Winning @ Low Stakes Poker

Poker Strategy: Showing your hole cards

Saturday, October 27th, 2007 | Features, Strategy | No Comments

We’ve all done it. You just pulled off a huge bluff and got your opponent to fold the winning hand. But rather than throw your cards in to the muck you turn your hand over and show the table your moxie. You feel like the king of the world. But have you thought of how that one move has affected your table image and how other players will play against you? If not, it’s time you do.

Think of each hand of poker as a jigsaw puzzle. Each piece of information you have about the hand gets placed in the puzzle. The more information you have, the more pieces you can put in place and the better you are going to be able to play your hand. So at the end of a hand if 2 of your opponents each show their hands, this is valuable information that you can store up and use in future hands. Think about it, if you play the hand back in your head, you should be able to remember what position each player was playing from, who was betting, calling or raising, and you now have the benefit of knowing how strong each players hand was when they were doing it. Being able to recall that type of information is going to make it that much easier for you to play against these opponents in future hands.

Consider this scenario. You sit down at the poker table and quickly realize that most of the players are fairly passive. You take that that your cue to step up the aggression. You start raising every 2 or 3 hands and following up your pre-flop aggression with bets on the flop. After an hour of simply robbing the table blind, you haven’t had to show down any of the junk you have been stealing with. Everything is going your way. You are feeling invincible and you decide to show a big bluff. At that moment the tumblers all clicked in your opponents heads. You have just lost the element of mystery. You better be prepared to tighten up your game immediately or else you are going to find yourself getting called down by some mediocre hands. Of course this can work in your favor if you hit some decent hands immediately following. But you can expect to be called to the river the next few times you are in a pot.

Some people will tell you that it’s a bad idea to ever show your hands unless you absolutely have to, for example, at the showdown when you have to show your hand to win the pot. While you certainly don’t want to make a habit of it, there are certainly times when it’s not a bad idea to do some advertising. If you’ve raised 2 or 3 pots in a row and then pick up a huge hand like A/A or K/K, I’ll often show this hand before mucking to reinforce the idea that I’m only raising with “the goods.” It is typically a bad idea to ever show your bluffs. Very little positive effect can be gained by it. Sure, you get to bask in the moment as you are stacking up your stolen chips, but the likelihood that you are going to get away with another bluff in the near future his gone way down.

Use the power of information in your favor. Think twice before showing your hands when you don’t have to. If you do show hands, use it to reinforce the notion that you are always holding the winning hand. Unless you are ready to start gambling, don’t show your bluffs.

How many hands should you play?

Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 | Strategy | No Comments

You’ve heard it 1000 times, one of the most important aspects of winning poker is position. Having position on other players (i.e. being the last player to act in a round of betting) can dictate how you play virtually every starting poker hand and should be factored in to your decision to play a hand or fold it. So, how many hands should you expect to play? Let’s break it down by position.

Small Blind (3%) - This is the worst position at the table. You are going to be first to act on every round of betting. You should be folding pre-flop with weak hands that have little chance of making a 5 card hand (flush/straight) even in an unraised pot. Consider re-raising with big hands to avoid playing out of position.

Big Blind (3%) - Your position hasn’t improved much. Again, try re-raising with big hands or calling only with hands like A/Q, A/J or medium sized pocket pairs. Also, based on the position of the pre-flop raiser, you can elect to play a wider range of starting hands, but not by much.

First position (5%) - You have 9 player to get past, your hand better be strong. Also, you should be coming in for a raise 95% of the time when you plan to play from first position. If you get re-raised from a player in later position, before you call, remember that you are going to be out of position the rest of the hand.

Second position (10%) - Your position is still pretty poor. This is another raise or fold position. By limping in you are inviting players in later position to punish you and raise you out of the pot pre-flop.

Third position (15%) - You should still be playing pretty close to the vest from here. Don’t play unless you plan to come in for a raise.

Fourth position (20%) - At a full table, you are now in middle position. Your starting hand range can start to open up. It may sound redundant, but you should be coming in for a raise from here.

Fifth position (25%) - Time to start getting more active. You are going to have position on most of the table. By coming in for a raise you are going to most likely isolate yourself against a single opponent giving you the best chance to win the hand.

Sixth position (30%) - One spot away from the cut-off position. Time to start thinking about stealing the blinds. Starting hand range opens up even further and calling a pre-flop raise from here should yield you position for the rest of the hand (with only 2 players left to have better position than you)

The Cut-off (40%) - I consider the cut-off position to be the sweet spot. Time to start raising with a much wider variety of hands. If you are going to be the first to enter the pot from the cut-off position, suited connectors, any pair, any two face cards all become raising hands.

The Button (50%) - Having the button in front of you is like a license to steal. If all players have folded to me while I’m on the button, I’m going to raise to put pressure on the blinds about half the time. Most any two cards will work in this position. If you are called by one of the blinds, you can continue to apply pressure by betting the flop no matter if you hit or not. Remember, your opponent is only going to improve his hand on the flop 1/3 of the time. So you should win 2/3rds of these pots.

Avoid playing marginal hands from early position and apply pressure from late position. These two simple tips will improve your winning percentage immediately.

Playing micro limit tournaments

Friday, September 21st, 2007 | Strategy, Tournament Play | No Comments

One of the great things about playing online poker is the fact that it’s easy to find a tournament for nearly any buy-in amount. At any given time, sites like Full Tilt Poker offer tournaments with buy-ins ranging from $1,000.00 down to $1.00. There are even freeroll tournaments that let you play for a chance to win real money with no money out of your pocket.

I consider a micro-limit tournament to be anything under $5.00. In tournaments with this low of a buy-in, you can expect to see some extremely loose play. Many players will play any two cards in an effort to either win a large pot or get knocked out early to avoid wasting time in a tournament where the payout is going to be relatively low.

For the sake of this article, we’re going to assume that your goal is to win the tournament. This means you aren’t going to play like a maniac while trying to get lucky in order to accumulate chips or get knocked out trying.

Your first task is to make it past the first three levels. Here are some tips to do this:

• Play tight and fold all but the premium starting hands.
• Try to avoid race situations for all your chips
• Don’t overvalue hands like A/Q, A/J, A/10, K/Q or pocket pairs 9s or lower
• Don’t try to steal the blinds (during the first few levels, they are so low, they aren’t worth stealing)
• Identify the overly aggressive players and avoid them early on

Getting dealt some premium hands in the first few rounds can be a large benefit. Since many players are playing really loose, it’s not usually a problem to get paid off by lesser hands. Of course there is always the chance that you will get unlucky and have somebody draw out on you. This is a part of poker and there is nothing you can do about that.

After these first few rounds are over, it’s now time to change gears and accumulate some chips. Since you have been playing tight, you should now be able to use the tight image that you have portrayed to your advantage. When you enter a pot with a raise, other players, if they are paying attention, should take notice and give you credit for having a big hand. I would still suggest you avoid playing against the overly aggressive players, especially if they have accumulated a sizable stack. Many times these players will choose to play back at tight players thinking that they can get them to lay down most hands with a large bet on the flop. Unless you start with a monster hand or flop a big hand, you are going to be hard-pressed to play back at a player with a much larger stack than your own.

The number one most important rule for playing micro-limit tournaments is to remain patient. By picking your spots, getting your money in with the best hand and with a little bit of luck, you are going to find that these small buy-in tournaments can produce a profit for you on a consistent basis.

Setting traps: Risk Vs Reward

Sunday, September 16th, 2007 | Strategy, Tournament Play | No Comments

In tournament poker, it’s far more important to maximize the amount of chips you win from a big hand than it is in a cash game due to the fact that in a tournament, the blinds and antes increase on a regular basis. After the first few levels in a tournament, you are subjected to antes that eat away at your stack every hand. One way to to do this is to set a trap for an aggressive opponent.

There are several ways to set traps for an opponent, and they all require you to take some sort of risk. A great example is when you are in early position and you are dealt a hand like A/A or K/K. By limping in with a monster hand from early position, you are inviting an aggressive player behind you to raise the pot allowing you to re-raise when it gets back to you. However, the danger in limping in is that you are making it more inviting for sub-par hands to enter the pot because of the extra money you have added to it. If nobody raises after you and you are forced to see the flop against several opponents, you need to proceed with caution as it’s going to be difficult to determine the strength of an opponents hand. If you are willing to limp in, you are going to need to be ready to fold your premium hand if the flop misses you and the betting dictates that you no longer have the best hand.

While it may seem like setting a trap would always mean slow playing a big hand, that’s not always the case. In some cases, I prefer to bet my big hands depending on the situation. For example, here’s a hand from a recent online tournament. An aggressive player raised roughly 3x the BB from middle position, the player on the button called and I was in the BB with 4/4. The SB folds and I call. The flop came out A/9/4 rainbow. Being first to act with 2 players behind me, my first instinct was to check and let the pre-flop raiser do the betting for me. But, given the players aggression in previous hands, I decide to make a small-ish bet (about 1/3 the pot) which would invite the original raiser to re-raise me. As expected, he did exactly that. He made a healthy raise and I pushed all-in and he eventually folded his hand. After the hand, he claimed to have had K/K and felt unlucky that the Ace hit the board However it was me that was unlucky that the Ace hit as I would have won more chips if the flop had been Q/9/4 instead. Regardless, I made more money on the hand by betting out and letting him raise me than if I had checked and called the flop as he would have bet far less than the amount of his raise of my flop bet.

Setting traps depends greatly on how well you know your opponents. Keep your eyes open for spots where you can play a hand differently than you might normally play it in order to set up an opponent to pay you off.

Using your reputation at the poker table

Friday, September 14th, 2007 | Strategy | No Comments

If you play in the same card room be it live or online, you are bound to end up playing against people you have played with before. The more often you play with the same group of people, the more they are going to know about you and the way you play. Building up a reputation in a card room can definitely work to your advantage.

There are many types of reputations to have: gambler, a rock, a bluffer, tight, loose, aggressive, maniac, passive and many more. For the sake of this article, I’ll focus solely on my current reputation.

In my circle of friends I have picked up a reputation to always be bluffing. While this makes it much more difficult for me to pull off a bluff since I will get called down with really weak hands, it provides me with an excellent weapon that I can use against my opponents. Since I’m never given credit for a hand, I simply value-bet my hands on the flop, turn and river. There is no value in slow playing big hands in this circumstance since my opponents will not likely bet their weak hands, but will feel compelled to call me down with 3rd or 4th pair.

When in this situation, it’s very important to pay attention to the texture of the board. Since I am likely going to have to show down my hand, I need to be sure I have the best hand. If any sort of draw is filled with the turn or river card, I’m more apt to check/call or simply fold and wait for a better spot than I am to try and win the hand against an opponent who has a hard time laying down a hand, especially to a guy that he thinks is bluffing anyway.

I will usually try to control the size of the pot by being the person doing the betting. Like I said, they aren’t going to give me credit for a hand anyway, so I may as well bet my strong hands the same way I would if I were trying to bluff them out of a pot. This opens up several possibilities. Re-raising right away or smooth calling to set up a check-raise on the turn are both strong plays but need to be used based on the strength of your hand mixed with the likelihood your hand can be drawn out on.

If you don’t already know what your reputation is, pay attention to the types of hands that are showing down against you. If you are being called down with relatively weak hands, you are probably perceived as loose or even a maniac. If you are getting no action on your raises, you are perceived to be tight and will only enter a pot with solid hands.

Once you have figured out your reputation, use it to punish your opponents. They already think you play one way. Switch it up on them and you are bound to be rewarded.