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Macau’s Poker Scene Looking Vibrant after Successful 2009

With the new year just beginning, Macau is already gearing up for even more poker tournaments and events to build on a successful 2009.

Last year, Asia’s gaming capital was the site of record-setting poker events from the biggest poker tours in the region. It also saw the opening of several new poker rooms, signifying that local players were steadily becoming more interested in the game.

In mid-August, the Asian Poker Tour (APT) held its 2009 Macau event at the StarWorld Hotel and Casino and experienced a large surge in player participation. Its twelve-day festival of poker featured fifteen side events in addition to the main event, which set a new APT record with a field of 326 runners. The winner was France’s Adrien Allain, who won HK $3,035,000 for his first-place finish.

Over at PokerStars Macau at the Grand Lisboa Hotel, the third season of the Asia Pacific Poker Tour (APPT) Macau event saw Irish player Dermont Blain win HK $4,194,000 in its main event. Blain was just one of the APPT Macau record 429 players who played in the main event, contributing to the prize pool of HK $16,130,400.

The PokerStars Macau poker room also held its own series of tournaments throughout the year, culminating in a grand finale in December. The poker room’s Macau Poker Cup held four Red Dragon main events in 2009, with each one getting more players than the last.

The first Red Dragon main event, which was held in March, saw its HK $500,000 guaranteed prize pool broken as 112 players entered for a total prize pool of HK $1,052,800. Due to the large turnout, the subsequent Red Dragon events offered a guarantee of HK $1,000,000. It didn’t matter, as player numbers kept increasing, including a field of 247 runners in October.

PokerStars Macau then held its grand finale in December with the Macau Poker Cup Championship (MPCC). Held from December 12-20, the MPCC featured a HK $20,000 main event with HK $2,000,000 guaranteed. The winner was Devin Tang, who defeated Taipei’s Michael Chang to win the HK $727,600 first prize.

2009 also saw two new poker rooms open in Macau. Sun City’s Poker King Club, named after the movie released earlier in the year, opened on October 31 at the StarWorld Casino. Over on the other side of town, The Venetian opened its own poker room in late November, adding to the hotel’s multitude of gaming and shopping attractions.

With more poker rooms and bigger tournaments, 2009 definitely showed just how much poker is capable of growing in Macau and the region as a whole. Already established as the go-to place for poker in Asia, it won’t be long before it becomes one of the biggest poker hotspots in the world.

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Online Casinos Tournaments. Part Two.

Playing at the casino tournaments the strategy may be different from the common gambling. When gambling, for the most players the main thing is not to lose. The gambler plays discreetly, tries his best efforts to prolong the pleasure and not to lose. The main thing about the tournaments is to hit the prize pool. It makes no sense to hang around the initial sum, as you would never come into the prize winners. It’s all the same whether you’ll lose your money or keep it – anyway you will pay for entry. So, the winning formula of tournament games is “Sink or swim”. You will have to stake high and take risks. There are two main approaches in tournament games, one of them is called conservative and the other one is referred to as aggressive.

The conservative approach suggests “slow” start of the tournament. The stakes are not very high; the risks are not that big, the main purpose is to stay in the game as long as possible and see how other players progress. As the tournament situation is becoming more or less clear, the player increases his stakes and tries to catch up with the leaders. In the aggressive approach the player starts to stake maximum from the very beginning. If the limit of the table permits, some players stake all the money. The main aim here is quickly to leave behind all the competitors and being a leader to play more calmly and watch the competitors. Besides the aggressive approach would help you to save the time if the game is not in your favour. Select the approach you like, but one general recommendation is that it is worth to play “against the crowd”. So if the majority plays conservative tactics, you should follow the aggressive one and vice versa.

If in the tournament there are casino games with basic strategy such as blackjack or other games, then all you need is to follow the strategy. The only exception is few last hands (when the time is running out). If you need quickly to catch up with an opponent and you are running short of time, you may diverge the blackjack basic strategy and split tens or double. You may use various stake strategies even martingale. At the end of the day it is a tournament and you are not so afraid to lose your money but to increase the chances to win. In such a case, the dispersion is not your enemy, but friend. You have to take risks to succeed!

And one more hint – please look through the results of the previous tournaments before your start playing, so that you can understand what you should aim at. Online casinos tournaments would allow you to turn a negative to positive mathematical expectation! There are two ways to success: firstly, tournaments with guaranteed prize fund can offer bigger prize than the sum of the collected fees, secondly player’s skill level. This fact at once makes the game win-win in any way. If you follow the blackjack basic strategy and you are ready to take risks, then you would get advantage over the opponents. In accordance with experience not all the players are familiar with the basic strategy and principles of the online casinos tournaments. Because in the tournament you are not playing against the casino dealer but against the other players your chances are higher than average, and in any way you’ll be in the profit. On the whole, if you want to play a risky game, play in the tournaments – you would enjoy the game and you would have chances to catch a to catch a whale.