It happens to us all more times than we’d like to count. We build a nice pot with pocket kings and then the flop comes and… BAM! There’s the ace. The way you handle it depends a lot on your opponents, the stack sizes, and more. Let’s look at a Pocket Kings Flop An Ace… [...]

It’s a common question that takes many forms. “How many hands do I have to play before I know I’m a winner?” That’s the most standard form of the question. “If I’ve won $12 per 100 hands for the last 10,000 hands, does that mean I can move up?” A When Do I Know I’m [...]

The New Book
Today marks an important internal deadline for our new small stakes no-limit hold’em book. It’s the day that we’re completely finished writing. Now we just need to edit (though we’ve done a fair amount of that already), proofread, and typeset/lay it out. I’m not completely sure how long A Few Loosely Connected Thoughts|769|3.95|USD|| [...]

One of the most disappointing events in any no-limit game is getting stacked. With the monetary loss often also comes a sense of embarrassment and self-doubt. “Did I do it wrong? Should I have approached the hand completely differently?” Every decision gets scrutinized.
I want to talk about a hand submitted On Getting Stacked|765|3.95|USD|| [...]

Recently on the message board I fielded two questions about big pocket pair hands played in live no-limit games. I want to share these two hands with all my readers.
The first question comes from Slam. You can read the entire discussion on the message board. Slam asks:
I’m holding my own with all of my $100 [...]

Recently I published an answer to the mother of all poker questions, Can A No-Limit Game Be Too Loose? The short answer is, no. For the long answer, read the article.
This really is, however, the mother of all poker questions, both because it’s an extremely important question and because for many players it will never, [...]

In Part 2 of Moving Up: Beyond Winrate And Bankroll, I discussed how the relative strength of your hand reading skills versus your opponents’ is a big factor in whether you’re ready to move up or not. The river betting round is the one that allows you to benefit most from sharp hand reading, [...]

In Part 1 of Moving Up: Beyond Winrate And Bankroll, I claimed that the two factors most cited in discussions of moving up, winrate and bankroll, don’t tell the whole story. If you’re thinking about moving up, you should consider some other factors just as much.
The first factor is your overall comfort level at your [...]

Are you ready to move up to higher stakes? How can you know when you are?
These questions are on the minds of most serious players at least some of the time. Conquering your current game and moving on to bigger and better things is the goal of most players.
Most discussion about moving up I see [...]

Recently I benefited from a serious case of what I call adjustment tilt. I was in a live $2-$5 no-limit game. Most of the players, including me, had helped to start the game a few hours earlier, so we were familiar with each others’ play.
Some of the players had modestly weak-tight tendencies, so I made [...]