Entries Tagged 'Poker Tips' ↓

Friday was my biggest one-day win, ever - I’m still stoked about it!

In ~1,500 hands I won a little bit over $8,500 - not bad for about four hours work!

Most of this was at 5/10NL, with a little bit of 3/6 and a quick shot at 10/20 thrown in.

While I won a couple pots with “tricky” plays like floats(calling without a hand to represent one, usually in position) or “squeeze” re-raises, the majority of the winnings were accomplished with solid fundamentals:

• Planning the pot-size
• Extracting value
• Inducing bluffs / pot control
• Tilt avoidance

Plan the Pot from the Beginning

5/10 NL, $1000 effective stacks.

I am dealt AK in the cut-off, the UTG player folds and the HJ, an average player, limps.

The standard play is to raise 4-5x the BB. However, I’ve kept my eye on the table and the BB is a complete maniac:

• He will raise around 30-40% of his hands from any position if there is no raise
• If there is a raise, he will usually just call.
• If he gets reraised, he will almost always see a flop.

He’s the “easy money” at the table, so I target him first.I decide to take a chance and hope he has a hand to raise, so I overlimp behind the HJ. The button folds, the SB completes, and to my delight the BB raises to $50.

The first limper folds, and I reraise to $150. It is folded back to the BB who pauses and calls.

At this point my planning has started to take shape - I’ve got a good enough chunk of my stack in preflop that if I hit a pair I can happily get the rest in, since the pot will be ~$320 and we will have $850 remaining.

It may get a bit dicey if I do not hit top pair, but I have position and my opponent is generally entering the pot with a significantly weaker hand, so I’m willing to take that chance.

The flop is the beautiful: A T 2 (Pot: $320)

I bet $225, and villain thinks for a moment, then check-raises all-in for $625 more. I call quickly - villain has QT and my hand holds up.

Careful attention to my opponents, a little planning, and that pretty Ace allowed me to double up here.

Had I just raised pre-flop like normal the BB would have called, and I might have won a small- to medium-sized pot, since I would be forced to play for pot control with such a small portion of my stack invested preflop.

Extracting Value

Extracting value goes hand-in-hand with planning the pot. Here’s an example from 5/10 NL:

Hero(100bb) raises AK to $35 UTG, and gets 3 callers - a shortstack(30bb) in the HJ, a fishy player on the button(100bb), and a TAG in the SB(125bb).

Flop: A 2 2 (Pot: $150)

At this point, I notice a few things before acting:

1. The short-stack is irrelevant as I’m happy getting 30bb in w/ TPTK on this board
2. The TAG never has a 2 unless he has specifically 22 or A2s
3. The fishy button may hold a 2, but he will likely pay off 3 streets of betting with just an A

As a result, these factors along with the pot size ($150 with $965 left to bet) let me bet my TPTK aggressively because there are so few hands that beat me.

This results in a rare situation where I can commit my stack with top-pair in a multi-way raised pot.

So, I come out and bet $130 into $150. The shortstack folds, the fishy button calls, and the tag folds. This is my ideal scenario, heads-up with the deep fish.

Turn: 4; (pot: $410)

I bet $305, button calls.

River: 8 (pot: $1020)

I go all-in for my remaining $530, and villain calls with AJ.

AK was good to me on Friday

Solid Play Pays Off

Many players get caught up in the idea of “outplaying” their opponents. When it comes down to it, a solid, tight strategy and attention to your opponent’s habits are the most important factors - play well for long enough, and it will pay off!

I have been playing less tables and more hands the past few weeks. My goal was to learn new situations where I can win more, basically.

What I want to talk about in this post is experimentation. Learning by trial. Learning by applying basic math, odds and brain!

Experiment

Don’t be afraid to experiment. Experience is the best teacher. Reading, talking and coaching only take you so far.

After awhile you have to step out of your comfort zone and try things. Although a slight warning before you do so. It is easy to fool yourself to playing bad and shrugging it off while saying “I’m experimenting!”.

On the other hand, a friend of mine who learned by experimentation. Be smart when you do it though, it is easy to fool yourself

Don’t start re-raising hands out of position which put you in extremely tough situations.

Start with something lighter and where your success rate is higher.

One example could be playing a few more hands on the button, in position. Always think of what kind of range your opponent has, you do not want to be calling a hand like A5s on the button to an under the gun raise if the raiser is tight. Because his range crushes yours.

A better spot would be against a loose opponent who opens in the cut-off and you call on the button with A5s.

I have always leaned more to the conservative side. That is my weakness, I don’t move up the stakes when I could make even more at a higher limit. Sometimes I am too complacent and don’t make the play that has the most expected value.

But I am learning, just as you are.

Analyze

I usually go through my sessions in Pokertracker after my session is done. It costs $55 or so and is a very helpful tool. I bought it around August 2004 I think and it has been well worth it

Il also use Holdem Ranger and Pokerstove which are very helpful for calculating equities. It might be confusing in the beginning. If it is, send me your questions and I will answer them. It is a lot easier for me to help when I know what specific questions you have.

What all these programs help you do is assess when a play is correct and when it is not. For example with equity calculators like Holdem Ranger and Pokerstove you can input your opponents perceived range of hands and start calculating if a bluff is correct.

For example if a slightly loose and aggressive opponent who steals a lot opens in the cut-off and you call on the button with two cards. The flop comes down something like K72 rainbow.

He fires out a continuation bet like he does 90% of the time. How often do you think he will fold on this flop if you raise? How will he react when you just call?

First you have to think about his hand-range, it might contain a lot of hands like 65s, A5o, Q9o and such. He will easily fold hands like that to a small raise if you have a solid image.

When you first learn to use calculators like this it is kind of a revelation. It was for me because I had a good method of figuring out when I could do different things to take advantage of my opponents. I am still learning and lost in many places but with the help of calculating, discussing, coaching and playing I am getting better.

And to win in poker you have to be learning constantly.

When I was around 12 I started playing ice-hockey in my towns hockey team, that lasted for about 4 years. Even when I wasn’t part of a team me and my friends used to get together and play on our neighbour hood football field which was covered with ice during the winters.

I have always been in pretty good shape and have gotten used to the benefits of exercise. There have always been periods of severe inactivity

But I always come back to some form of exercise and each time I “start again” I am stunned of the benefits and how it makes me feel.

What benefits have I noticed? Everyone is different so you might not have the same things, I hope my benefits encourage you to try it out, if you are not already doing it.

1. Emotional Balance

I have always been a person with lots of energy, hyper-active at times And when I have so much excessive energy and when something goes wrong, it all turns to frustration and the feeling is pretty overwhelming because it can lead to blaming myself for weird things.

When I started exercising my emotions slowly started becoming more balanced, because of a more healthy diet and exercising. There are some days when I feel a very weird energy build-up and it feels like I just have to do something.

When I exercise this feeling becomes neutralized, it gives me a way to get rid of that excess energy. This means I have more emotional control at the poker table.

2. Stamina

I am slowly building my endurance, both physically and mentally. I can focus longer and think about situations with more clarity. I shouldn’t say that I can play longer poker sessions because that might be misleading.

I don’t recommend playing long sessions (more than 60 minutes at a time) because after a certain amount of time your ability to focus plummets.

What I can say is that my ability to focus while playing poker has become longer since I started exercising.

3. Discipline

When you do something regularly you will naturally run into days where you just don’t feel like doing it. This is how you build discipline, by doing things that you do not always want to do.

And I am not saying that you should do something you hate, if you hate exercising all you have to do is re-frame it. Ask yourself why you hate exercising?

Is it because it is laborious? Are you focusing on the tiresome aspects of exercising? I will bet you that this is the case if you think exercising sucks.

What would happen if you thought about how good you would feel, how you would look and how this might improve your whole life? Wouldn’t you feel a bit better focusing on that instead?

So when you feel like just watching some TV and eating a cookie or two, think about how good you would feel after your workout and how GOOD you would feel after a year of working out regularly and then get off your ass and exercise! That is discipline.

The more I exercise the bigger my discipline muscle gets, I can get myself to play poker on a consistent basis even when I do not feel like it. Sometimes though, you have to realize when it is time to take longer breaks from poker to avoid burn-out.

4. Self-Confidence

My self-confidence always goes up when I’ve been exercising a while. Partly because my body is in shape and because I am in shape mentally. So many psychological benefits come from working out regularly.

Self-confidence also helps me assess poker games better and helps me to gather the confidence in taking shots at higher stakes in a calculated manner.

These are the main four things I have experienced while exercising, all I can say is that I feel great and it works for me otherwise I would slowly go insane and tilt all my money away

I’ve been helping my brother learn No-limit hold’em the past couple weeks, and he recently made the discovery that a little bit of planning goes a long way. We’ve talked about pot-control, inducing bluffs, and other somewhat complicated concepts. He summarized it in a much simpler, more effective way.

He told me that when the flop comes down, he looks at the board, and at his cards, and asks himself “How big a pot do I want with this hand?” Once he has the answer, the actual play of the hand is easier.

A couple example hands:

Hand 1, a small pot hand:

.50/1.00 NL, $100 effective stacks.

Hero raises As2s to $3 on the button. The BB, a somewhat loose but not terrible player, calls.

The flop is: Ad 4h 4s (pot: $6.50)

How big a pot do we want with this hand? Not a very big one. If we get the remaining $97 into this $6 pot we will undoubtably lose.

There are no draws, so our opponent will rarely have a worse calling hand, and any Ace or better is ahead of us. With that in mind, we would want to get one, perhaps two streets of small betting in at the most to get value from pocket pairs.

If we decide to bet the flop and get raised, a possibly tough decision (is he bluffing? does he really have a 4?) becomes simpler: The pot is getting bigger than is acceptable for our hand’s strength, so we fold.

If bet-folding is uncomfortable, perhaps we check the flop, and our opponent makes a midsized turn bet. We call, intending to call a midsized river bet - hopefully we have induced a bluff.

Things have gotten much simpler now that we know how big we want the pot to be. If our opponent tries to force the pot larger than we are happy with, we simply fold and save some $.

Hand 2, getting value:

.50/1.00 NL, hero has $100 and villain has $25

Folded to hero on the cutoff whe raises to $3 with JhJd. The villain on the button, an unknown shortstack, calls.

Flop: Td 8d 7c (pot: $7.50)

Our opponent has $22 left in a $7.50 pot. With so little left to bet and so many draws out we are happy to get $22 in the pot.

So, we bet full pot ($7.50) so our opponent gets as close to allin as possible before the board can scare him or us. Villain minraises to $15, we stick to the plan and shove, and he calls. (pot: $51.50)

Villain shows Jc8c for middle pair and a gutshot. The turn is a K and the river an A - our Jacks hold up, but the turn and river would have made it very difficult to get villain’s whole stack had we played it slower. Or worse, if we tried to induce bluffs we might have ended up getting pushed off the best hand!

Planning is a powerful tool in NL. Take a look at the flop, and the board before you take an action. Ask yourself “how big of a pot do I want?” With a little practice even tough decisions can become much easier.

I know you guys have been requesting a tutorial on how to shuffle poker chips, and today I just happened to stumble upon this fine video (with nice music to boot) on shuffling them chips. Enjoy.