GBF Poker Guide

To start off, this guide isn't meant to teach you the rules of poker or what the hands are or anything like that. If you know that little about poker, then you need to google the basic rules.

Before I get into it, I want to make one thing clear: if you're losing chips in poker, you are doing something wrong. It's not because it's rigged, it's not because you had shit luck, it's because you're playing incorrectly. Pokerbot was popular for a reason. It didn't do anything that you yourself aren't capable of. It didn't even play its hands with 100% accuracy, believe it or not. So if you've been playing for a few hours and you haven't been making any profit, it's time to read through this guide and figure out what you're doing wrong.

IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT CARDS TO KEEP OR DISCARD:

Before I list the priority system here, there's two things to keep in mind. First, speed is everything. Get through your hands as fast as you can, so you can see more double ups. If you're stopping every hand to look through this priority list to make the correct play each hand, you're doing it wrong. Read through it, memorize as much as you can, and then just play. If you reach a hand where you aren't certain what the correct choice is, just take your best guess, keep playing, and then come back to the list later to make a mental adjustment for the future.

The other thing is that this priority system is prioritizing WINNING over EARNINGS. What does this mean? It means that it prioritizes whatever will get you to see a double up with the highest odds, regardless of what the payout is. This is VERY DIFFERENT from real world video poker, because real video poker doesn't have the guaranteed profit machine that is double up. Table payout doesn't matter, double up payout does. Keep that in mind.

With all that out of the way, here's the priority list, in order of priority from top to bottom:

-Drawing a winning hand, even if it's just two pair (get rid of cards that aren't part of the winning hand to try for a better one)
-One card away from a flush (Ex: 4 of the same suit)
-Keeping one pair OR One card away from an OPEN straight (Ex: 2 3 4 5)
-One card away from a CLOSED straight (Ex: 6 7 9 10)
-Two cards away from an OPEN straight (Ex: 3 4 5)
-Two cards away from a flush (Ex: 3 of the same suit)

(Source: http://www.videopoker.com/learn/statistics/)

There are a few things this list leaves out, like 3 cards away from a straight/flush, but these hands have so little odds that it basically doesn't matter. You can just discard the whole hand and keep going if you want.

Now, with that out of the way...

IF YOU KNOW ALL OF THE ABOVE BUT ARE STILL NOT PROFITING, THEN THE PROBLEM IS YOUR PLAYSTYLE. HERE'S HOW TO FIX IT:

To start with, the most important factor when it comes to making many chips per hour is getting through as many games as you possibly can as fast as you can. The more games you click through, the more chances you get at double up, which means more chances at reaching max bet. Someone who plays his hands optimally only 85% of the time is not going to notice a big difference in winnings compared to someone who does it perfectly, as long as the speed at which they are playing at is similar. On that same note, if the person playing his hands optimally 85% of the time is faster than the perfect player, he's going to make more chips. It's okay to hesitate for a few seconds while you look at a new hand, but if you're sitting there trying to remember which cards to keep because of two different possibilities with odds that barely differ, you're wasting too much time. Double up, on the other hand, should be near instantaneous, as the animations give you more than enough time to figure out what you're going to pick. Memorize the locations of the buttons and spam click them.

Now, with that out of the way, I'll split the rest of this guide into two parts: the table, and double up.


The table:

Lets get one thing straight: the table does not matter at all. You see all that stuff on the top telling you how much each hand pays out? Ignore it, it's unimportant. The goal when you're on the table is to get off of it as fast as you can. You'll do this by trying to make whatever hand is most likely to get you to double up, whether its two pair or a royal flush. Literally the only thing the higher payouts are good for is making it so that you don't have to win as much when you do finally get a double up chance. Prioritize whatever will get you off that table as fast as possible, regardless of what the hand is. Keep in mind, as was said earlier, that your number one goal is always speed. If you feel like you could have made a better decision with keeping cards, don't stress over it. Just keep playing hands while you reflect on it, and make the change as you play.

The rate at which you see a double up should be at least once every few minutes, maybe 0-2, depending on luck. That's only on average, however. If you feel like you see a double up way less often than that, say every ten minutes or so, then you're either going through games way too slow, or maybe you need to brush up on your hand odds.



Double up chance:

Now we get to the part that actually matters. First, though, I want to get one misconception I sometimes see posted out of the way: counting cards really doesn't matter. It helps a little bit with 8's, but you can completely ignore it and still do fine. I'll explain why:

For any card between 2-6, and 10-A, counting cards literally does nothing. You will always, always bet high for 2-6, and low for 10-A, no matter what.

For 7 and 9, 99% of the time, counting cards does nothing. There are a set of very, VERY rare circumstances where this will matter, which I will explain below:

To begin with, card counting doesn't come into play here until round 8. At this point, if you get a 7, and every card before that was higher than 7, then you have an even chance of the next card being higher or lower. The inverse, of course, is true for a 9. Starting with round 9, if you get a 7, and every card before that was higher than 7, then you would have a higher chance of the next card being lower, instead of higher.

Here's the thing, though: because this situation is so incredibly rare, and because even when it does happen, the odds barely change at all, counting cards for this is an absolute waste of time. If you have a godlike memory, great. Otherwise, ignore this, as it will only slow you down.

Now, the one places card counting does make a significant impact is on an 8. Again, though, like with 7's and 9's, the impact is very minimal. More than anything else, your number one goal should always be to get through games as fast as possible. If you have to sit and think about how many cards you saw each time an 8 comes up, you're wasting your time. If you're on round 1, your choice is irrelevant. Round 2 or 3, you can probably remember without having to slow down. Round 8 or 9, just take your best guess. I promise you, you will not notice a difference in your winnings. If you slow yourself down to count cards and think, on the other hand, you can definitely expect to see your winnings per hour plummet.

With that bit of information out of the way, we're left with just two things. First, I'll restate: you should be clicking through double up games instantly. The animations give you more than enough time to know what you'll pick ahead of time. Why? Because, if you didn't already know, the card you draw in double up will always be the next card you're asked to bet on. So, if you bet low on 10 and get a 2, your mouse cursor should already be hovering over where the high button is, ready to spam click it. That is, after you click Yes, of course.

The second thing, and the thing that people tend to mess up on, is how to bet. The rules for this are actually pretty simple, though: bet aggressively, and do it quickly. Your goal when playing double up is to get as close to, if not over, the betting cap of 1.5m with every game. Here's how you'll do that: don't stop betting until you get to the last round/card, period. Note, that in this case, the last round/card is either the 10th card, or any card in which a winning bet will put you at or over the betting cap (so a bet of 750k or more).

What do you do when you reach the last card?

-If it's an 8, just go ahead and stop.
-If you ended up in round 10 with a paltry amount of chips (anything under 500k), bet again even if you get an 8, because that amount is basically nothing.
-For any other situation, bet again.

There's an argument to be made for stopping on the last card for a 7 or a 9 as well, but this won't affect your winnings in any significant way one way or the other, so do as you like. The general rule here is that if your bet isn't currently over a million, you shouldn't even care about it.


One more thing before I finish: don't play on tilt. You want to play like the bot does, and that means both playing fast, and not playing emotionally. Stop giving a shit about getting a 2 when you bet high on 3, or an A when you bet low on K. If you play poker correctly, you WILL profit, and with 1K bets, you will profit quickly. Remind yourself that your 700k chip loss over yet another badly timed 8 is meaningless. As long as you keep burning through games and you play properly, you'll make chips. Everything that happens in between doesn't matter. If you stop playing to take a screenshot of your poor luck and post it in the threads, that's time you could be using getting into more games and winning more double ups. Get used to seeing those loses, and learn to ignore them. If this is a big problem for you, start keeping a log of your winnings. Look at it every time you go on tilt, and use it to remind yourself that your losses are meaningless.