Online Poker Musings

It’s that time of year again! If one of your New Year’s resolutions is to download free poker and win some tournaments, you are in luck because UBOC 6 is rapidly approaching. Included in 2011’s UB Online Championship is a total of 29 events, all with guaranteed prize pools. Winning one of the events nets you a special UBOC watch, and there is even a Tournament of Champions for the winners of UBOC 2010. If you have considered using Ultimate Bet for Mac, there is no better time than now to give it a shot!

January 16th is when things kick off with the No Limit Hold’em Deep Stack event for $530. Those that have utilized free poker training to improve at Omaha will be able to test themselves on January 18th. If you are best at heads-up games, you have Event 13 to look forward to, but register as soon as possible because it won’t be possible to register late for this tourney.

The High Roller event is a $2,100 buy-in and takes place on January 23rd. The Championship Event is on January 30th and features a $1,050 buy-in. If you are inexperienced on money poker sites and find that these stakes are way out of your bankroll, you will have several chances to satellite into the events. Step satellites start as low as $0.10.

The other option for people new to online poker rooms is Mini-UBOC. This series has all of the same events, but the buy-ins are much smaller. These tournaments give you the chance to experience the thrill of making a big final table in UBOC without having to risk a large chunk of your bankroll.

Some people have been waiting all year for UBOC, so don’t let this opportunity slip away. If you own an Apple computer, you are in luck because UB is one of the best Mac poker sites around. See you at the tables!

If you want to download free poker and prefer to play Omaha, you should consider UB. They have a new Royal Flush promotion that might remind you of a bad beat jackpot. There is a progressive Royal Flush Jackpot, and when someone hits a royal flush, they win 50% of the pot. Pretty cool way to reward someone for the most awesome hand in poker.

If you are familiar with the PartyPoker bonus code, you might have tried playing on the bad beat jackpot tables. The loser of a bad beat wins 50% of the jackpot, and the rest of the table also wins a percentage of the jackpot. The Royal Flush promotion is very similar. The royal flush winner receives 50% of the jackpot, the players that participated in the hand receive 25%, and the other quarter goes to everyone else playing Jackpot tables of the same stake. At UB you will have more chances to win than at the majority of the other US poker sites!

Keep in mind that only 65% of the jackpot is given out when a royal flush is made. The other 35% is divided as follows: 25% for the next Jackpot, 10% to UB for administration. If you have experience with a PokerStars bonus code, you might dislike that UB receives a tenth of the jackpot, but the folks at UB need to get paid somehow too!

If you want to win the Jackpot, you must sit down at a Royal Flush Jackpot table. Free poker no downloads is a feature of UB, so you do not even need to download a program to give these games a shot. At these tables, $0.50 is collected every hand and placed into the Jackpot.

If you play Mac poker and are about to hit the Royal Flush tables, take note of a few conditions for winning the Jackpot. The Royal Flush hand must have at least four participants, and the hand must go to show down. Players sitting out at the time of the royal flush hand are not eligible for any share of the prize pool. If two royal flushes hit at the same time on the site, the table that started the hand first will win the Jackpot. I think I would hide behind my slot machine download for some time if I lost the Jackpot to another royal flush hand that started mere seconds before mine. I would be so mad!

UB is a great place to play Omaha if you don’t want to play the standard Texas Holdem games. It is nice to know that you are not forced to download PokerStars if you are interested in the less common poker games. PokerStars is great but it is nice to have options!

If you want to play tournament poker, it’s a great idea to download free poker on the Internet. Pretty much every major poker site has tournament leaderboards, so today I will tell you about the ones found on UB. There is an MTT leaderboard and three SnG leaderboards, and there is cash to be won on each one.

UB, like many of the best US poker sites, uses a points system to rank their players. When you play a tournament, you get leaderboard points based on the prize pool and where you finished. The same formula is used for both MTTs and SnGs.

Similar to the other best Mac poker sites, UB has a different MTT leaderboard for the week, month, and year. The weekly version takes your best 10 results, and first place receives $1,000 cash. You’ll need 20 good results to win the monthly leaderboard, where the total prize pool is $14k and first place is $6.5k. And finally, the leaderboard for the year considers your top 100 cashes, similar to the leaderboards you get with the PokerStars Bonus code. The top 50 players get entered into an exclusive $36k freeroll. The top ten players receive cash prizes. Both 1st and 2nd place also win $10,000 WSOP Main Event entries!

If you do not have much experience on Mac Poker sites, it might be wise to give SnG leaderboards a shot first. This is because there are three divisions for different buy-ins. The Diamond division was made for people playing from $1 to $20. The prize pool for the week in Diamond is $1,500 while the prize pool for the month is $5k. If you play between $21 and $50 buy-ins, you fall into the Heart division. There is a total of $3k up for grabs for the Heart division on a weekly basis and $7k up for grabs on a monthly basis. If you can stand to give up Internet slots to dedicate your free hours to SnGs, perhaps you should try buy-ins over $51 and make a run at the Spade leaderboard. This division has a $6k prize pool for the week and a $10k prize pool for the month.

If you are excited about the leaderboards and the great prizes, you should definitely play as many tournaments as possible. It might be a good idea to take a look at a few poker videos to become even better at the game. It will be worth it if you can finish in first place!

Players hoping to download free poker should consider UB, so it would be good to meet another UB advocate in Adam Levy. Levy will be better known to online players as “Roothlus” because that is how he is known on US friendly poker sites. The 28 year old professional was born in New York but he has since moved away and now lives in Florida. Before he became a professional poker player, he was a student and used to wait tables.

Levy has cashed for over $3 million on the best online poker sites, something most people cannot say for themselves. An inspiring thing to know regarding Levy’s online scores is that he does not have a single win that exceeds $387.5k, yet his winnings are still well over the $3 million mark. This goes to show his impressive consistency as a player. He won that $387k competing in an FTOPS tournament on his Full Tilt Poker download a year ago. He also won $80k on Full Tilt in the $750,000 Guaranteed. He earned his biggest PokerStars cash back in 2006 when he finished 3rd in the Sunday Million and received $56.9k.

Roothlus has some live cashes in US poker rooms to be proud of, as well. His largest live cash actually came this year in the WSOP Main Event after going incredibly deep and finishing 12th. Missing the November Nine was very disappointing, but he must have been pleased to add an extra $635k to his bank account. Before this Main Event finish, his best cash in a live event was a couple years ago for $266k.

Levy has a pretty solid routine laid out when he plays poker. He says he usually gets up an hour or two prior to competing on money poker sites because going to his computer first thing after waking up isn’t his style. He knows his day has gone right so far when he has had his shower and early breakfast. He likes to listen to music while he plays although you might be surprised to learn his genre of preference: techno. And then, when he has finished playing on the best US poker sites, he jumps onto his XBOX and plays FIFA. I like a man that knows what he’s doing!

If you, like many others, would like to see results like Levy’s, go ahead and get a poker download and start practicing your game. It should not be overly difficult to find plenty of free poker training online so even the most inexperienced player should make progress fairly quickly.

If you are going to download free poker but are having trouble selecting from the large variety of US poker sites, I’ll introduce you to Eric Baldwin, another UB representative. At just 27 years old, Baldwin is another young player that has found great success in live tournament poker. He was born in Beaver Dam, WI, and he went to the University of Wisconsin and studied Psychology and Mathematics. He currently lives in Las Vegas.

Baldwin can be found on some of the best US poker sites, but since he has earned over $3 million playing live events, he is mostly known as a live tournament pro. He has one bracelet on his list of wins, earning over $500k in Event 34, a $1,500 NL Hold’em event. While he didn’t make any final tables this year in the WSOP, he still had some nice cashes. His largest cash was in the Main Event where he finished in 59th place for $138,285.

This young tournament star can also be found playing the big WPT events. He had a great year last year, first finishing 3rd in a Legends of Poker event in August and then winning a Five Diamond World Poker Classic event near the end of the year. The previous year in 2008 he placed first in Event 2 for $148,860 in the Five Star World Classic Poker Classic. I wonder if Baldwin ever makes time for a free slots download like some of the other poker pros.

Since he is sponsored by UB, Baldwin plays the rest of his poker on top Texas Hold’em sites. According to Baldwin, the main difference between online and live games is that online games are much more aggressive preflop. Online he likes to chip up without showdowns in comparison to live where he is happy to see multi-way flops.

Card Player named Baldwin the 2009 “Player of the Year”, so I’m happy for any advice Baldwin is willing to give. When you first get into money poker sites, you should weigh your options carefully. An Everest Poker download is a good choice, but as you’ve seen from my previous articles, UB is a great site too.

Brandon Cantu is another professional player that would tell you to download free poker from UB. Cantu was born in 1981 in Washington, and after his grandfather taught him poker, he played in Oregon casinos. It makes sense that he now lives in Vegas because he can easily get to casinos for US players there.

The decision to go pro came four years ago in Vegas after winning a bracelet in Event 2 of the World Series. To make it even more impressive, that win was the first major tournament he’d ever played! Since then he has continued to do extremely well in US poker rooms. Regarding WSOP, he won a PLO event in 2009 for almost $230k and his second bracelet. That same year he placed second in Event 39 for $403,951. His best showing in the Main Event was two years ago when he was 20th for just over $250k.

He also has three cashes in the World Poker Tour including his first WPT title in the Bay 101 Shooting Star championship for $1 million. In that tournament he also busted 6 bounty players good for $5k a piece! As such, he got the nickname “The Bounty Hunter”. It wouldn’t surprise me if the six pros he took out of that tournament wished he were a professional flash Texas Holdem player instead!

Cantu has cashed for over $3.4 million in live tournaments. He’s on Team UB, though, so you’d think that he must sometimes play in online casinos for USA players. Unlike a lot of the other players I’ve written about in my blog, he actually doesn’t spend that much time playing on money poker sites as he’s always been primarily a live player. This does not mean that he doesn’t play online at all, however. He’s known as BRANDONCANTU on UB, and he plays tournaments and a bit of high stakes cash.

If you want to become good at poker, Cantu believes that you must play an aggressive style. It makes sense that he’s a tournament player! If you aspire to challenge him in the WSOP one day, you definitely shouldn’t download free casino games. It would be a way better use of your time to login to UB and play some tournaments!

I’m back to write another biography! Let’s talk about another promoter of the UB bonus, this time Tiffany Michelle. Michelle has only been playing professionally for around four years, but she has quickly risen in popularity due to her tournament success (plus being easy on the eyes doesn’t hurt, either). She created the record for the largest field ever conquered by a female by placing 17th out of 6,844 people in the 2008 WSOP ME. Once she got deep in the tournament she wore a UB patch, so she’s represented the UB bonus since 2008.

Michelle was born in L.A. 25 years ago. Since completing a theatre program at UCLA, she has been seen on a number of television shows including American Dreams and The Amazing Race. And not only does she also like to write and perform music, she can also boast that she’s won a beauty pageant. She used her talent of finding the spotlight after she discovered cards on US poker sites. Sirius Satellite Radio featured her as a host for WSOP coverage, and then she hosted tournaments for PokerNews.

Michelle plays a lot of tournaments on her UB download. Her favorite events are probably those with bounties and also deep stack tournaments. Because she prefers deep chip stacks, it’s not a big shock to learn that she also participates in cash games. She can be found being dealt Texas Hold Em hands at No Limit midstakes.

Michelle is definitely taking advantage of her fortunate situation. Back in 2008 we spent a lot of time wondering why she wanted to represent UB rather than a Full Tilt Poker download, but it seems to have worked out just fine for her. She has a lot of work ahead of her before she makes it into the poker elite, but she has an entire career in which to accomplish it.

This next update will feature Joe Sebok, another poker professional that endorses a UB bonus. There’s a chance you might not know Sebok, but you should recognize Barry Greenstein, his stepdad. Originally from San Francisco, Sebok went pro back in 2005. He has been endorsing the UB bonus since the second half of 2009.

Tournaments are Sebok’s bread and butter, and his live tournament winnings total a little under $2 million. While he’s cashed in the WSOP 15 times, he’s still waiting for his first bracelet. His best showing in the Main Event has been 56th place, which happened in 2009. Since he plays predominantly tournaments, I’m curious to know if he ever secretly plays on a Full Tilt Poker download or uses a PokerStars bonus code from time to time. If he does, I’m sure he’s not the only UB representative doing things like that!

Sebok is well known in the poker community. He co-founded PokerRoad.com with Greenstein, a media center that features poker-related radio, TV, and blogs. His co-host on the PokerRoad Radio is Gavin Smith, his good friend and fellow poker pro. You might have seen the Internet show “Prop Bets”, a show in which Sebok and Smith compete against each other in various prop bets in things like mechanical bull riding and belly slapping. This show stemmed from a prop bet that caused Sebok, the loser, to wear three costumes to the 2006 WSOP Main Event, including a diaper-wearing bear, Spider-Man, and Wonder Woman. He definitely doesn’t lead a normal life, and it’s pretty clear that Sebok doesn’t necessarily require poker downloads and live events to pay the bills.

Sebok is pretty young, and there’s probably a lot more to come in the near and far future. He’s been a pro for a mere five years, and it’s not a stretch to believe that he will win a WSOP title in the next year or two. He honed his skills online when he was new to poker, and you should do the same if you’re determined to become a better player. It wouldn’t surprise me if Sebok told you to avoid other sites like a Full Tilt or Carbon Poker download, though. That’s his job as a UB spokesman, after all!

When I wrote last time, I described Phil Hellmuth because he’s part of the team that advertises UB and the UB bonus, and today I’m about to describe Annie Duke, another UB spokesperson. Among the most successful female poker players around today, Duke received a WSOP bracelet six years back playing Omaha Hi-Low. She grew up in New Hampshire with her brother and sister. Her brother, Howard Lederer, was actually the person that taught her how to play poker.

Duke has been representing UB and the UB bonus for 10 years now. Many would agree that she is an excellent tournament player, as her live MTT poker winnings total over $4 million. Her most impressive cash in the WSOP Main Event was tenth place in the year 2000. To make it more impressive, she was pregnant with her third kid at the time! She’s cashed in the WSOP 37 times for a total of $1.1 million, and she won the winner-take-all invitational WSOP Tournament of Champions for $2 million in 2004.

Duke isn’t well known in the poker community just because she’s a female poker player. In 2004 when Ben Affleck won the California State Poker Championship, he actually received poker tutoring from Duke. She was the chosen one when the Colbert Report hosted a poker player for the first time, she’s appeared on the show 1 vs 100 three times, and she appeared on Deal or No Deal one time. She also participated in Celebrity Apprentice a year ago where she placed second behind Joan Rivers even though she raised 3 times more cash for her charity of choice, Refugees International. Include the fact that she also participates on UB’s Best Damn Poker Show, and you begin to wonder when she gets her poker hands in.

Duke is a proud supporter of American poker online, and she speaks up when she thinks something is wrong. She publically dislikes the fact that players are not allowed to represent poker sites on their clothes during select live events. Regarding the subject, she boldly said, “We are not even slaves. We’re people paying to pick the cotton.” Duke acknowledges the fact she’s one of only a few successful women in poker, but she thinks it’s silly that women have their own exclusive tournaments. Regarding the subject, she said, “Poker is one of the few sports where a woman can compete on a totally equal footing with a man, so I don’t understand why there’s a ladies only tournament.” It doesn’t come as a surprise that as a result, she passes up any opportunity to participate in ladies only MTTs.

Annie Duke is an excellent representative for both UB and poker in general. By appearing in so many different TV shows, she’s encouraging people everywhere to support legal US poker sites and enjoy one of the best games ever invented. You can join her at the tables on UB – make a UB download today!

A well known pro poker player that would give a thumbs up to a UB bonus would be Phil Hellmuth, a UB spokesman famous in the poker world for his ridiculous table antics and multiple World Series of Poker (WSOP) bracelets. Hellmuth was the first of five children, born in 1964 in Wisconsin where he also attended university. Hellmuth married his wife, Kathy, and they moved to California where they have two sons.

You wouldn’t think it, but people are encouraged to earn their UB bonus when they find out that UB’s most prominent spokesman holds so many outstanding records. It’s just amazing to find out that he has earned bracelets in 11 WSOP events, winning the first one back in 1989 when he was just 24 years old. His most recent bracelet was won in 2007. He has the record for cashing the WSOP (75) and the most final tables with 41. His total WSOP winnings total $6.1 million which ranks him 9th on the WSOP All Time Money List. Many people are surprised when they find out that Hellmuth has still never won a World Poker Tour (WPT) event despite 3 final table appearances. He’s actually been able to cash 11 times in WPT tournaments and he has $691k in total winnings. All these records and cashes allowed him to be brought into the Poker Hall of Fame a few years ago in 2007.

It’s Hellmuth’s MTT poker success that caused him to become famous, but he is probably most well known for his antics and tantrums at the tables. Maybe his success has gone to his head a bit because he has a huge ego, and nothing upsets him more than a couple bad beats. In the past he’s directed his outbursts to those who benefit from his bad luck, calling them names and questioning their intelligence. In 2008 during WSOP he got a penalty because he wouldn’t stop abusing a player after he showed the table that he’d caused Hellmuth to fold a hand preflop with suited rags. His personality and countless shenanigans have earned him the honor of being called “The Poker Brat”.

It looks like Hellmuth is making good use of his unique nickname, however. He started a clothing line using the name Poker Brat, and if you want to get into his head, you can read his thoughts in the book titled Poker Brat. He’s the author of several books, actually, and he’s even made DVDs and a mobile phone game. He writes a newspaper column called “Hand of the Week” about interesting poker hands, and he blogs for both CardPlayer and UB. And then if you think about all the times he appears on TV at the tables and on reality shows, it’s clear that Hellmuth is cashing in at more than just playing cards.

You hear so much about getting a Full Tilt download or using a PokerStars bonus code, but UB deserves some of the online poker spotlight, too. Join Hellmuth at the tables and use a UB referral code if you haven’t already done so. With a lot of hard work and dedication, it’s possible to accomplish some of the things that Hellmuth has accomplished in his career. Be sure to read my first couple entries for more information about the benefits of playing at UB!