What have you learned since then? Likely you’ve learned all the important fundamentals. You’ve learned not to limp in out of position with weak hands. You’ve (more or less) learned not to pay off big bets from nut-peddling and passive players. You’ve learned to play position aggressively. You’ve learned to c-bet flops and also to barrel the turn when it’s clear your opponent doesn’t often have much. You bet your good hands for value, and maybe here and there you find a good thin value bet.

You’re a nit or maybe a TAG, and you make money easily off of players who can’t read hands and who therefore overvalue their medium-strength hands in big pots. As long as you can play in relatively soft games, you will make money playing poker for the rest of your life.

But I’m sorry to say, you’re not very good yet. Being very good means firing up an online casino and sitting in a game with nothing but players just like you and being able to generate a consistent profit. An advanced stats package is R for download and Casino.org. Obviously we’re not talking about a massive winrate. Massive winrates require legitimate spots in the game. But a consistent winrate.

You might be thinking, “Why on earth would I even want to try to play in a game with nothing but solid players to squeak out a winrate?” If you were thinking this, stop yourself! That’s not the point. The point of getting very good is that instead of winning X in a game, you’re now winning X + Y, where Y is the profit you squeeze out of the regulars in the game. That Y over time allows you to build your bankroll faster and move up.

So how do you do this? It’s a relatively simple, yet painstaking process. It’s simple because you can find a single edge over your clones in as little as fifteen minutes. But it’s painstaking because you have to find these edges over and over and over again–and retain them all–to really get the best of your TAGish bretheren.

Basically, it’s a lot of work. But if you play a lot of poker, and your goal is to win more or move up, the work is very worth it. So what do you do?

First, pick a relatively common situation. It’s a $0.50-$1 6-max game at an online casino. A 21/17 regular opens for $3 from under the gun. You’re on the button, and you call. Let’s not worry about what hand you’re calling with just yet. The blinds fold.

The flop comes A 6 2 . Your opponent bets. Is this bet unexpected?

It’s not. This is a dry, ace-high flop, and many regulars think they should bet flops like this one with 100 percent of their range. After all, they raised a tight range UTG, and they can “represent the ace.”

What’s the reality, though? Say the UTG player raises 13 percent of his starting hands from UTG. His range is something like this:

AA-22
AKs-ATs, KQs-KTs, QJs-98s, QTs
AKo-AJo, KQo

This is 13 percent of hands. How often do you think this hand range makes top pair or better on this flop?

According to Flopzilla, which is an invaluable, yet inexpensive, program if you want to get very good at poker, this UTG range makes top pair or better just 31.6 percent of the time. This means that 68.4 percent of the time, your opponent will flop a hand he’s likely to fold to pressure.

If this is beginning to sound like a good spot to throw in a bluff, you’re catching on. Assume UTG is playing a very simple strategy of c-betting 100 percent of his hands (because he’s “supposed to” on a flop like this one) and then shutting down without an ace or better. You can raise his c-bet and show an automatic profit. There’s $7.50 in the pot preflop. He bets $4 on the flop. That puts $11.50 in the pot. You raise him to $10 with any two. You’re risking $10 to win $11.50 that he’ll fold. If he is indeed folding 68.4 percent of the time, this is extremely profitable.

If you find that your regular opponents tend to take this line on flops like this one, you can raise them all day long and auto-profit. You’ve taken a small step toward becoming a very good player. Now find 200 more situations like this one. Find two every day for 100 days in a row. At the end of this exercise, you’ll be an absolute monster in your regular games, and you’ll have a gaudy winrate to match.

“But Ed,” you say, “you make it sound easy, but it’s not easy like that! If I start raising these flops with air, I’ll be exploitable, and my opponents will adjust and punish me. And then I’ll just be spewing chips.”

No, no, no, no, no! This line of thinking has two enormous flaws. First, it’s monsters-under-the-bed. Most players at your level don’t adjust quickly or accurately to opponents who are playing counter-strategies. Many of them are multitabling 12 tables or more, and they literally click buttons every second or two. Do you think one of these players will think twice about the situation when they see they got raised on an ace-high flop holding 8-8 or K-J suited? No, they’ll fold, and they’ll do it day after day unless you absolutely abuse them many times in a very short period.

Second, you are not a robot. Say you get reraised. What is a legitimate reraising range on this flop given the UTG opening range? Sets and maybe A-K, right? Your opponent will have one of these hands under 15 percent of the time. You are going to get reraised very rarely. If you notice a player start to reraise you, he’s likely adjusted, and now you adjust yourself. You start raising A-J and A-T on this flop and stop raising air.

For the most part, though, when you find an exploitative play like this one, it works. It’s a more-often-than-not thing, which adds up to a long-term edge. Nitty and TAG players LOVE to bet/fold. It’s a strategy that works terrifically to maximize value against fish. But it’s an exploitable, unbalanced strategy. Find all the common spots where your opponents are bet/folding, and raise them. (Or float them and then bluff when they give up.)

Yes, it will blow up in your face sometimes. And when you’re running bad you’ll feel like a total idiot spewmonkey. But after 100k or 200k hands, you’ll likely see a much better winrate than you had before. And you’ll know that it was all your hard work that got you there.

Time to move up and start the process anew with a more sophisticated set of regulars.

While not completely reliable, the amount of money on the table is a reasonable indicator of how aggressive the game is. If all the stacks are short and medium, expect a quiet, perhaps even weak-tight game. If everyone is deep, then you should probably expect fireworks. If one player is really deep, and everyone else has a normal-sized stack, there’s a good chance the deep player is loose and aggressive. It’s not always the case – he could be deep just because he got really lucky or because he’s been glued to the seat for 48 hours (look for 32 ounce coffee cups and bloodshot eyes) – but loose-aggressive players are the most likely ones to build deep stacks in a game with a maximum buy-in.

Back to my crazy $2-$5 game. Usually I would buy in for the maximum, $500, to give me the best chance to win a big pot. But yesterday I wanted to try out a strategy that I consider foolproof for beating crazy no-limit games. I bought in for $300 or 60 big blinds. Last issue I said that I often buy in for around that much to scope out a game. After all, I can buy more chips before any hand, but I can never take money off the table.

But this buy-in was a little different, because the foolproof strategy relies on a short buy-in to work. In a crazy game, many players will play very loosely preflop, even for a raise. After watching a few hands (and after losing my first buy-in right off the bat with pocket jacks against 6-5 on a 6-5-2 flop), I saw that the “standard” preflop raise at the table was to between $30 and $40, and typically between three and six people would call it. So a typical hand would see five or six players to the flop for around $150 – a crazy game indeed.

Naturally, if five or six players are seeing every flop, their standards are none too high. Many players were playing (for raises) any two suited, offsuit connectors, and hands like K-7 offsuit. Now if everyone at the table has $2,000 in front of them, and if everyone is playing loose like this, then the low standards don’t actually hurt anyone. To get an advantage in poker (or to get taken advantage of), someone needs to adjust their strategy to exploit the weaknesses. If no one is taking advantage of it, playing loose is harmless.

But the foolproof strategy is designed to take advantage of it. First, you don’t have $2,000 in front of you. You have only $300, making the $30 preflop bet a sizable 10 percent of your stack. And, by the elegant symmetry of the table stakes rule, it’s also 10 percent of all of your opponents’ stacks when they’re playing against you. (Remember, their extra money is irrelevant when they’re playing against you. It’s as if it weren’t even on the table.)

Playing K-7 offsuit for one percent of the stacks can work out fine. Playing it for 10 percent is a recipe for disaster. They simply can’t outflop or outplay you often enough to make up for building such a big pot with such a stinker of a hand.

So what’s the foolproof strategy? Buy in for 40 to 60 big blinds. Wait for strong starting hands: pocket pairs, big aces, and K-Q. In position you can add in some more hands. Ask yourself, “Is this hand better than what my opponents are probably playing? Or am I playing this to try to get lucky?” If you’re playing to get lucky, don’t play. For instance, if you see 8 6 , throw it away. It can be a good hand when the stacks are deep and you have some control over your opponents, but it will only cost you money in a wild and woolly game.

So you’re waiting for good hands. If you have a medium or big pocket pair, or if you have two big cards, raise preflop. With small pocket pairs, or on the button with your somewhat weaker hands, you can just limp.

If the pot is raised and you hit the flop well, move all-in. For instance, say you raise to $35 preflop with K Q and five players call. The pot is $210 before the flop, and you have $265 remaining. The flop comes Q 9 7 . If everyone checks to you, push all-in. Even if someone bets in front of you, push all-in. The pot is too large to consider folding a hand as strong as yours. Indeed, that’s what makes this strategy “foolproof.” Your goal is to get your money in early with good hands so there are no tough decisions. You aren’t relying on your hand-reading skills or your creativity to give you an advantage; you’re relying on raw math.

That’s the basic idea. Obviously, you won’t push with every hand on every flop. If you raise preflop with pocket jacks and the flop comes A-K-6, check and fold. If you have A-K and the flop comes J-9-7, check and fold. If you limped in preflop with pocket fives and the flop comes Q-T-3, check and fold. But if you connect solidly with the flop, the pot will be big enough and your stack will be small enough that you can just put your money in and be confident that, over time, your bets will earn you money.

You can mix it up a little bit. For instance, you can try limp-reraising if you get a strong hand in early position. Or you can try a squeeze bluff if a loose player raises and a few people call. For example, if someone raises to $40 and three people call, you can try moving all-in with J 9 . If no one calls, you win $160 for your $300 risk. And if you do get called, you’re getting 3-to-2 on your money, enough to compensate you even if you run into A-K.

The reason many people have trouble in wild games is they repeatedly leave themselves in a no-mans-land. They flop a decent hand, but then the big bets start pouring in, and they second-guess themselves. Buy buying in a little shorter, you can get your money in with confidence and with a mathematically guaranteed, foolproof advantage.

[This article appeared originally in the December 5, 2007 issue (Vol. 20, No. 24) of Card Player.]