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.

Editing took a few weeks longer than we anticipated, mainly due to complications from having three authors. But it’s done. Here’s what to expect now:

• In about a week we’ll announce a firm release date. Release will likely be in or about the first half of June.
• We will be offering a variety of payment methods. If we don’t offer a method that is convenient for you, you can email us and we will work something out.

I’ll make all the important announcements here, so if you’re reading this post, you’re in the right place.

And now for today’s excerpt from the section on Range Balancing.

How Far Should Bill Go [To Unbalance His Line]?

How far does Bill need to go to fix his unbalanced line? Unfortunately, there is no math answer to this problem. Too much depends on opponents, game conditions, and what street you are on. However, there are a few guidelines to follow.

I think these stages are worth thinking about because they can help you do a couple of things:

1. Realize about where you stand in your development, and therefore what concepts you have still to master.
2. Understand how to identify roughly how your opponents are thinking, what tactics they are well-defended against, and what tactics they might be vulnerable to.

As I read hands and try to get into the heads of my opponents, I refer to an internal conception of these stages all the time, and I think it really helps me in my quest to outlevel my opponents by one.

Here are the stages that I presented in the video. If you’d like to see the whole video you’ll need a Stoxpoker membership. If you don’t have one I think it’s very worth your while to sign up for a month and check it out. It’s not expensive, and there’s just an absolute ton of great content now.

Stages of a TAG

1. Hrmm, this K5s looks kinda good

2. I will never play anything but these 18 hands under any circumstances

3. I need to fold postflop if I don’t hit a hand. And I need to fold to pressure if I don’t have a great hand.

4. Maybe I can loosen up a little bit in position. I can play more hands because I know how to fold them postflop.

5. I need to bet my good hands hard so I can get value for them.

This is basically the evolved stage of a “nit”. Tight preflop, slightly looser in position, and mainly putting in serious money postflop only with strong hands. Nits can make money, but they need to really multitable hard to get any kind of real traction.

6. I can semibluff decent draws postflop with essentially no added risk.

7. C-betting is much more powerful if you follow it up sometimes with turn barrelling.

8. I should 3-bet more hands preflop for value.

9. I can now play a few more hands from all position because bluffing makes bad hands profitable sometimes.

10. I need to adjust my preflop game to my opponents. That means not folding as much to frequent 3-bettors, calling more on the button against light openers.

11. I should look for small pots that nobody in particular seems to want and attack them.

This is where a lot of the TAG regulars in microstakes fit in. This is also about where most of what I write and produce picks up.

12. I need to adjust my postflop play somewhat to my opponents. That means getting it in with stuff like top pair against bad or loose players.

13. I can make money by stealing more preflop. I can steal more loosely from the button, and I can 3-bet light from the button and blinds.

14. I can also get carried away and start opening too many hands from all positions.

15. I can combat light 3-bettors with light 4-bets and light 4-bettors with light 5-bet shoves.

16. Double barrelling can be quite effective, and sometimes I should resort to firing three barrels.

17. I can take aggrodonks who bet every flop off their hands with well-timed raises and floats.

18. I should seek out bad players and try to isolate them to play as many pots as possible with them.

19. Preflop hand values usually depend far more on the situation than on the intrinsic value of the cards.

20. The size of the pot determines how aggressive I need to play and how committed I am to the pot.

21. I should look for large pots that people seem to have given up on and shove my money in.

22. I can value bet on the river much lighter against bad players and expect to get called by worse hands.

This is about where you need to be if you want to play online poker for a living at the $1-$2 level or so. At this stage players usually vary from loose TAGs to LAGs. Virtually everything I write and produce is designed to get people from stage 11 to stage 22.

23. I need to focus on line balancing. Reading hands lets me find unbalanced lines in my own play and in my opponents’ play.

24. Through obvservation I can determine roughly what level my opponent plays at and out-level them by one level

25. I can make seemingly drastic adjustments to my game to exploit opponents playing an unbalanced strategy.

And more…

For those who don’t know, Stoxpoker and Cardrunners are video training sites. They each put out 20+ hours per month of high-quality poker instructional videos. The coaches are top-notch. (Disclosure: I’m a coach at Stoxpoker.) If you want to get better at poker, you really owe it to yourself to get a membership at either one of these great sites (or both).

Through the Truly Free Poker Training offer, you can get these memberships completely free. All you have to do to earn your membership is play raked hands at Full Tilt. Here’s how you get set up:

1. Go to trulyfreepokertraining.com and register yourself for the program.
2. Play hands on Full Tilt.
3. Get your free membership(s).

You earn memberships while you earn Full Tilt Points. The memberships don’t cost any points; you earn credit for memberships simultaneously with and in addition to your points. It doesn’t cost you any MGR or rakeback. It’s completely free to you.

This really is a great deal, and if you already play on Full Tilt, it’s a total no-brainer. Sign up right now.

I’m a coach for Stoxpoker, a poker video training site. Video training is one of the absolute best ways to improve your poker play. Now you can get your Stoxpoker membership, as well as a membership at partner site Cardrunners, paid for by Full Tilt Poker just by accumulating Full Tilt Points.

I’m not talking about spending your Full Tilt Points on Stoxpoker or Cardrunners memberships (though you can do that too if you want). For this new deal, Full Tilt will simply pay for your Stoxpoker and/or Cardrunners memberships if you accumulate enough points during a month. It doesn’t cost you any points, and it doesn’t affect your MGR or rakeback either.

Want to learn more about poker video training? Check out Stoxpoker now.

If you know about poker video training and want Full Tilt to pay for your membership, follow these directions:

1. Go to www.trulyfreepokertraining.com to register. This website is owned by Cardrunners and Stoxpoker and is used for the express purpose of administering sign-ups to this new program.
2. Select your primary training site – CardRunners or StoxPoker. You’ll still be able to earn both for free, but we need to know your first choice so we can credit you properly. Earn Full Tilt Points by playing at Full Tilt Poker: 4,500 for CardRunners, 2,500 for StoxPoker, or 7,000 for both. If you don’t hit the full threshold, we’ll still credit your account in increments of one week. If you do not already have one, make sure you have created a Guest Cardrunners account before you enroll in the program. This will prevent any processing delays if you want to enjoy Cardrunners for free.
3. This free training program has no effect on your Full Tilt Points or on your Rakeback/MGR. We only track your Full Tilt Points to calculate the length of your free training each month.

Take a look at the Frequently Asked Questions or join us in the Stoxpoker forums to chat about this.

This offer is fairly new, and already the interest has been staggering. So definitely check out www.trulyfreepokertraining.com to register for your free months of Stoxpoker and Cardrunners.

Bryce is a one-of-a-kind wonder. His videos are insane. They are absolutely jam-packed with incredible insight from beginning to end. And, oh by the way, he happened to win $2.5 Million in 2007. In fact, four Stoxpoker coaches won a combined over $5 Million in 2007. So watch that $200-$400 video I linked above. Then watch part 2, part 3, and part 4also. Then sign up at StoxPoker today.

To weight a range, simply add a colon plus an integer between 1 and 100 after your range unit. From the documentation:

Finally, you can weight any unit within a range by appending a colon and then an integer from 1 to 100. The number represents a percentage of the total times dealt a hand in the unit. For example, the range TT+,AK,JTs:10,T9s:10,98s:10 might represent someone’s 3-betting range preflop. They’d reraise 100 percent of the time with any pair tens or better or AK (TT+ is equivalent to TT+:100), and they’d also raise 10 percent of the time they were dealt JTs, T9s, or 98s. These weights allow you to better simulate actual hand ranges.

The colon+number applies only to the unit it sits next to, not any other units separated by commas. And if a hand is represented by multiple units, only the highest weight is used. For instance, for AKs:80,**s:30,**:5, AhKh has a weight of 80, Jd4d has a weight of 30, and 3c2h has a weight of 5.

To see how this new functionality works, try out these examples:

• TT against AhAs,55:17. The weight of 17 percent on the 55 balances out the fact that only one combination of aces is used, and the result is nearly 50/50.
• TT+,AK,JTs:10,T9s:10,98s:10 against 88
• TT+,AK,JTs:10,T9s:10,98s:10,**:1 against 88. Adding a 1 percent chance of bluffing with every random hand changes the equity significantly.

Note also that weights matter only if two or more different weights are used in the same range. A range of AA:1 is identical to a range of AA:42 or simply AA. However, AA:1,JTs:80 is very different from AA:42,JTs:80, which is very different from AA,JTs:80.

A few bugs probably slipped through, so if you find one, please let me know in the comments.

Thus, I have spent the last ten days feverishly coding a new tool that lets you assign hand ranges and pit them against one another to calculate pot equity. This tool only works on hold’em hands (for now).

• In “How do I start over?” I outline a basic strategy for AlamedaMike, a limit hold’em player who lacks focus. With some practice and after developing some hand reading skills, it should have him beating his local $3-$6 limit game.
• Matthew Hilger asks what I think about the future of poker.
• Neilis wonders how to handle those loose-passive players when you flop top pair with 100BB stacks.
• Sometimes a bluff isn’t just a bluff, as emmapeel points out.
• Philhux brings up the Stop And Go, which is often a more profitable alternative to moving all-in preflop.

Enjoy!

Equity Calculators

Equity calculators are essential tools. They run simulations of all the possible board cards that can come, and they tell you the percentage of the time a certain hand (or range of hands) will win, tie, and lose. The two I use regularly are PokerStove, which is a full-featured client application (i.e., you have to download it and install it on your computer), and NPA Poker Tools, which is a web application I recently wrote. I personally use PokerStove for my writings more than any other poker software tool.

Poker Web Search

#1 Poker Search is a new poker search service that indexes only top-quality poker websites. There’s a lot of great poker information on the web, but sometimes it’s hard to find either because it’s on a site you don’t regularly visit or because the search functions on the sites don’t work well. #1 Poker Search helps you search poker websites and answer your poker questions more quickly and thoroughly.

Hand Converters

PokerHand is a sort of universal hand converter. You can submit a hand history of a hand you played online, and it will convert it into a pretty, human-readable format with card pictures and store it in its database. Then it gives you a permanent URL to your hand that you can post anywhere. So if you want to ask a question about a hand on a forum or blog, you can upload your hand to PokerHand and just post the URL it gives you. FlopTurnRiver also has a hand converter that will produce code for you to copy into forums, blogs, etc. Be careful and make sure you use the right format for the output, however, or your posting will look like a garbled mess of codes instead of a human-readable hand.

Online Hand Databases

SharkScope is a huge database of online tournament results. You can use it to scout out players you may not be familiar with, and it works on many of the major online sites. It tells you vital data about each player, including how many tournaments they’ve played and what their ROI (return on investment) has been. They give you 5 free searches per day, but if you want more, you have to pay.

Heads Up Displays

PokerAce HUD is a heads-up display for online play that uses your PokerTracker database. It’s not free, but it’s a terrific tool nonetheless. Ever wonder how people can play 8 tables at once? PokerAce HUD is one of the tricks these mega-tablers use. It displays PokerTracker data about your opponents next to their names inside the table window, so you see a quick summary of how each player plays right before your eyes. It’s fully configurable, so you can show whatever data you want wherever you want it.

Sit n Go Calculators

Sit n Go Power Tools is not free either, but it is simply essential if you seriously play one table tournaments. Sit-n-gos are very different from any other poker game because they pay so much to second and third place. Your goal isn’t to win the most chips, it’s to win the most money, and often that means trying to survive rather than gambling. Using equity calculators like PokerStove might lead you to the wrong conclusions in sit-n-gos because they will tell you what earns the most chips, not the most money. Sit n Go Power Tools runs the numbers for you, adjusting to the payout structure, and using it will improve your play tremendously.

NOTE: The equity calculators like NPA Tools, PokerStove, and Sit n Go Power Tools are all offline calculators. They aren’t intended to tell you how to play while you play (like the HUDs do), they are for analyzing hands away from the table.

Poker tools are sophisticated these days, and you should take advantage of them. Check out these tools today, and a few months from now you may wonder how you ever played without them.