to be small enough to get a call, yet large enough that you cut down the pot odds to anyone drawing to a hand better than yours.
Another example of this is a beginner with a strong hand will make a bet to protect that hand, but size it so irrationally large that they will never make any money on the hand. A common scenario:
$1/$2 game; beginner player is dealt pocket aces in the big blind. One player limps, a second player raises to $10 and everyone folds to the beginner; the beginner moves all-in for $145.
There is $15 in the pot, and he just raised to $145. It is almost never a good idea to raise over 9.5 times the pot. Yes, he protected his hand and won the pot, but he extracted the absolute minimum amount of value from it.
Anytime you play a hand in a way that extracts less value than possible, you make a mistake and lose money. With pocket aces your opponent is a serious dog to your hand. You could possibly be ahead by a margin of as large as 8-1.
This means you want your opponent to call your reraise. You want to make a raise small enough for them to call, yet large enough to maximize their mistake.
If all goes well, your opponent will think you're bluffing, and move all-in after you. If you move all-in first, chances are that will never happen.
You need to size your bets in a way that maximizes the mistakes of your opponents.
If you'd like to learn more about bet sizing, PokerListings writer Dan Skolovy wrote a great article on the topic. Read it here.

Tournament vs. Cash Play Part 1

This is part one of two articles exploring the differences between playing tournaments and cash games, at more than just chip face value.
Investment and Return
One of the biggest differences between tournaments and cash games is your investment versus your return.
Bad beats aside, every player is guaranteed a significant amount of playing time in a well-structured tournament. The large ratio of starting chips to blinds allows every player to start as a deep stack.
The only monetary investment made in a tournament is the original buy-in. Bad beats aside, you are guaranteed to see a large number of hands for the price of entry.
In a cash game, with each chip being worth face value, the same investment can't guarantee you nearly as many hands.
The attraction of having a set maximum loss makes tournaments attractive to weaker players, who are not comfortable with the amount of money they may lose playing a cash game, or casual marked cards players who don't want to invest a large sum of money into a bankroll. This is one of the reasons a tournament will have an average lower quality of players overall than most cash games.
For a $100 buy-in to a large tournament, the winner stands to make upward of $8,000, depending on the size of the field and the payout structure.
Any player can have a spectacular day where everything works out for them. On one of these days, a player stands to win 80 times the original investment.
In a cash game, you'd be lucky if the same type of day made you 20 times your original investment. The allure of making big money is attractive to gamblers. More importantly, it's attractive to players who know their skill level is lower than that of many other players in the room.

Negreanu is one of the few players who is world class in both tournament and cash play.

Bankroll Differences
As a professional player, you must always be playing inside your bankroll. Playing tournaments requires a much larger bankroll than playing cash games.
In the short term, cash games are much more likely to yield a positive result for a professional than a tournament. But the amount of money made will always be far less than the winner's share of a tournament with an equal buy-in amount.
A top-notch tournament trick cards player can expect to win somewhere in the neighborhood of one out of every 40 tournaments he enters. (The larger the fields in the tournaments, the worse this ratio will become.)
Ignoring all cashes that aren't wins, the player may stand to lose 39 buy-ins before they win. They will make good money in the long run but will have to suck up significant losses on the way.
Cash game play will have its own swings, and periods of loss, but they should never be on a scale as large as this. If you are losing 39 consecutive buy-ins at a cash game then you are clearly making some huge mistakes at the table.
Quality of Players
I don't want to be misread, and have people think I'm saying tournament players are less skilled than cash game players. What I am saying is that with an initial buy-in of a similar amount, you will find a larger ratio of weak players to strong ones in tournaments than in cash games.
Although there will be more weak players in tournaments, you will also sit with more great players then you would at a cash game. With the availability of satellites regular Joes can afford to get seats into major tournament events.
Everyone in a tourney buys in for the same amount and is seated randomly. Such an arrangement will see weaker players seated next to, and playing against, some of the world's best. The same Joe who won a satellite would never have been able to afford to sit at the pro's regular high-limit cash game.
In cash games, you're generally seated with a group of players who all have similar levels of skill and experience. Players who exceed the norm for that limit, and dominate it, move up to a higher limit.
Part two of this article will explore the final few elements that differ between the two types of games.

Razz Rules and Game Play

Razz is known as a "low" game, meaning you're trying to make the lowest (or worst) hand possible.
Because Razz is almost identical to Stud in all but a few ways, we won't rehash the setup and rules for those variants here. Readers not familiar with the rules of 7 Card Stud should start with this article:

• 7 Card Stud Rules and Game Play

Once you understand how to play marked cards 7 Card Stud, you can easily learn how to play Razz. The only differences between Stud and Razz are in the rules governing the following factors:

• The player who must bring in the action at the start of the first betting round
• The player who must start the action on any given street
• How to decide the winning hand at showdown

The Bring
Once every player has their two down cards and one door card, you're ready for one player to bring it in.

1. Just as in Stud, the player required to bring in a Razz game is decided by the value of each player's door card. Unlike Stud, in Razz the player with the highest-valued door card is required to bring.
2. Door cards are ranked according to face value from lowest to highest: jack, queen, king.
3. Aces are viewed as low or "good" in Razz, meaning the highest-value card rank available is a king. If two players tie for high card, the suits of their door cards break the tie.
4. In Razz, suits are ordered alphabetically from worst to best: clubs, diamonds, hearts, spades.
5. Again similarly to in Stud, the player required to bring has two choices:
   • Bet an amount equal to the ante
   • Complete the bet, betting the full amount of the small bet

The Betting Rounds
The only difference between a betting round in Razz and a betting round in Stud is how you decide where the action starts for the hand.
In Stud, the player with the highest-valued show cards starts the action.
In Razz, it's the marked card tricks player with the best Razz hand, or lowest-valued cards, who starts the action on the betting round.
Pairs are always viewed as "high," meaning a player holding K♠ Q♠ has a better two-card Razz hand than a player with 2♣ 2♦. A hand is only as low as the value of its highest card, meaning that out of these hands:

•    
•    
•    
•    
•    

... the best two-card Razz hand is    
Even though A♥ 5♠ has an ace, which is lower than either the 2♥ or the 4♣, the highest card of A♥ 5♠ is the 5♠. The lowest two cards, without having a pair, are the 2♥ 4♣.
Once you've determined the best hand, this player gets to start the betting round. As in Stud, this player has two options:

• Check (same as a call, but since there is no bet to match, they are calling nothing)
• Bet

Showdown
After the final betting round has been completed, the players still in the hand enter into the showdown. In the showdown, each player makes the best five-card hand possible out of their own seven cards.
The remaining two cards are "dead" and contribute no value toward the hand at all. They are never used to evaluate the strength of a hand.
Evaluating Hands
Here are the rules for evaluating the winning hand:

• A hand of Razz is won by holding the worst hand at the table
• Straights and flushes don't count in Razz hands, meaning the absolute best hand possible is the lowest straight (known as the wheel) A-2-3-4-5
• There is no qualifier for the winning hand - even if a player has two pair, if it's the lowest hand on the table, it's declared the winner
• Hands are evaluated from the highest card down, meaning A-2-3-4-8 is a worse hand than 3-4-5-6-7
• If two players have the same winning hand, the pot is split between them. Suits are not taken into account for evaluating the winning hand.

Once the pot is shipped to the winning player, the cards are collected and shuffled in preparation for the next hand. Starting with each player placing their ante, the whole cycle begins again.

Rabbit Hunting

Examination of undealt cards marked cards after folding in order to see who would have won the hand if everyone had stayed in.
EXAMPLE: “I folded a flush draw on the turn cause I was not getting the right odds to call. I asked the dealer to see what the river card would have been, and after seeing it I’m glad I folded since the rabbit wouldn’t have helped my hand.”

Cheat Online Poker-Become a Winner Today!

In playing poker - whether online or conventional, cheating is rampant. It seems to be an inbuilt part of the game. Almost everyone cheats because everyone desires to win. This, cheating has a distinct connotation as far as playing poker is concerned. As long as there are people who loves to have an invincible edge at the table, there will be cheating. You, too, can learn how to cheat online poker and become a winner today!

There are various software programs available in the internet that allows you to learn the rudiments of how to cheat marked cards online poker.

What these software programs give you are the following:

• Strategies to play it "right"

• Instant cheat online poker advice, and suggestions

• Automated mathematical calculations to instantly calculate hand and pot odds

• Displays statistics to analyze and monitor opponents

• The ability to learn the kinds of pocket cards opponents play

In the world of poker, cheating takes a different turn. Unlike cheating in casinos, there are four levels of cheat online poker:

1. Minor cheating - the most common level of cheating, usually done with friends who do not play together but informing one another of hole cards over the phone of instant messaging

2. Idiot cheating - more obvious cheating where players who have timed out are still able to put a bet

3. Inept collusion - where din-witted partners team up and conspire that everyone else knows they are engaged in cheating

4. Expert collusion - the expert cheating, where professional poker players conspire in an effective way that the cheating is hardly discoverable; there is also such things as "self-collusion" where a player engages in the same game under two different accounts

There are other forms of cheat online juice cards poker as well:

1. Misuse of the "disconnect protect". This is an automated feature that protects an online player should his internet connection fail him at a critical time during the game.

2. Hacking the online poker software in an attempt to secure information vital to winning the game.

3. The use of bots- automated programs that play instead of human. Although their ability to win remains to be an argument, the use of bots in card rooms goes against the rules and is therefore still considered as a form of cheating.


There are several other methods to cheat online poker. While they may differ in features and implementation, there is one goal to these methods: beat the odds and win the game.

While it is relatively easy to cheat online, the same degree if not more are the chances of being caught. It is so obvious to say that card rooms abhor cheats. This would mean less money intake for them. Therefore, card rooms employ a broad range of anti-cheat and anti-collusion technology from the most evident to the least.

More than the prospects of being caught, one's best cheat online poker and become a winner today is to hone your poker skills by playing more and more games- with time and money that you can afford to spend.