Three Plays You Can Try Today To Open Up Your No-Limit Thinking
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Poker players get stuck in ruts. We make so many decisions when we play that it’s natural for us to develop a sort of default, automatic way of handling most situations. Automatic plays are, on one hand, a practical necessity. I play about 500 hands an hour, and I probably make at least 800 to 1,000 decisions during those hands. That means I’m making a decision, on average, every 3 to 5 seconds. If my brain were cranking on each one, I wouldn’t last fifteen minutes.
But automatic decision making has a major downside also. We stop considering alternatives, and we therefore stop improving.
I believe in using trial and error to improve your poker game. I don’t mean that you should start playing randomly and see how many pots you can win. I mean that you should think about the game and try to come up with plays you rarely, if ever, make. If those plays are obviously bad, like checking back the nuts on the river, then toss the idea. But if the play might have something going for it, even if you are skeptical about it, make an effort to actually try it out. Sometimes you’ll find that it works better than you thought.
Poker players like to make assumptions about how other players play. For instance, “Nobody is going to fold to a min-bet on the river.” We then form our strategy around these assumptions. Some assumptions are good, and some aren’t. Many of the plays we avoid, we avoid because they conflict with one of our assumptions. If we avoid a play because it conflicts with a bad assumption, we play bad. Trial and error is a great way to break down these false assumptions.
Here are three plays you can try today that might help you to break down some bad assumptions.
Ultra Light Blind Steal
In online 6-max games, blind stealing is critical. Blind steal situations occur frequently, and overall winrates even for excellent players are generally quite modest. Learning to steal the blinds effectively can boost your overall winrate by 20 percent or more.
Too many of us get hands like J4o or 95o and click the auto-fold button. When you’re on the button, sometimes clicking that auto-fold button is a pretty big mistake. Your hand strength often plays only a peripheral role in deciding whether to take a shot at the blinds. The playing tendencies of the players in the blinds are far more important, as is the general flow of the game.
If everyone folds to you on the button and you have total trash you’d usually auto-muck, take a look at who is in the blinds first. If it’s two low VPIP players, say players with VPIPs of about 22 or less, then go ahead and open that trash. See what happens. You’ll get enough folds that the raise will likely be nearly break even off the top (i.e., even if you never ever put another dollar in the pot).
When you’re opening wide like this on the button, experiment with raise sizes also. You don’t have to make the “standard” raise; you can raise less or more. Again, trial and error, along with a regular review of your stats in PokerTracker or Hold’em Manager, will help you fine tune your stealing strategy.
Cold 4-Bet Bluff Preflop
Say you’re in the blind, and there’s a raise and a 3-bet in front of you. Will you automatically check the auto-fold for any hand that’s not TT+ or AK? Will you essentially never bluff 4-bet in that situation?
Usually you should balance your play so that, given any set of actions you take, some percentage of your hands are good hands, and some percentage of your hands are bluffs. But sometimes you can examine your opponent’s play and say, “My opponent is never bluffing here, he’s always going with the hand, so it makes no sense to try a bluff myself.” In that case, you can drop the bluffing from your strategy.
But that’s an assumption, and sometimes it’s flawed. I think many people have internalized the notion that a preflop 3-bet isn’t a bluff often enough to make trying to rebluff it profitable. But online 6-max games, particularly at $0.50-$1 and up, are rife with light 3-betting. If you assume that your 3-betting opponent can’t be bluffing, your assumption may be wildly off.
The cold 4-bet bluff can be a very effective tool against light 3-bettors. Look for situations where the two raisers can have a wide range, and attack them.
For instance, say you’re playing $1-$2. A bad player who has been limping into most pots limps in. An aggressive, TAG player makes it $9 to go from the cutoff. Another aggressive TAG player whom you know likes to 3-bet light makes it $31. You’re in the big blind with A4s. You can try a 4-bet to about $58. You’ll get three folds quite often.
The play works because the cold 4-bet looks so strong. Most players haven’t worked it much into their games, so you’ll get a lot of respect. Often you’ll get folds from all hands except JJ+ or AK. When your opponents have wide raising and 3-betting ranges, you’ll usually catch everyone without a premium hand, and your bluff will take the pot down.
Obviously, if you begin to cold 4-bet bluff, some players will adjust and give those 4-bets less credit. Often it’s difficult to get further action with a hand like AA in the big blind when there’s a 3-bet already in front of you. Anything you do, cold-call or 4-bet, looks super strong. Opening up your range with some 4-bet bluffs will make your 4-bet look slightly less strong and over time get you more action on your big hands.
Small Bet and Raise Sizes
Min-betting and min-raising is a donk play. No doubt you’ve heard someone say it. It’s true that a lot of donks like to min-bet and min-raise, but that doesn’t make min-betting and min-raising necessarily bad plays.
Before I try to get you to make more small bets, I’ll give you an example of a really bad min-raise for balance. It’s the turn. You have $300 behind, and there’s $40 in the pot. You flopped a flush draw and called a flop bet. Your flush came in on the turn. Yet your opponent bets $30 at you. You min-raise to $60.
This is a common play “donks” make, and it is indeed bad. It gives away the strength of the hand, yet it also allows big flush draws and sets excellent odds to draw out. I’ve won many pots where I called this bet with a set and then shoved the river (often for 3x the pot or more) when the board paired and got paid off by the flush.
Min-betting and raising is bad generally when it tips the strength of your hand and yet also offers good implied odds to your opponent to beat you.
But when a smallish bet doesn’t give away your hand strength, or when it could cheaply encourage your opponent to give up on a number of marginal hands that might either draw out or bluff you later on, it could be your best play.
Here’s the upside of making small bets. Any bet, no matter how big or small, gives your opponent the opportunity to fold. That has value, because no matter how small the bet, every once in a while you’ll get the fold. Sometimes you’ll get a fold betting $2 into a $60 pot. That’s powerful.
In small stakes no-limit games, many players don’t react well to small bets. They fold too much. Or they auto-raise them. Small bets can induce bigger mistakes, and they can do so cheaply. Try them out.
Tags: autopilot, blind stealling, bluffing, cold 4-betting, no-limit-holdem, poker, semibluffingIf you find this article helpful please support the site to help keep the poker strategy tips coming.
