Posts Tagged ‘Uncategorized’
Book Review Directory- Basic HTML
June 29th, 2009 | Author: foucault
Harrington on Online Cash Games 6-max No Limit Hold Em
Harrington on Cash Games Volume 1
Harrington on Cash Games Volume 2
Winning Poker Tournaments One Hand at a Time
Transitioning from No Limit Hold Em to Pot Limit Omaha
Sklansky – No Limit Hold Em Theory and Practice
Pot Limit Omaha:The Big Play Strategy
Tournament Poker for Advanced Players – Expanded Edition
How to Beat No Limit Hold Em Cash Games
The Professor, The Banker, and The Suicide Kind
High-Low Split for Advanced Players
The Poker World According to Cinch
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Flopping a Monster from Out of Position
June 26th, 2009 | Author: foucault
by Andrew Brokos
Previously published on CardPlayer.com
I play mid-stakes no-limit hold’em cash games and tournaments online. I provide exclusive coaching videos for Card Player Pro, powered by PokerSavvy Plus. My columns will explore important concepts illustrated by hands that I analyze in my instructional videos. As a Card Player reader, you’ll have access to clips of these hands and many others.
I recently finished 35th in the main event of the World Series of Poker, winning $193,000. This column will examine a big pot that I won in the first few hours of the tournament and illustrate the benefits of playing a big hand fast from out of position.
We were less than an hour into the tournament, but I was already a little unhappy with the way things were going. My starting table didn’t include a lot of superstars, but the player on my left was a phenomenal young pro named Tony Rivera who had already won a bracelet in the inaugural $10,000 Mixed Games.
This hand begins with Tony making a small raise from first position. The blinds were 50-100, and everyone had roughly the 20,000 chips we started with. Tony raised to 250, and another pretty solid player across the table from us called. The action folded to me holding A-5o in the big blind.
Against Pot Control
June 26th, 2009 | Author: foucault
by Andrew Brokos
Previously published on CardPlayer.com
“Pot control” is an increasingly popular concept in the contemporary no-limit hold ‘em scene. The idea is that you want to tailor the size of the pot to the strength of your hand, betting and raising when you have a monster and checking and calling when you have a medium-strength hand.
Pot control is important, but it must be balanced against competing considerations. Making the most profitable decision should be your highest goal, yet I often medium-strength hands played in a way that guarantees they get to showdown rather than in a way that will make the most money.
This article explores a common turn decision to illustrate how keeping the pot small and trying to get to showdown can interfere with maximally profitable play.
Suppose that in a 6-handed no-limit hold ‘em game with $1/$2 blinds, you open raise one off the button to $7 with a pair of queens. Only the small blind calls. You both have $200 behind.
The flop comes 6s 8s Jd. Your opponent checks, you bet $12, and he calls.
You grimace as the turn brings the 7d. If your opponent holds 9-7, 8-7, 7-6, or 5-4, then he just improved to beat your queens. You also worry that he may have J-8, 8-6, or even a flopped set. In short, your overpair no longer feels like a monster. The small blind checks. What now?
Creative Bet Sizing
June 24th, 2009 | Author: foucault
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
Conclusion
There is a lot more that could be said about underbetting and overbetting. Hopefully this article will encourage to explore some of those options yourself. But it should also encourage you to experiment with other unconventional plays. When was the last time you limp-re-raised or floated a continuation bet from out of position? There are good reasons why these aren’t often-used plays, but if you never use them, you are missing out on opportunities to confound your opponents and find value in places where no one else is looking.
Creative Bet Sizing
June 24th, 2009 | Author: foucault
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
Underbetting
I define an underbet as an amount less than half of the pot. Underbetting is in my opinion a somewhat trickier skill to master than overbetting, but since it doesn’t require risking as much, it’s also generally a lower risk strategy to practice. Just as your overbets should be disproportionately for value with monster hands, your underbets should generally be with weak hands, either as bluffs or as thin value bets. Against observant opponents, you’ll need to underbet occasionally with big hands as well for balance.
Bluffing- The easiest targets for underbet bluffing are players whom you believe are practicing fit-or-fold. In other words, if you raise or re-raise pre-flop and are called by an opponent who will fold to any bet if he doesn’t flop a pair or draw, then there is no reason for you to make a continuation bet of 70% of the pot or whatever your standard size is. You can probably pick up the pot with a smaller bet of 20-25%. You should be careful about pushing this too far, though, as even weak opponents may choose to get tricky if you start trying to push them out with a bet of only 5-10%.
Creative Bet Sizing
June 24th, 2009 | Author: foucault
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
Overbetting
I define an overbet as any amount larger than the size of the pot. I don’t really have all-in bets from short-stacked players in mind here, as their overbets are something of a necessity since smaller bets would usually commit them to the pot anyway. Obviously overbetting is not an option in pot-limit games, but in no-limit it is a powerful and dramatically under-utilized tool.
Big bets are simply harder to play against than smaller bets. Any edge that you have over an opponent, whether it be position, better cards, or superior skill, is magnified by pot and bet size. This doesn’t mean that every bet you make should be all in. But if you believe that an opponent will make comparable mistakes whether you bet 70% of pot or 125% of pot, the latter option will be far more profitable.
A good rule of thumb about overbetting is that the larger your bet, the more likely it is to induce a raise-or-fold response from your opponent and the less likely it is to be simply called. How exactly you use that information will depend on factors like your hand, your opponent, and the size of the effective stacks. Here are a few possibilities to get you thinking:
Creative Bet Sizing
June 24th, 2009 | Author: foucault
by Andrew Brokos
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
Big bet poker is a game of options and creativity. Whereas fixed limit players generally have only two or three options at any given decision point (check/bet or raise/call/fold), big bet players often have the option of betting anywhere from 1BB to the size of the pot or the effective stacks. Yet despite the myriad options available, most players tend to restrict themselves to betting between 2/3 pot and full pot.
This is not without good reason. Such moderately sized bets offer a compelling risk/reward ratio: they build the pot for big hands, deny proper odds to all but the best draws, and avoid putting too much of your stack at risk.
However, there are drawbacks to such a narrow betting strategy. The ability to vary bet sizes is one of the defining characteristics of no-limit and pot-limit games. Failing to take full advantage of it can only hurt you in the long run. Moreover, most of your opponents will be accustomed to responding to “big-but-not-too-big” bets. It is what they do, it is what most of their opponents do, and through trial and error they’ve improved their decision-making when faced with such bets.
Thinking About Ranges
June 24th, 2009 | Author: foucault
by Andrew Brokos
This article originally appeared in Two Plus Two Magazine
If there is one lesson I have learned and re-learned as I’ve moved up the stakes in no limit hold ‘em, it’s that nearly everything comes down to hand ranges, both yours and your opponents’. The former may be grist for another article, but at the moment I want to address some of the myriad ways in which the hand ranges you assign your opponents should influence your decisions at the table.
Most readers of 2+2 Magazine will understand that they are supposed to be putting their opponents’ on a range of possible hands. However, many will be equally confused about what exactly to do with these ranges. That is, they will not necessarily understand how exactly the ranges they assign should influence their decision-making in virtually every situation.
There is a lot more to it than thinking, “I beat that range, so I’ll call,” or “I don’t have the right equity versus that range, so I’ll fold.” Your perception of an opponent’s possible holdings should influence everything from whether you bluff to how you size your value bets, sometimes in rather subtle ways.
This article will move quickly through the basics of calculating your equity versus a range of hands and then examine some of the more complicated ways in which the ranges you assign should influence your play.
