Three Simple Things An Average Small Stakes Live Game Regular Can Try To Make More Money

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The great thing about poker is that nearly all of us have room to improve our games. Many players who beat small stakes live games at a decent clip could win more money if they tried these three simple things more often.

Taking Control Of The Game

Many small stakes live games are relatively passive. The players are mostly just pushing small pots back and forth, each hoping to cooler someone. A lot of winning regulars are content to mostly play along, limping into pots and waiting for those cooler hands. But you can often do much better by taking control of the game.

What do I mean taking control? I mean raising preflop with marginal hands to isolate limpers. I mean reraising preflop with marginal hands to isolate loose raisers. I mean firing more barrels on the turn and river. Overall I mean ramping up the aggression significantly.

Taking control of a game by using aggression does two positive things:

1. It allows you to absolutely run over the game for a while until your opponents begin to adjust.
2. When they do start to adjust, it takes your opponents out of their comfort zones where they’re more likely to make mistakes.

By taking control of a passive game by raising and reraising, barrelling off and barrelling again, you force mistakes. You force mistakes by getting them to fold to your weak hands, and then eventually you force mistakes by encouraging them to stack off with second pair to your one big hand of the night.

You can’t take control of a crazy or super-aggressive game in this way. But when the game is passive and people are limping around a lot, you can often devastate the game by forcing the action in a lot of pots.

Value Betting On The River

Too many players check perfectly good hands down on the river rather than bet them for value. This is an area that offers many players a lot of room for improvement. Generally speaking, if you have top pair or better and it’s checked to you on the river, you should seriously consider firing. You don’t have to bet the pot. You can bet less, sometimes a whole lot less. Getting something for your hand is better than getting nothing for it.

The risk of value betting on the river is often that you’ll get raised or check-raised, sometimes as a bluff. But in a regular old passive small stakes live game, this risk is remote. You can play for days and days and never once encounter a river raise from anything but a top-notch hand. So get value betting.

Varying Bet Sizes

The great thing about no-limit is that you have so much latitude to vary bet sizes. You can bet five times the pot or one-tenth the pot or anything in between. Furthermore, you can often manipulate your opponents into doing what you want them to do just by choosing the right bet size. Make an overbet and get a fold. Make a small bet and get a crying call.

The problem with varying bet sizes to manipulate your opponents is that your opponents could potentially reverse engineer your thought process and then figure out roughly what sort of hand you have. While this threat is always present, the reality is that many small stakes live game players are simply not very sophisticated.

When I play these games, I vary my bet sizes a lot, often with the intention of manipulating my opponent into making one play or another. The manipulation is successful far more often than it fails due to an opponent “levelling” me. As long as the backfire rate is relatively low, I think varying bet sizes smartly can improve your bottom line a lot.

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