Freeroll your way to the USD20, 000 R/A on Mondays. We have 3 Freerolls that now run on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. The top 3 players in each Freeroll will be entered into the Sunday Satellite! If you want to buy-in directly the buy-in is USD5+0.50 for the Sunday satellite and for every USD33 in the prize pool one player will advance to the Monday USD20K.

The Sunday Guarantees have also been super sized! We will now run a weekly USD100,000 Guarantee and a monthly USD250,000 Guarantee. We are running daily freerolls into the USD250K Saturday Semi-Final, top 20 players will advance to the Sunday USD250,000 on the 31st August!

Check the website for more details

The Gap Concept was introduced by David Sklansky in his book Tournament Poker for Advanced Players. The basic idea is simply; a pot is opened in front of you by a solid player who has a reliable opening hand. You have a hand which is a minimum opening hand for your position. Should you call? The Gap concept says no. In fact you need a much stronger hand than a minimum opening hand to call as you opponent opened in an early position and he did not necessarily open with his minimum hand, he opened with a hand that, on average, was halfway between his best hand and his minimum hand.

The distance between the hand you actually need and the minimum hand for his position is what Sklansky termed “the Gap”. The sample hand illustrates the Gap Concept for a small stakes online game.

Click here to go through the sample hand.

WPT

We will send players to the WPT North American Poker Championships in October. Packages are worth USD12,000. That includes your Tournament buy-in (USD10,300) and USD1,700 cash for your accommodation and travel expenses.

Sunday Satellites are at 8pm ET, buy-in is USD200+15. There are daily cash and gold card satellites and a Sunday WPT semi final at 5:30 ET buy-in is USD38+2.

Package dates are 10th October to 16th October 2008.

Situation: Small stakes online game. You sat down about 20 hands ago. Player D hasn’t been involved in a hand until now.

Your hand: 3h 3c

Action to you: Players A,B, and C fold. Player D raises to $8.

Question: Do you fold, call, or raise?

Answer: It’s 7-to-1 against improving your hand to a set. Your opponent bet $8 and has only $32 left in his stack. You can’t win enough money when you improve to justify your call, and you will not be able to call a later bet with your treys if you don’t improve. In addition, there are still three players to act behind you, and any one of them could raise you out of the pot. So fold.

Action: You fold.

You need a hand considerably better than the minimum hand your opponent would have used to raise. The Gap Concept works well in limit poker and in many tournament situations. In deep stack poker, however, it has to be adjusted as there are hands that are designed to win your opponents whole stack by making a concealed monster.

In the next email we will be looking at the Gap Concept while playing deep stack poker.

To re-read the poker tips from previous emails click here

Source: Robertie, B. and Harrington D. (2008) Harrington on Cash Games Vol. 1, Nevada, Two Plus Two Publishing LLC.

Congratulations to Dave B for winning last week's chips. Play poker in the next 24 hours and stand a chance to win a free entry to any Gold Chip Lover (10 chips) Sit 'n Go. All players that play cash games will be entered into a draw and the winner will receive the free entry. Shuffle up and deal!