Full Tilt Poker Academy
Of all the poker rooms out there, I have to say that Full Tilt is one of the most innovative rooms to play at. Although next in popularity to PokerStars, they seem to out do their competition time and time again. At the time of writing Full Tilt had only 75,000 players or so to PokerStars 195,000+ players. I think this shows that a poker room built by pros’s is going to better suit the needs of up and coming players. Why am I so excited??
I just got done scoping out Full Tilt Poker Academy. In my opinion, this is what will set Full Tilt apart from all of the other rooms. Team Full Tilt has gathered all of their pro’s, be it online or live and created a series of video lessons to watch. All the lessons that I noticed were by video only and on average they were at least 10 minutes in length while the other two I watched were 15minutes in length and 28 minutes. I watched 5 videos and took a few notes on each.
The first video I watched was by Poker Pro Bill Edler. Although he seemed slightly nervous at first, he did a very good job of presenting Table Position. He explained why he would play some cards versus others and what he may do in specific scenarios. The next video was by Jennifer Harman on “sizing up opponents” which was amusing. They displayed a few pictures of random players and she discussed how she would interpret what kind of player they may be, by clothing, chip handling, and overall demeanor. Chris Ferguson discussed pre flop play and talked about betting or folding criteria versus just calling pre flop. He also talked about different positions and how he related those to his hole cards and betting. The last two videos were about online play and the players analyzed each hand and talked about what they were doing and why or why not.
Are you interested in scoping it out? Great because it is virtually free. Any guest can come in and take a peek. If you would like more than just a peek then you will have to sign up for a free Full Tilt account, which is required for the Bronze, Silver, and Gold Levels of the academy. To move up in levels all you have to do is earn Full Tilt points by playing on their site or by earning them through challenges. There is not much of a difference either between all of them and what they have to offer. The Bronze requirement is simply an account with Full Tilt and you will have access to a limited amount of videos and 2 Sit N Learn Leaderboards. The Silver only requires 10 Full Tilt Points and gets you all of the same things as Bronze but you have limited Sit N Learn Leaderboards as opposed to only 2. The Gold level will unlock everything but to achieve this status you must earn 500 points.
After you watch the lessons you can take quizzes called Sit N Learns that will rank you on the amount of correct answers and how quickly you were able to answer them. They are all ranked in difficulty so if you are not ready for a harder quiz then you can try something easier. The points you earn from this goes to the Sit N Learn leaderboard where the top ranking players get to play in Full Tilt Academy only freerolls. Aside from the freerolls, you can take part in special challenges brought on by the different videos you watch. Each challenge you complete will give you Academy Points which will boost you that much closer to a Gold status and can buy neat stuff from their store. You accomplish these challenges by playing for money on Full Tilt.
All in all, this is a definite must see. Even if you do not play on Full Tilt or prefer to play for free, this advice is golden. You can not get better advice for a new or even intermediate player than what is offered at the Full Tilt Academy. Go do yourself a favor and sign up to Full Tilt now and check this out. You will be glad you did.