Knowing what range of hands your opponent is putting you on may not seem like a crucial skill to the uninitiated. In fact, it may be the most important skill of all in a game like no limit hold’em. To be a successful online poker player, you must know what your opponents are thinking. If you don’t care about that, well, perhaps you should stick to video poker.

Just one poker story yesterday coming from Pokerblog.com. It seems like a quiet day regarding the online poker news but we are sure the poker blogs will keep up. Pokerblog suggests not baiting the sharks: "Play enough poker and you’ll run into players who just seem to outflop and outplay you every step of the way. Unfortunately, many of us can only take so much of this abuse and will try to constantly attack and take chips away from these opponents, only to find that more often than not we just end up losing more chips. If you have a maniac at the table that’s just playing terribly, you need to just pick the right opportunity to strike. However, if you’ve identified legitimately skilled players sitting in your game, you need to develop the mindset to stay away from them and get involved in pots with the weaker opponents at the table."

For a guy who has been so outspoken about the unfairly positive treatment the banks are receiving over the past year, I am really torn about this whole bonus thing. For those of you who don't know, millions of Americans, including prominently newly sworn-in president Barack Obama, were disgusted and outraged to learn on Thursday that Wall Street paid out $18.4 billion in cash bonuses to its New York City-based employees at the end of 2008 / beginning in 2009 for fiscal year 2008. Many of these banks are the very institutions that received between $10 and $50 billion of taxpayer funds from the TARP program to help stabilize their capital bases and keep them in business as we suffer through the most trying financial crisis since the Great Depression. News that these firms that needed billions and billions of dollars of our money to survive the over-risky positions they got themselves into are now paying out billions and billions of dollars in bonuses to their employees cannot be expected to be taken well.

That said, this isn't nearly as cut and dried as many, including the new president, seem to think it is. In the banks' defense, what they call "bonuses" are not really bonuses in the sense that most non-bank employees think of that word. Having come from that industry myself, I can say with total positivity that this isn't like some other jobs I have had, where you get paid whatever your salary is, and then in a good year maybe they kick you 5 or 10% on top as a year-end bonus. Maybe you get it, maybe you don't, but either way you make your salary and that's what your real pay is. At the banks, the compensation model is completely different. The base salaries at many of the banks, even for those investment bankers making $5 and $10 million a year, generally top out well under a million dollars. It is not uncommon for even the highest-paid bankers in the industry to receive a salary close to $250,000, and then receive their millions all in a bonus at the end of the year, making upwards of 80% or more of their total annual compensation in that year-end bonus.

Read the complete story at Hammer Player's Poker Blog.

Last years winner of Pokerstars Carribian main event, the Frenchman Bertrand "ElkY" Grospellier, got of to a really good start in 2008, and 2009 seems just as successful for Grosspellier. ElkY wins the PokerStars Event yet again, not the main event as he did last year - but the $25K High Roller Event. This time the Frenchman took home a first prize of  $433,500.