Two No-Limit Plays That Make You Easy To Read

Your no-limit hold’em opponents bluff. I know it may shock you, but it’s true. Are you just going to let them get away with it, or are you going to do something about it?

If you don’t have a good plan for dealing with your opponents’ bluffs, you may want to just let them get away with it. While nearly all players bluff sometimes, most of them don’t bluff often enough that you can call randomly to keep them honest. If you don’t pick your spots with some thought, you probably should just concede the occasional bluff.

But I’m not satisfied with that answer, so I’m going to help you to develop a plan. Your opponents aren’t going to get away with it! At least sometimes they won’t.

Here’s the first principle to picking off bluffs. Your opponents will, by and large, not bluff hands that have showdown value. They will bluff only with hands they think have no chance to win a showdown. In other words, your opponents might try to bluff with 9 7 on a K 8 6 2 A board, but they likely won’t try to bluff with 9 7 on a K 8 6 2 9 board. Most players would try to check the latter hand to showdown.

Suspect bluffs when your opponent could have a wide array of worthless hands, and avoid calling when he has few such possible hands. Here are a few example hands where we can use this technique to pick off possible bluffs (or to avoid a bad call).

Read more…

The final hand always gets the most attention. It could be the last hand of a grueling heads-up battle to determine a million dollar tournament winner. Or it could just be the hand you busted out on in your local Wednesday night tournament. Either way, chances are that you (and maybe a lot of other people) will be thinking about that final hand for a while.

In this column, I analyze a final hand from one of my readers. It was the final hand he played in the 2009 World Series of Poker main event, and he has naturally spent hours analyzing and reanalyzing it. I think it’s an instructive hand, and I wanted to share my thoughts about it. I’ll let my reader tell the story.

This hand occurred on day 3 of the main event. It was level 11 with the blinds at 800-1600 with a 200 ante from each player. The table had been playing mostly tight with a few active players and no big name pros. I had just doubled up to around 50,000 chips. The chip average at this point was around 90,000. The best hand I had seen in 3 hours was A-5, and I had not played a hand this level. It was folded around to me on the button, and I looked down at A-J of hearts. I raised to 4,000. The small blind folded, and the big blind (an aggressive European player) reraised to12,000. He had me covered with about 80,000 in chips. I put him on a range of suited connectors (A-K to 7-6), pocket pairs (A-A to 5-5), and some other hands like K-Q and K-J. I decided to call.

Getting reraised when holding A-J often puts a player into a difficult situation. Because A-J is so far behind many of the hands people reraise with, it can be tempting to lay it down. Often folding is the right play, but I like my reader’s call in this instance. Here’s why.

Read more…

The longer I’ve played poker, the more I’ve become convinced that a single concept is truly at the core of nearly all successful strategies. It’s a concept that is as important playing no-limit hold’em as it is at limit stud eight-or-better. This central concept is extracting thin value.

It’s a simple idea. On the final betting round you have an okay hand. It’s the sort of ho-hum hand you get a dozen or more times in a session. But given the way this particular pot has played out, you think it’s likely better than whatever your opponent has. You bet the hand, your opponent calls, and you win.

Even though the idea is simple, the gap between players who consistently find thin value and those who don’t is massive. Finding thin value doesn’t just mean making a few extra bucks with your so-so hands. It also means being able to bluff more frequently and more profitably. It also means making your bets on earlier streets carry more leverage. Players who consistently find thin value will find that nearly every action they take in a hand beginning with their decision to enter the pot is more profitable.

How can this one little aspect of the game be so important? Let’s look at an example in no-limit hold’em.

It’s a $2-$5 game with $500 stacks. You open for $20 from three off the button with A T . The button calls, and so does the big blind.

The flop comes T 8 6 . The big blind checks, you bet $50 into the $62 pot, the button folds, and the big blind calls.

The turn is the 2 . The big blind checks, you bet $120 into the $162 pot, and he calls.

The river is the K . The big blind checks, and you bet $180 into the $402 pot.

Read more…

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?

Read more…

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.)

Read more…

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 ...

Login/Register for more.

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.

Read more…

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 ...

Login/Register for more.