Thin Value

Last issue I wrote about how the most useful way to read hands relies on the concept of hand ranges. Because your opponents do not provide you perfect information with their checks, bets, and raises, you cannot quickly narrow down their holdings to just one or a few hands. Instead, you must assign ranges of hands to them given their actions, and you can refine these ranges as the hand proceeds.

You’re off to a good start if you can come up with relatively accurate hand ranges for your opponents as you play. But it’s also important to use these ranges to make the best playing decisions. The first step to doing that is to consider how hand ranges interact with board textures.

A board texture is classification of board type based on what hands the board makes probable. For instance, a board of K 8 6 2 makes flushes probable, but full houses and straights impossible and two pair hands relatively improbable. Given the sorts of hands people generally play, a board of K J T makes straights, two pairs, pairs, and straight draws relatively probable, while flushes and full houses are impossible. These are two very different board textures.

Different board textures interact with players’ hand ranges in different ways. Some textures paired with some ranges will produce a lot of strong and medium-strength hands. We saw an example of this in the last article. Our opponent in that hand raised preflop with a range of 22+, A7+, KT+, QT+, JT, T9s-54s. The flop came Q T 7 . Most of the hands in our opponent’s range flopped either a pair or better or a straight or flush draw on this flop. Usually you shouldn’t bluff when an opponent’s range fits so well with the board texture. With a bad hand in this situation, you should typically just give up.

Other board textures will produce mostly weak hands. For instance, our opponent raises preflop with the same hand range as before. The flop comes 6 4 3 . How does our opponent’s range fit with this board?

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Reading hands is a critical poker skill. The better you can key in on the sort of hands your opponents have, the better decisions you will make, and the better your results will be. Most players use some sort of hand reading process to inform their decisions.

But not all hand reading processes are equally good. Many of them are hit-or-miss, leading the practitioners to make occasional brilliant plays, but perhaps even more often leading them astray. These hit-or-miss systems often have something in common: They focus quickly on one (or a few) possible holding to the exclusion of other possibilities. You may have heard someone relate a hand story to you that sounds like this:

“Well, he raised preflop and I called with 6-6. The flop was Q-T-7, but I put him on A-K so I decided to call him down unless another big card came.”

The problem with this thinking is the narrow focus on one hand, in this case A-K. Sure, most players raise preflop when they get A-K, but they also raise with A-A, K-K, Q-Q, J-J, and often many other hands. Many players would fire a continuation bet on a Q-T-7 flop with many of those holdings, not just A-K. It’s misleading to focus so narrowly on just a single possible holding so early in the hand. Instead, when you’re reading hands, you should think in terms of hand ranges.

Thinking in terms of hand ranges acknowledges that we can’t have perfect knowledge using just the small bits of information we get during a poker hand. A preflop raise doesn’t indicate specifically A-K or J-J or any other hand. The most we can know is that, typically, when our opponent raises he’ll have, to use an example for a hypothetical opponent, one of the following hands: any pocket pair, an ace with a seven or better, two cards ten or higher, or maybe a suited connector. (When discussing hand ranges, writers generally use a shorthand notation. The preceding hand range could be written in a short hand as 22+, A7+, KT+, QT+, JT, T9s-54s.)

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35% OFF on Small Stakes No-Limit Hold’em until January 15.

To celebrate the New Year and also the release of the updated Version 1.1 of Small Stakes No-Limit Hold’em, we are offering a limited-time 35% discount. Until January 15, you can get your copy for $64.95. Here’s what ...

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Yesterday we released the first major update to our affordable poker e-book Small Stakes No-Limit Hold’em. 2009 has been an absolute explosion for e-books, not just in poker, but across the board. Login/Register for more.

Last issue I discussed five ways that running particularly good for a while can negatively affect your play. In this article, I’ll talk about how running bad for a prolonged period of time can get in your head and have you making bad decisions.

Running bad is the boogeyman for every poker player. There’s nothing more frustrating than doing everything “right” and yet still losing session after session. If you aren’t vigilant, running bad can set off a vicious cycle. You run bad for a while, which causes you to start playing badly, which then prolongs your poor run of results. Here are five pitfalls to avoid during your next bad run.

Losing Aggressiveness

Aggressive play is the key to winning poker. Finding the right bluffs and the smart value bets sets good players apart from mediocre ones. When you run bad, however, your aggressive edge can be the first thing to go. After all, none of your bluffs has worked in two days, so why burn chips trying another one? Or every time you make a decent hand, an opponent seems to show up eventually with the nuts. So why bother betting your hand for value?

When you’re beaten down and nothing is working, it’s easy to lose the nerve to bet and raise with anything but lock hands. If you notice that you’re becoming too scared to make aggressive plays you’d normally make, try one of two remedies. You can try taking a few extra seconds on these decisions and talk yourself into putting your chips in the middle. Failing that, you can take a break and analyze some hands away from the table. Reviewing the mathematical basis for an aggressive play can motivate you to make it the next time even if things haven’t been working recently.

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Small Stakes No-Limit Hold’em is getting an upgrade! If you haven’t read this book yet, and if you are a serious micro or small stakes no-limit player, now is a great time to ...

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I’ve always thought that one of the worst things that can happen to new poker players is for them to run really good right out of the gate. If they rack up a number of big wins early on, a couple of bad things can happen. First, they get unrealistic expectations about the game. They think winning comes easy, and they think solid strategy is much simpler than it really is. This may cause them to ignore sound advice, and it can also make the inevitable bad runs that much harder to take. Second, they reinforce bad habits. As long as they’re winning, whatever they’re doing must be right, right?

People talk a lot about how to handle bad runs, but I think learning to avoid the pitfalls of running good is just as important. During good runs we often pick up bad habits and allow ourselves to get careless. These tendencies come back to haunt us over the long term. I’ve identified five pitfalls of running good that you should look to avoid the next time the cards smile consistently on you.

Entering Unprofitable Pots

This one is simple and, I think, nearly universal. Almost everyone who runs good for an extended period of time begins to loosen up. In more sober times we’d perhaps know to fold K 9 from five off the button. But in our manic state this hand begins to look like just another opportunity to drag a huge pot. We loosen up by opening more pots from out of position, and we loosen up by calling more raises, both in and out of position. These subtle adjustments will prove to be costly over time.

If you’ve been running good, allow yourself an extra second to make preflop decisions. If you see a hand that looks playable, don’t just toss your money in. Think about whether this hand fits in well with your overall game plan. Don’t play the hand just because you’re a little more excited to see a flop than usual.

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Stacking your opponent is the ultimate no-limit high. There’s nothing more exhilarating than winning a huge pot. But, beyond that, stacking opponents is a critical no-limit skill. I’ve noticed that the best players tend to be far more adept than the average player at encouraging opponents to part with all ...

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Cash games tend to be relatively static. The blinds don’t change. The stack sizes can vary, but they tend to vary from fairly deep to really deep. And after any hand you can get up from the table and cash your chips in for dollars. So each chip is always worth to you at least the face value of the chip.

In tournaments these things — blind sizes, antes, stack sizes, and chip values — are all variable, and mastering the changes in strategy due to these changing variables is the key tournament skill. This brings us to today’s question from a reader.

According to your book, Getting Started In Hold’em, the early phase [of a tournament] is regarded as similar to cash games, and the bubble and prize phases are regarded as similar to sit-n-gos (SNGs). Therefore, although my primary focus is on [multitable tournaments], working on my cash game and SNG game would help with my early phase play and bubble and prize phase play, respectively. The middle stage (which you define as average stack of approximately 10 big blinds) is regarded as similar to satellite play. But in tournaments I play, the average stacks are rarely 10 big blinds. They are usually more. If this middle phase exists, I would want to work on satellite play. Should I therefore practice all three games — cash games, satellites, and SNGs — to improve my tournament play?

Well, indeed in live tournaments it’s quite common to have average stacks around the 10BB level after a few rounds. But that actual number isn’t so important.

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