Ruff Poker Blog
Learn Train Dominate Poker

During Season 6 of the PokerStars.net European Poker Tour, EPT officials announced the creation of seven poker awards that would be given out to the tour’s top performing players, including the coveted Player of the Year award. In addition to a trophy, each Season 7 award winner will receive a prize package for the first [...]

In a previous entry I talked about the early stages of poker tournaments and the numerous opportunities these stages present for savvy poker players. In this installment I’m going to explain what happens when the early stages of a poker tournament ends, and the adjustments you’ll need to make in order to stay afloat.
The best [...]

Money attracts greed, and while the vast majority of poker players are trustworthy individuals there is a small subset of people who would like nothing more than to take advantage of an all too trusting individual, whether it’s for $20 or $20,000. In this installment I’ll look at a common online poker forum scam many [...]

I suppose cheating poker players out of $22 million -that’s just the total from Ultimate Bet-will keep a story going for quite some time, but the Super-User scandals that plagued first Absolute Poker and then Ultimate Bet have once again found center stage thanks to some more investigative work by the like of Haley Hintze, [...]

One question I get asked a lot is whether or not a person should learn a new game, or just stick to what they know. The answer has a lot to do the person and what the reason(s) is for asking the question in the first place, so hopefully I can outline the different factors [...]

The difference between cash games and poker tournaments are very severe; the most striking difference obviously being the increasing value seen in tournaments, where in a typical cash game the first hand is worth exactly the same as the last.
However, this isn’t what makes a cash game more skillful -if it indeed is more skillful-the [...]

The idea of working on your strengths while ignoring your weaknesses runs counter to much of what we are taught: In school if you are deficient in one subject you often put in extra-time, at the expense of subjects you are already good at: Another example is the fact that athletes are constantly spending the [...]

The poker world was shocked by the news that during a rafting trip in Oregon with some close friends, poker superstar Phil Laak suffered major injuries including broken bones in his wrist and elbow, as well as facial lacerations, when he crashed his ATV on Thursday.  
Laak was treated at a local hospital and is recovering [...]

One of the more recent scandals that shook the online poker world dealt with collusion, and unlike the strategic –some would say soft-collusion– that took place in the StoxTrader scandal, in this case the players’ involved shared information and weren’t looking for a small added edge; these players were actively looking to cheat other players [...]

While nowhere near the level of the Super-User scandals, or some of the other cheating scandals in the history of online poker, the Nick ‘StoxTrader” Grudzien incident is perhaps one of the most shameful in online poker history, not only because the offending players was a solid winner with a huge reputation in and away [...]