taipan168’s Low Buy-in SNG Do’s & Dont’s

here are countless other strategy guides out there, however I thought that since FTR seems to attract a high proportion of beginner/low buyin SNG players I would condense the thoughts of a number of posters into one post. These principles are aimed at $5.50/$11 normal and $6.50 and maybe $16 turbo tourneys (and the equivalents at other sites).Note that these are supposed to be general ideas rather than specific ‘how-tos’, so hopefully they are generally correct even though we might all be able to think of specific situations where another line may be better. For advice on specific hands it is best to post them. Also note that these are NOT in order of importance.

DOS
1) Play very tight early in the tourney (Levels 1-3) and even tighter in early position
Starting hand requirements have been covered elsewhere but suffice to say if you are playing hands like ATo UTG or QTs in the CO early in the tourney you are playing too loose. Similarly, you are probably playing too loose if you are limping hands like A2-A9o early in the tourney.

2) Loosen up as blinds increase and as the game gets shorthanded, particularly in position when it is folded to you
Blind stealing is key once blinds hit 75/150 at PS or 100/200 at PP. Never open limp at 50/100 and above.

3) Be aggressive
If you are going to play a hand, you should be raising preflop most of the time (e.g. if blinds are 50/100, you pick QJo in the SB, it’s folded to you, the BB has been playing tight, don’t just complete, RAISE!) The only times I limp preflop are early in the tourney with pocket pairs (playing for set value) or suited connectors in position and preferably with multiple limpers in front.

4) Early in the tourney, limp (and call raises) with low-medium pocket pairs (say 22-88) for set value
You have implied odds to play for set value on the flop with pocket pairs provided that the amount you need to call is 1/15 or less of the total chips you can win. Note that this is determined by the smaller of either your stack or your opp’s stack. Eg. you pick up 33 UTG+1 at 10/20 blinds, open limp for 20 chips, button raises to 100, then CALL the raise as you have implied odds to play for a set. However, if you don’t hit a set on the flop, then NO SET = NO BET – see i) below.

5) Raise preflop 3x BB plus 1x BB for each limper with your big hands (e.g. KK)
At PS level 1 and 2 add an extra 1x BB to try to thin the field.

6) Push or fold preflop when your stack is <10x BB
Standard raising is usually bad when you have <10x BB.

7) Bet your strong hands
Don’t slowplay! If you hit a set or two pair on the flop, in general don’t check/call (e.g.if you have 55, everybody limps, you limp from the button and the flop comes A85, bet bet bet! You will get paid off by some idiot who limped with A3 soooooted.)

Make sure that your bubble/shorthanded play is good and that you make +EV pushes/folds/calls
In particular there are situations when it is often +EV to push with any two cards (eg. it’s folded to you in the SB and either your stack or the BB’s stack is <10x BB). This is much harder than it sounds, particularly in the heat of battle.

9) Realise there is a big, huge, ginormous difference between pushing all-in and calling all-in.
When you push all-in you add to the strength of your cards the chance that the other player will fold, when you call all-in you must be able to show down the best hand to win.

10) Generally bet between 50% and 100% of the pot at any stage
– An example where I would bet 50% of the pot on the flop is if I raised preflop, got called, missed the flop, my opponent checks, and I knew he/she was weak/tight. A half-pot bet is also a good sized bet if you flop a set against one opp who likes to chase flushes and two of a suit come on the flop.

– An example of where I would bet 100% of the pot is if I raised preflop with QQ, got two callers and the flop came TDiamond 9Diamond 2Spade.

11) Realise that at low buyins TPTK is often the best hand on the flop even when opps lead into you after you have raised preflop
For example blinds 50/100, you raise to 275 on the button with AQs, BB calls, flop comes Q83 rainbow, opp leads for 300 – push all in! The times when your opponents flip QT and you stack them far outweigh the times when they have a set or two pair.

12) Realise that low buyin players LOVE to play A-rag
Blinds 25/50, you’re on the button with KK, 4 players limp in front of you, you raise to 350, get 3 callers, flop comes A94, SHUT DOWN, there is a very high likelihood that somebody has an ace and you are well behind drawing to 2 outs. Conversely you can take advantage of this on an A high flop if you have AK or a pocket pair which hits a set, you are very likely to get paid off by one of these A-crap donks.

13) Get SnG Power Tools or SNGWIZ when your bankroll can support it
It is the best single poker-related $79 (or $99 in the case of SNG Wiz) I have ever spent. It will help you learn #8 among other things.

14) Make the time to review your HHs/run them through SNGPT/SNG Wiz
If that means playing one less SNG then so be it, it is time well spent.

15) Post hands, if necessary post whole (trimmed) tourneys to get feedback
Some of the biggest improvements I have made have come about because I have had another player review my hand histories and give me feedback. Sometimes you have leaks that you miss but become bleeding obvious once someone else highlights them. Just remember to take the feedback on board! FTR is a friendly place and people are out there to help you. Just remember to take their feedback on board!

16) Realise that bad, horrible, appalling, one-outer beats do happen…
…and that the best way to console yourself is to be sure that you got your money in as a favourite – if you did, there is nothing else you can do, you effectively won. Your AA will be cracked by rubbish like QTs 19.5% of the time when your preflop push is called BUT the other 80.5% of the time you double up/take opp’s whole stack. The question to ask yourself is “would I have played differently?” and if the answer is “no”, then be happy whatever the results might be.

17) Remember that poker is a long term game
Long term means thousands, not hundreds of SNGs. Do realise that even the best players suffer streaks of 10+ SNGs out of the money and 20+ buyin downswings. Stick to your game and you will win money in the end.

DON’TS
a) Don’t get fancy at low buyins
ABC poker wins. There’s no need for fancy slowplays, check-raises, raises with air, stop ‘n’ gos, etc. at the $5.50s. Wait for good hands and bet them hard – see #6 above. Conversely, if you pick up AK preflop and raise, get called, flop comes T74 rainbow, throw out a 1/2 pot c-bet, get called again, miss the turn, betting is often spewing chips unless you hit.

b) Never minraise preflop
This is a waste of chips. At the low buyins the BB and often the SB won’t fold for another 1-1.5x BB. Plus if you have a strong hand like AK, over the long run you win by getting your opps to put more money into the pot when you’re very likely ahead.

c) Don’t minbet postflop
This is a complete waste of chips and achieves nothing. If you have a hand with which you’d rather not get any calls, a minbet won’t get the $5.50 donks to fold. If you have a hand with which you would like calls, then bet more to build a pot. The best way to win a big pot with a big hand is to BET to build a big pot!

d) Almost never minraise postflop
The only time I will minraise is to induce a push over when I flop the ‘non-vulnerable’ nuts (quads or full house) and opp leads into me.

e) Don’t worry about varying your play so people wont get reads on you
They simply don’t pay attention, you don’t have a table image at low buyins. Also, don’t worry about playing with marginal hands so you’ll get action with your big hands – if someone else has a marginal hand like JTo you’ll get action with your AA even if you’ve folded the last 3 orbits.

f) Don’t call all-in with less than two pair if your flop bet is called and opp pushes on the turn
Sure, sometimes you fold the best hand but more often than not opp will have the goods.

g) Don’t bluff loose passive players who will call your preflop raises with crap then keep on calling to showdown with bottom pair
This is spewing chips. It’s similar to what Doyle Brunson said – you can’t bluff a calling station, you have to show them the best hand at showdown.

h) Don’t ever fold AA or KK preflop
Rarely fold QQ preflop unless there is serious action in front (e.g. raise, push and call) or there is some unusual bubble situation (e.g. it’s 4-handed, you’re second stack, the small stack has 2x BB and the big stack pushes).

i) Don’t get married to hands like AK and low pocket pairs that need to improve if you miss the flop
I’ve seen countless times when players limp preflop with 55, flop comes all overcards, bet, get called, miss the turn, bet again, get called again, miss the river, bet yet again, get called and end up losing a big pot to somebody who called all the way to showdown with TPNK. With low/medium pocket pairs, remember SET OR FORGET; with missed high cards like AK/AQ remember all you have on a missed flop is ace high.

j) Don’t play when you are on tilt, tired, drunk, stoned, grumpy, just had an argument with your wife/girlfriend/boyfriend, whatever
Recognising when you are not playing your best and just NOT PLAYING is very +EV. Even more important, if you’re on tilt because you’ve just taken six bad beats in a row don’t move up buyins to try to recover what you’ve lost. There are enough sad statistics on Sharkscope of players who usually play the $6.50s, lose 4 in a row then proceed to spew even more money at the $16s, $27s and $60s…

k) Don’t believe “I can’t win at the $5.50s, I will win more by moving up and playing with players who respect my bets/raises”
This is plain wrong. Sure, players at higher buyins may play tighter and may well fold a bit more often to your preflop raises or postflop bets but there are so many other ways which they can pwn you – they will be MUCH more aggressive, generally displaying a good understanding of bubble play/ICM etc. If you can’t consistently beat the $5.50s over a few hundred SnGs then you will NOT beat the $22s, $33s and $55s.

l) Don’t get defensive when people reply to your posts saying you’re incorrect
Justifying a bad play to yourself won’t make you money, improving your play will.

The art of the single table sit-n-go – by Danny “THE_D_RY” Ryan

My name is Danny Ryan and I play $500 to $2k sit-n-gos (SNGs) as well as MTTs online as THE__D__RY. Although SNGs have the same basic strategy at all buy-in levels, some differences in play do exist. We’re going to focus mainly on the mid buy-in single table SNG tourney, in which nine or ten players fight for the top three money places. Many players argue that SNGs are just “all-in poker” when the blinds get high, and are more or less crapshoots. Although I agree that there is less of an art to them than to MTTs, due to the rapidly increasing blind structure, this doesn’t mean that there isn’t a strategy that can be mastered within this structure that allows you to make the most +EV (expected value) decisions possible.The most important thing to remember is to PLAY WITHIN YOUR BANKROLL! This seems so easy to say, but for many it is so hard to do. Why spend months or years of bankroll building, only to lose it all after running bad while you’re playing out of your limit? I recommend having at least 100 times the tourney buy-in available in your poker bankroll before registering in any tourney. This way you never have to say to yourself, “I need to win this one.” It will allow you to play 100% +EV poker and maximize your game. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself folding +EV hands later on, hands that you would have played had you been at a lower, more comfortable level.

As with all poker games, many different styles work, which is what makes the game so interesting in the first place. It’s important in SNGs to keep pots small in the early levels of the tourney when you are uncertain if you are ahead, or if your lead is not that great. In SNGs, there isn’t as much +EV from building a big stack as there is in MTTs, so it doesn’t warrant taking a coin flip with A-K all in pre-flop at 20BB for 1,500 chips (especially not in 1k SNGs where only A-A, K-K, Q-Q, or J-J would regularly call you). I like to see cheap flops with pocket pairs and suited connectors (usually with position) in the early stages. If you’re fortunate enough to pick up some nice hands or flops, you can build your stack up nicely before the blinds increase. If not, you should still be fine on chips and ready to scrap when the blinds become more significant.

As the blinds move to 50-100 and beyond, I recommend either raising or folding pre-flop almost exclusively. Do not limp or fold your chips away to the aggressor. The only situations in which I would limp at higher blinds would be when I am heads up in the blinds or if I want to slow play a big hand. As always, you will have to get a feel for your table and know which players are willing to enter pots and which players are playing conservatively, just hoping to make the money. This comes with careful observation and by taking notes on players you frequently play with. More observant players and players who are playing fewer tables at a time will have a better feel for the others at the table, and that will ultimately lead to good value-calls and a higher average profit per tourney.

As the big blind goes to 150 and beyond, I begin to steal the blinds whenever possible. Avoid being too obvious when stealing, because that will leave you vulnerable to the re-steal from a good player on your left. Keep in mind that if you have 3,000 in chips and raise A-10o to 425 at 150BB, you will usually fold if a player puts you all in for 3k, just like you would if you had raised the same, but with 7-9 suited. Therefore, it follows that the hand that you are raising with is not as important as the credibility of the raise in the eyes of your opponents. Avoid raising when you think it won’t seem believable, unless you are willing to call a big reraise.

With blind steals, the ultimate goal is to maximize the return while minimizing the risk. If you successfully steal the 100-200 blinds twice for a total of 600 chips, but you were reraised another time in the process and had to fold 575 chips, you are only ahead 25 chips (300+300-575). So avoid getting re-popped!

Here is another example of risk versus return: Imagine that you have 2,250 chips on the cutoff with A-9o and the blinds are 75-150. Is it worth going all in and risking 2,250 chips for a return of 225, or 10% of your stack, with three players left to act? I don’t think so, especially since the hands that will call you will almost certainly have you dominated — hands like any higher ace or pocket pairs above 9-9. In fact, I think an all-in here with Q-J suited instead of A-9o would actually leave you a better chance of winning against the range of potential calling hands. However, I recommend coming in with a normal raise of approximately three times the big blind in both cases and folding to a large reraise.

When your stack is around five to seven big blinds, you should either go all in or fold pre-flop, unless you’re hiding a monster. It is important to munch-tain yourself (maintain your stack by munching the blinds once or twice a round) in this scenario. Good hands to go all in with are pocket pairs, suited connectors that aren’t too low (you don’t want to push 6-7 suited and be up against 8-8 without an overcard), and most aces. However, avoid pushing hands like A-7o with a full table behind you, even if you are low, because you will often be called by a higher ace and have slim outs. If someone raises before you in this situation and you have a solid hand that you think may be a coin flip, this is usually a good time to take a chance for a stack. You don’t want to stay at six big blinds the whole tourney, since the +EV is in first place. It’s necessary to make a good value call or try to win a flip while short stacked.

The payoff structure is set up in such a way that playing for first is absolutely essential in the long term. Let’s take a $100+9, nine-person PokerStars SNG as an example. The payouts are as follows: first, $450; second, $270; third, $180; and fourth, $0. This means that your profits from one first place finish are $450-$109, or +$341, second +$161, and third +$71. In other words, to equal the profits of just one first place finish, you would need to place third (341/71) 4.8 times in a row! SO PLAY FOR FIRST! This also means that the profits from first are more than double that of second. So take your heads-up matches seriously and try to pull out the win. What are the overall profits if you go fourth, fourth, first, playing strong for the win, compared to those of third, fourth, third, playing passively on the bubble, trying to sneak into the money? You’ll have $123 in the first example compared to only $33 when you played for third. So you decide if you want to play strong on the bubble, moving up in chips, or if you want to try to drift into the money and ultimately break even in the long run.

All players should determine how many tables they are the most comfortable with playing simultaneously, how many tables they find the most profitable, and which buy-in level they find most lucrative on an hourly basis. I recommend recording all your poker results in an Excel spreadsheet. You should make a separate spreadsheet for each buy-in and game that you play. For example, make one for all of your $109, nine-person SNGs and a separate one for each $77 SNG, and for each unique game that you play (cash games, Omaha, NL, SNG, MTT, etc). Record all the details you think will be helpful (e.g., number of tables you played at a time, place you finished, cost of tourney, prize it paid you, and the overall profit/loss). When you have hundreds or thousands of tourney entries, you can observe the data and understand more about what the normal patterns and results are for your game in each specific area. Most importantly, you’ll know which game and which buy-in you should play, and whether it’s really worth playing 20 tables at a time, or if you are actually more profitable at 4-tabling a higher level.

There are so many details that must be considered in order to make the best possible decisions for yourself at and away from the table. Move forward with the mentality that you are always going to improve your game and that you can always learn something new, no matter how good you have already become. If you ever stop improving and changing your game, the others will catch on to you and you will no longer have the same edge. So stay calm and collected, carefully observing everything that you can in order to make the right adjustments when needed, and you will be on your way to success. Good luck, and long live the freedom to play poker!

Staying off Tilt in Poker with Zen

Ok, I have to admit, I stole this idea from Zen and the Art of Poker, which is supposed to be a very good book on well – Zen and Poker. For those of you who don’t know, Zen is basically the idea that you can attain peace through understanding and self-control. Now, based on what I just said, if it sounds like I didn’t actually read this book – you would be right, I haven’t. That said, I feel that I have a very good idea what the book is all about, because I personally found the ‘Zen’ poker principle before hearing about this book. Zen in Poker So what in the world does poker have to do with zen anyways? Besides weird esoteric images of far-east meditation or religion pop-up, you’ll probably be (annoyingly) reminded of all the ‘Zen in X’ books that you keep hearing about:

Zen in Cooking! Zen in Gardening! Zen in Accounting! Zen in Underwater Basket Weaving .. and well you get the idea, yeah?
So Zen, poker and tilt, how does it all fit?

It all fits because unless you are extremely well balanced (mentally) or are an emotional zombie, you will go on tilt at some time playing poker. For beginning players especially, when you are learning correct poker only to have people beat you with incorrect poker, tilt can be a major factor in your game.

Zen comes in, because learning to deal with tilt, or rather, the cause of tilt is an exercise in self-control coupled with mental understanding of the situation. You can either learn to control your tilt or learn to stop tilt at the root – which is where Zen comes into play.

Tilt: Is it in you?

One misconception people have is that tilt is turning into the Hulk and smashing things to itty bitty pieces when you get angry:

“HULK RIVERED? HULK AAAAANGRY!! HULK SMAAAAASH!!!” (as the tilt-o-wheel goes off)

But the thing about tilt is that even if you don’t show anything on the outside, you can still be suffering on tilt from the inside. What this means is that even if you’re not acting like the hulk, if you feel like you want to be smashing things, you still have major tilt issues – but just don’t show it.

The problem with tilt of course is that it distracts you from optimal play – which most of players are NOT doing even when they aren’t on tilt. Even when players are fully aware of what they are doing, they’ll call down a hand when they know they are beat – but they just can’t bear to laydown their hand.

What tilt does is amplify your hasty decision making and put you in a “I want to get him back”, “Fuck it, I don’t care” or “I’m going to push my way around” attitude. So, even if you’re not smashing things on the table, you’re pushing yourself to make wrong plays in crucial situations. You don’t have to be a pot splashing maniac to be on tilt – because if you make any play that costs you a bet that you could have saved, that’s good enough to be on tilt.
Identify the cause of tilt?

Here is where Zen comes in. When I ask you to identify the cause of tilt, what is your response?

* 1. Losing a lot of money on a big hand
* 2. Being rivered by a fish
* 3. Losing a hand where I was the winner
* 4. Playing correctly and still losing

All of these are reasons for going on tilt, but only #4 really addresses the issue of the cause of tilt. The reason you go on tilt is because even though you played to the best of your abilities and played what you thought was correct poker, someone else managed to beat you. Of course, that’s quite unfair when you think about it, right? Which in turn, makes you angry. “He was a 7:1 underdog and he should have known by the way you were betting, but called anyways!” you tell yourself. But if you re-think through your point, you’ll realize that: Yes, your opponent had no idea he was the underdog, otherwise he wouldn’t have made the call!
Zen Lesson #1: Understand your opponent instead of blaming him

Let’s say ou were a History major and asked your friend what year Columbus founded America, you wouldn’t smack him in the head if he replied “Uh… 1812″ would you? No you wouldn’t! Why? Because he’s not a history major and doesn’t have the foggiest on the correct answer. This very simple concept in empathy (looking at things through the eyes of someone else) should help you understand why you shouldn’t get angry at your opponent.
Golf and Tilt

To hit the point home again, imagine if YOU are doing something that you enjoy only as a hobby – let’s say golf. You’re swinging away on the greens and make a lucky hole in one. You’re really happy, but a pro-golfer comes by and tells you that your swing was awful, your clubs are second rate and that you don’t deserve to be playing golf. You’d get pissed in a hurry and tell them to go shove it – and for good reason, you’re just here to have fun! You don’t give a rats ass about good form, because dropping $20 for a weekend of golf is your idea of a good time.

So, before berating other players at a table, stop and remember that almost everyone at the table is just looking to have fun. You’re one of the few serious ones or aspiring pros. So, act like a professional and realize that it’s completely pointless to blame people for mistakes they A) don’t realize and B) don’t care about. They are here to have fun and it’s not your right to spoil it.
Zen Lesson #2: There is no revenge in poker, just karma

Most of the advice you will get about tilt is to remember that it’s a long term game. If you read inbetween the lines, what the advice is really saying is either: that bastard will bust out eventually or you will win eventually. What’s wrong about both of these modes of thinking is that it still implies feeling sorry over the fact that you had a bad beat.

The problem however, is that line of thinking (however logical) is flawed in terms of controlling tilt. As long as you keep thinking that you should be sorry for yourself after every bad beat – you’ll still be tilting. You don’t want to be feeling sorry for yourself period if you want to get off tilt.

To illustrate, if you just had your car stolen and the policeman told you “Oh don’t worry, he’ll eventually be caught down the road.” That doesn’t make you feel better, does it? No it doesn’t, because you still want to catch that punk and give him some five-fingered medicine. But the fact is, you can’t.

You just simply have to man up to the fact that your car is gone and no line of wishy-washy “oh but he’ll pay in the future!” thinking is going to make you feel better, even if it is true. You need to face it now and get over it. Man up. You lost. Suck it up and move on.
Zen Lesson #3: Give up control

Before you watch Rounders for the umpteeth time and convince yourself that poker is a skill only game, remember that it wouldn’t be gambling if there wasn’t luck involved. World Series of Poker champions have been made by the river, so don’t think that you’re special when it comes to getting a bad beat. You lost $20, $50, $100 big ones? Boo hoo. Try losing $400,000 and a bracelet. It’s still a game that is dicated by luck – and don’t you forget it.

Try to think of poker in this way: Luck is a mountain, poker is a big boulder and you are skill, running along the boulder trying to move it to avoid smashing into trees as it rolls down the mountain. No matter how hard you try, you can only adjust the boulder so much to avoid hitting trees. Sometimes the trees are just ahead and there’s nothing you can do, while other times you can barely avoid a hit if you try with all your might.

If you finally mastered this boulder game, you would eventually realize that there is only so much you can do, while the rest is up to fate. It’s futile to try and control that which you can’t. All you can do is position yourself in the best spot possible and hope for the best. Accept it. Really.

Just. Let. Go.
Zen Lesson #4: Using Zen to find your source of anger
Brain and Zen

This is the most important lesson. When you try to get over tilt, you are basically forcing your left brain (logic) to tell your right brain (emotion) why it shouldn’t be pissed off. But no matter how much you mentally fight yourself, you’re trying to surpress emotions instead of addressing them. What you really need to be doing is stopping your emotions at the source.

Your emotional center acts up as a response to a need. If someone punches you in the face for example, your reaction goes along the line of:

1. Physical: Flinch, close your eyes
2. Subconscious: Recognize a threat
3. Mental: Analyze how to respond to threat
4. Emotional: Become angry or fearful
5. Biological: Adrenaline rush, get ready to fight or run

The way this applies to tilting is poker, is by understanding the order in which tilt takes place. By taking time to examine your own thoughts (thinking about how you think), you can use Zen principles to break down exactly what you are going through during tilt:

1. Mental: Observe opponent rivering you
2. Mental: Realize you had a better hand than your opponent before the river
3. Mental: Realize you played correctly, while your opponent played incorrectly
4. Subconscious: You are accustomed to being rewarded when you do things correctly
5. Subconscious: You were not rewarded
6. Subconscious: This is not normal
7. Subconscious: This is not ‘fair’
8. Subconscious: Unfairness is resolved through conflict
9. Emotional: You need to prepare for conflict
10. Emotional: You need to become aggressive
11. Biological: Increase heart rate, release adrenaline, tense up the body
12. Mental: TILT
13. Mental: Recognize that you are getting angry
14. Mental: Realize that you need to stop getting angry
15. Mental: Fight against emotion and subconscious for control

We can see by this deconstruction that tilt comes up because of how an your subconscious reacts to an ‘unfair’ situation. This reaction is literally ingrained in most of us, as our biology, society and economy is based on reward conditioning. Everytime you are rewarded, our brain maps out a path on how to receive that reward, so it’s really inescapable. So, when you don’t get rewarded when you expect to, the brian sees this as an uncertain situation or situation that appears to violate the mental rules you have in place. Thus, the brain sees this uncertainty as confusion, which leads to a reaction of anger or fear.

To make yet another analogy, if your work suddenly decided to dock your pay for no reason, you would be up in arms because it’s obviously uncalled for (unfair). Unless you are a weak or timid person, your body will react in the appropriate way to deal with the situation. Just like most guys need a beer or two before hitting on a hottie at the bar, you need to get a bit riled up before you go mouthing off at your boss.

So, they key point here is that by analyzing your own mental train of thought and subconscious train of thought, you will realize that your body is reacting in a way that it is designed to. What you need to do, is intercept your thought processes at #4 and realize that you will not be rewarded in the same way in poker as other activities in your life. By reworking your thought processes at steps #4 and #6, you will stop the progression toward tilt and keep the game solely mental, instead of emotional.

To deal with #4 – you need to toss out the window your expectations of being rewarded in poker. You need to realize that there is no guarantee of being rewarded when you do things correctly in poker. Lose that mental hump you have where you are actually expecting something for doing things the right way. It doesn’t happen in poker. So dig deep… and go back to that inner child in you where you were rewarded a cookie by your teacher for reciting the entire alphabet in front of the class. Now replace that cookie with a solid smack to the head. That’s poker. Get it?
Zen Lesson #5: Learn from your defeats

On another note, many players will find themselves blaming their opponent for their own bad plays and go on tilt as a result. I see this often on the forums, with people blasting other players for outdrawing them when their opponent had the pot odds to do so. So some things you should ask yourself about each ‘bad beat’ you have should be:

* Did I completely count how many outs my opponent had?
* Did I make it incorrect pot odds for him to call?
* Did I try to bluff out a calling station?
* Was this really a bad beat?

In any game, you will find that the best players get angry just like everyone else from time to time. The thing that is different from the elite players however, is that they will always analyze their own play over and over, asking themselves “What did I do wrong?” or “How do I prevent that from happening again?”. It’s a different mentality than the average player, because the top players always put the blame to themselves first, rather than their opponent. The reason they do this is because you can’t improve on yourself if you’re not willing to admit fault first.

In many cases, you will find that you did play correctly of course. But in those times where you played incorrectly, if you cannot figure out that the problem lies with you, then you will never be able to mature as a poker player (or in any other of life’s endeavors) for that matter. Self-reflection is one of the key principles to Zen.
Conclusion and Summary

So to summarize:

1. Do not blame your opponents for things they do not know – that is wrong
2. Accept your bad beats straight up and don’t mull over them
3. Give up control and let fate run it’s course
4. There are no cookies in poker
5. Learn from your mistakes to make yourself a better player

Lastly, if you liked this article, then you should read more about Zen or meditation sometime. You can solve a lot of your own problems just by using this same process of internal dialogue; which comes naturally through meditation. Accessing your subconscious allows you to see what is really brewing under the surface of your brain. You’d be surprised at what you’ll find there.

Target Practice – by Rizen

Target Practice – Spotting and attacking various types of players to accumulate chips.

Card Player Magazine Volume 20, Number 5

In my inaugural column, I discussed how we can both spot and attack weakness in players at the table. Another situation that we often encounter is choosing how and when to attack various players by opening the pot. So, rather than attacking people who already have shown weakness in the pot, we have to choose what kind of players to target without seeing any action in front of us.

There are several methods we can use to do this, and I’m going to try to provide a few examples of each type.

One way to attack players is to figure out what kinds of players are weak post-flop and single out those players’ blinds for raises. That gives you the double advantage of taking control of the pot preflop and having the weak player play from out of position. If I find that some players are particularly weak post-flop, I’ll try to raise their blinds as often as possible in an unopened pot. I try not to be so overt with it that other solid players pick up on what I’m doing and reraise my raises, though. There is a bit of an art to recognizing how often you can get away with things before people start to pick up on what you’re doing, but with some practice, it becomes second nature.

Another good way to single players out for target practice is by chip-stack size. This works better in the middle/later stages of a tournament when the blinds start to get high enough that people are more reluctant to get involved in big pots with marginal hands. Basically what you’re looking for here are people who have the most to lose by playing a pot with you.

When you’re the chip leader, this is easy. Everyone has a lot to lose by playing a pot with you, since you potentially can knock any player out. When you have a shorter stack, it becomes more difficult, because you don’t have that same leverage. Even if you’re the shortest stack at the table, though, there will always be players who have something to lose by playing a pot with you.

So, how do we know who has a lot to lose from playing a pot with us if we don’t have a big stack? A general guideline that I like to use is that any player who has 15-30 big blinds and less than twice my stack size is a prime target to attack. If players have at least 15 big blinds, they are not so short that they’re desperate to double up, and if they have fewer than 30, they typically are shallow enough that they’re reluctant to take flops with people without a real hand.

Another example typically comes up in satellite play, where multiple seats are awarded. A quick online example is if you’re playing the $11 turbo rebuy satellite to the Sunday million-dollar guaranteed tournament on PokerStars and it awards 24 seats, and with 40 players left, you’re in 26th place in chips. The best players to attack are typically those in 12th through 20th place in chips. Those players are in good position to win a seat, and will be very reluctant to get involved in any pots with players who can dent their stacks, and I will continually raise into those players every chance I get, regardless of my cards.

The final types of players that I really like to target are those who have either won or lost a big pot recently. Players who have just won big pots are often very reluctant to give those chips back, and will play exceptionally tight for 15-20 hands after their big win. I like to try to find opportunities to attack these players, knowing that they’re likely to play back at me only with a real hand. Conversely, players who have just lost a big pot are often prone to making mistakes. Even if they’re sitting just fine in chips, they feel the need to get their stack back to where it was, and in a hurry. Doing so will often lead to them playing wildly and aggressively for a short period of time, and I like to capitalize on their play by getting involved in as many pots with them as possible.

Those are just a few examples, but, quite honestly, the best way to try to figure out what kinds of players to single out at the table for exploitation is to constantly be trying to put yourself in the shoes of your opponents. Try to think to yourself how it would change your strategy if you had their chip stack, or were sandwiched between the players they are. Think about whether they’ve won or lost any big pots lately, and how that may be impacting their play.

Listen to their table-talk and mannerisms to determine if they’re getting frustrated by something; or, if they’re in a great mood and joking around at the table, they may be just “happy to be there,” and will just try to preserve their stack or even the “experience” of being in a certain tournament. At the World Series of Poker, there was a lot of this. There were tons of players who just wanted to make their World Series experience last as long as possible, and enjoyed being there. These players were easy marks for those of us looking for chips.

Really, the bottom line is that if you’re constantly maintaining your awareness at the table, and always looking for spots to pick up chips even when you don’t necessarily have a great hand, you’ll find them in a lot of places. The examples above are good starting points, but the possibilities are limited only by your ability to pay attention to the players at the table and react to the information they’re giving you.

Image is Everything – by Rizen

Card Player Magazine – Volume 20 Number 2You may remember the old Andre Agassi commercials from the 1980s with the tag line, “Image is Everything.” At the time, he was trying to sell Canon cameras, and I’m sure that he had no intention of talking about poker, but that tag line could be as easily about poker as it was a young hotshot tennis star with a mullet, back when neon was cool and it was OK for men to wear short shorts.

Knowing what your current image is, as well as how and when to exploit and manipulate it, is every bit as important (perhaps even more so) as knowing how to play A-Q offsuit from under the gun or J-10 suited from the cutoff. Image is what enables you to get away with steals and scoop a massive pot when you get dealt aces.

I’m going to assume that simply because you’re reading this column, you understand enough about poker to understand that your table image is how other players at the table perceive you. They may or may not be correct in their perceptions of you, but it’s much more important for you to know how they think you’re playing than how you’re actually playing.

I’ll discuss the three major factors that influence image, and then address how to exploit them to your advantage.

First, there is reputation. Maybe you’re a regular in your home game, a famous player from television, or a well-known online pro. We all have reputations that precede us when we’re on our “home turf.” I’ll use myself as an example. Being a well-known online player if I’m playing online, I have an image that comes from my reputation as a player before I ever play a hand. However, if I’m playing live, I’m most often at a table where no one knows me and no one has any preconceived notions of how I play.

Second, there is your actual play at the table. Maybe you’ve shown down only aces and kings the entire time at the table, or perhaps you’ve made a steal from late position with a terrible hand, then hit and had to show it down. This is also comprised of the hands you don’t show down. If you raise three hands in a row and don’t show any of them, people will start to doubt you, even if you were just dealt three monster hands.

Last but not least is table talk and body language. You might even lump appearance into this. If you’re playing online, this comes primarily from the chat box. This factor includes things like typing warnings to players who raise your blinds too often, how you sit in your chair in a live game, and even such things as how old you look or what color your skin is. Like it or not, people form opinions of you the moment they see you. If you look like you just turned 21, people are going to immediately assume that you’re a “young gun” or a “cocky kid,” even if you’re the most well-mannered and respectful person at the table. If you have gray hair and a picture of your grandchildren as your card protector, people are going to assume that you’re a tight player whom they can walk all over. Stereotypes are a part of poker, just as they are in the real world. People will change their opinions of you as they play with you more, but first impressions last a long time.

Before I discuss exploiting image, I’d like to take a moment to discuss my personal “ideal image.” When I’m at the table, my goal is to try to create the perfect balance of belief and doubt. Doing so enables me to get enough respect to get away with steals and use plays, but it also leaves people guessing just enough that I can get paid off when I hit my big hands. I try to visualize it as an old balance scale from high-school science class. Belief is on one side and doubt is on the other.

If one side starts to outweigh the other, I start “adding weight” to the other side. If I think I’m getting too much respect, I’ll start raising and reraising more liberally, but if I think I’m getting looked up too often, I’ll back away and show down only the goods until I start getting more respect. In a perfect world, people will doubt all of my good hands and believe all of my bluffs.

If I’m in a live game, another way to adjust my image is with table talk. If the balance scale is tipping too far toward doubt, I can start talking about how well I’m running and that I haven’t had a run of cards like this in ages. Conversely, if they’re believing too much, I can convey frustration by stating that I might just start playing my junk hands, since I never get any real ones, and the board always seems to come with rags, anyway.

Let’s discuss a few common examples of how we can exploit our image, although the possibilities really are limited only by the imagination. One of the most common examples is when you are dealt a very big hand either after you’ve already raised a few hands in a row or have shown down a big bluff. Your first instinct in this situation is often to do something tricky, but in reality, you should often play it the exact same way that you played either your bluff or your last few hands. The mere fact that your raises or the bluff are in people’s minds creates a seed of doubt that can often lead to a big pot for you.

Conversely, if you’ve just shown down the nuts, it’s often a good time to make a stab at the pot with a less than stellar holding. As discussed earlier about first impressions being important, people also have a tendency to weigh the most recent events at the table more heavily than ones in the more distant past. If people see you showing down good hands, they’re very likely to believe you until you show down something bad.

There really is no limit to the things you can do with your image if you’re constantly aware at the table and creative enough to take advantage of the situations that image can present. The biggest obstacle I see most players facing when it comes to image is that they have an image of themselves based on what kind of player they think they are. I hear a lot of bad-beat stories that contain phrases such as, “I’m a tight-aggressive player; how could he call there with third pair?” Or, I hear stories like, “I finally got aces and raised, and didn’t get any action! If I could just get some action on my good hands, I could win one of these things.”

If you find yourself using phrases like those, or not taking advantage of how others perceive you at the table, just remember this: “Image is everything.” Mr. Agassi would be proud.

Advanced Poker Tournament Strategy

This advanced tournament article is meant for those players who are already familiar with playing tournament poker and specifially no limit MTT games. The concepts covered in this guide will refer to advanced terms and concepts like folding equity, position, image and implied value. If you are unfamiliar with these topics, please read our basic tournament guide, which will introduce you to many of these poker strategies and concepts.

Aggression Theory and Knockout Factor

Tournament poker and no limit poker are widely known to reward the players that are most aggressive. This means that no limit poker tournaments are ripe for the aggressive player to do well, if they are able to maintain control. The question that most people have though, is why is aggression so rewarded in this game format? We’ll go over that now.

Many people like playing tournaments because they only have to buy-in once. This means that after their money is in, they no longer have to worry about losing their money because in essence, they are already “all-in” so to speak. This causes some players to play loose and crazy. For others, playing in tournaments means playing conservative, because being knocked out means that there is no chance to buy back into a tournament (except rebuy tournaments). For these players, playing tight is imperative because they don’t want to risk being knocked out. We will call this the knockout factor – or KF for short.

Aggression theory comes into play with no limit tournaments, because the aggressive players will often be the ones controlling the game when there is a table filled with players that are scared of KF. Aggressive players aren’t scared of being knocked out and play loose and wild, while the tight players are scared of action and will often let go of hands in favor of playing it safe. Thus in the overall context of a tournament, the person that is the most aggressive will often win the most chips, because their opponent is afraid or unwilling to defend their hand.

Early Game – Build Chips or Bust

Unlike cash games, where a constant Tight-Aggressive strategy is drilled over and over again, tournament play often requires that you get a little creative with your play outside of the simply ‘tight’ zone. This isn’t a license to play loose and aggressive, but one of the most important concepts to realize is that chip building is essential to survival in a poker tournament – especially no limit hold’em.

Play with the Fish

Many times, just playing tight and betting people out of a pot is difficult early in a tournament, because poor players do not look at bets relative to your bet or pot, but instead look at it relative to their chip stack. These poor players are the types that will be bleeding chips early on in a tournament, so it is essential that you capitalize on their weakness and exploit it. The way to do this is through implied value.

Implied Value is your Friend

A hand such as JTs is known to a strong player to be a marginal hand. In a tournament with the right situation though, JTs and other such suited connectors can be a very powerful hand when there is a large degree of implied value riding in the pot. Being in late position with speculative or drawing hands when there are many loose limpers in the pot is a very beneficial situation in tournaments. The benefit comes from being able to be in good position to play your hand depending on sheer odds alone. In addition, it gives you various angles of attack if you decide to play outside the odds and try to gain fold equity on your opponents by playing aggressive behind them.

The biggest factor however, is that your hand is often well disguised when you are playing on the strategy of fold equity. When your opponent refuses to believe that you played a certain poker hand, he is much more likely to pay you off when you do hit. That player will be unable (or unwilling) to properly gauge your hand strength and make a major mistake on reading your hand. Thus, what would otherwise be a mathematical mistake for you in terms of drawing odds in poker, may in fact turn into a beneficial odds situation in terms of implied value.

Position yourself against Weak or Tight Players

Players who have solid poker fundamentals will often make a major mistake in poker tournaments that they don’t make in cash games. That mistake is being too patient.

In a cash poker game, the goal (especially at low limits) is often to wait for a good hand, a good flop and a bad opponent to pay you out. Easy as 1-2-3. The problem is that in tournament games, you often don’t have enough time to wait or simply won’t get good enough cards. This becomes a major dillema to the solid “tight and aggressive” player, who starts becoming dejected and anxious, complaining about his impossible run of bad cards and inability to win a pot. To be a tournament player, you must cast aside this type of thinking and make things happen for yourself. This is why aggressive play is the correct strategy in poker tournaments. When you then consider again that aggression is important in no limit poker, you can start to see why aggression is the focal point of your strategy in no limit poker tournaments.

The Playing Chicken with a Chicken Strategy

To use aggression, you must use it on someone who will respect it. A calling station or just a sheer poker idiot isn’t someone that will respect you. That’s why you have to go and find someone who does. This person is called a weak player. Someone that will simply wait for a strong hand, make a huge monster on the flop and hope that someone is stupid enough to stay in the pot when they finally start betting and raising. Sound familiar?

What you want to do, is look for this weak player and start pushing him around selectively. The easiest application is to simply raise her or her blinds and snatch the hand right there. This may have a limited shelf-life however, as a keen player at the table will realize what you are doing and put in some counter-moves (i.e., raises). The weak player may also try to play back at you when he finally stands up and tries to stand up to your bullying.

That said however, the proper strategy after being confronted by the player is to simply back down, sit quiet for a little, then continue again with your harassment. If your constant bullying is able to deprive that player of his chips, then keep putting the pressure on him along with the other weak players at the table.

On the more advanced level, other than simple strong-arming of your opponents’ blinds, a more sophisticated and daring method is the simple limp or check-raise. If a weak opponent is in the big blind and it’s folded to you in late position, you should limp in with any hand. When the flop comes, your weak opponent will almost always check to you, at which you toss a normal bet onto the table. More often than not, this will win the pot outright. This type of strategy utilizes both position and table reads to give you a chance at chips with a minimal risk. In addition, in the event you do make a monster hand with rags, your holdings will be very well disguised.

Check-raises (or flat out raises) are another great tool to use against tight players, when timed correctly. An example is being in the big blind with a weak player playing behind you. The flop comes rags, which most likely hasn’t helped your opponent, provided he isn’t holding pocket pairs. On this type of flop, betting out is usually good enough to win right there. If you get called, you can almost be certain that your opponent has a hand of some sort. This means that you can check-fold the turn… or possibly check-raise the turn if you are sure your opponent has a weak enough hand to fold to major aggression.

In late position, raising an opponent on a bluff or steal is often safer however, since you aren’t put in the awkward position of checking the turn if your opponent decides to call. In the majority (but NOT all), if a weak opponent calls a raise on the flop and checks the turn, they likely have a hand that is decent but not a monster. Whether or not they will fold is a decision that you must be able to make. Hopefully if you have them pegged as the weak player to attack, you will know they will fold. Otherwise, you are in a sticky situation if they call another turn bet, as you’ll almost certainly have no way of pushing them out of a pot on the river.

Maximizing Fold Equity and Mathematical Survival

When short stacked or even mid-stacked, you will often be in a situation where a half-pot or pot-sized bet means putting a significant portion of your chips into the middle of the table. If you are ever in a position where you need to put a good percentage of your chips into the pot, you should often go ahead and simply push all in. You do this for a few reasons:

Your opponent can’t make a move on you if you are all-in

When against good, aggressive or tricky opponents, you will be vunerable to having a move made against you when you are holding the better hand. Especially on boards that look dangerous or very innocent, your opponent may see the opportunity to make a play against you by going over the top. By simply pushing all-in, you negate your opponent’s ability to gain any kind of fold equity on you, for the obvious reason that you’re fully committed to the hand. This strategy is often a little blunt and should be avoided if you have much more chips in comparison to the pot, but don’t be afraid to use this as a deterrent to keep players out.

Showdown avoidance – Even good edges work against you in the long run

In the event that you have a strong hand in these situations, while you have a leading edge on your opponent, you are still being forced into a showdown situation – which is something you want to try and avoid in any large multi-table tournaments. The reason you want to avoid showdowns is very simple – you will never have enough edges over the long term to have a reasonable chance of surviving.

If this doesn’t make sense, think of a craps table. The chances of rolling craps is 1 out of 6 – or 5:1 odds. Compare this with the odds of pocket Aces vs pocket 22 – which is 4:1 odds (in favor of the Aces, of course). Now, if you play craps or roll dice at all, you’ll realize that the chances of rolling craps on any single roll is slim. However, if you play at a craps table long enough, you’ll know that eventually, someone will roll craps. It might take a few rolls and some rollers might even be hot for 20 or 30 rolls, but eventually everyone hits craps and busts out.

If you apply the above example to multi-table poker tournaments, each showdown where you are at risk of losing significant chips or being knocked out is the equivalent of being busted out with craps. This is to say, that while you might have the better odds at winning a single roll, taking a large amount of chances will expose you to the laws of probability. This is why proper strategy absolutely requires that you accumulate a large stack of chips early on, in order to ride out the variance of all-in confrontations later down the road.

One question you may have then, is how are people supposed to win tournaments then? The answer is – luck. Even the best poker players in the world have to survive multiple all-ins in any major tournament in order to make it to the final table. This isn’t luck in terms of sucking out or ‘getting lucky’, but it’s more like ‘staying lucky’. This means that not only must you be ahead in all-in situations (and mind you, there are many race situations where you are only ahead by about a 5-10% edge), that your hands must consistently hold up against the long term odds.

Go hard or go home – The Super Suckout

Sometimes you will be in a bad situation where you have a weak or mediocre holding against what you imagine is a better hand. On it’s own merit, your hand is almost impossible to call against a raise or push because it is simply too weak. However, if you are in a bad situation overall, with a low chip count, then strategy starts to shift a little in the other direction.

If you find that you will be severely crippled by folding this hand in terms of chips (enough so that you will realistically have no chance in the tournament), you might as well call off the rest of your chips. The reason is that even though you are putting yourself at bad odds to call while you are behind, the value of the chips in the pot is most likely greater than the value of chips you will be left with. For instance, if you only have enough chips to survive a round of blinds, you will almost certainly be blinded out with a mediocre hand and knocked out of the tournament. Even in the event that you survive multiple all-ins, you still must overcome major odds to build a stack.

On the other hand, if you take a chance at sucking out your opponent, you are still facing bad odds, but at least can come out with a big stack of chips in the event that you do win. For this reason, when you are in situations where you know you are committed (even on the bad end of things) you want to take control and be the aggressor. Hopefully, you may be able to leverage whatever remaining chips you have as fold equity.

Maximizing Fold Equity

By sheer brute force, going all-in prevents your opponent from making a difficult call, especially if he has less chips than you. For the very same reason you want to avoid showdowns, a good opponent will also want to avoid a showdown. If your opponent has a mediocre hand, they will be very reluctant to call even if they are relatively certain they have you beat.

Often, you’ll see a player who dump away all his chips by checking a hand, then calling all their chips off when their opponent pushes. If you are ever in the situation to be this person, instead of just waiting for your opponent to push, be the one that pushes instead! If you’re going to call anyways, you might as well gain some fold equity on your opponent, however small it is. There’s nothing to lose by it, so always take the lead if you are going to jump on the wagon anyways.

Conclusion – Make plays, don’t wait around for premium hands

This is a practical no-brainer if you have followed all the advice above, but I have to assert the concept of playing smart. Playing aggressive is good, but when applied blindly, can lead to major issues in your game. Knowing when to use aggression to make well timed steals, bluffs and tricks against your opponent is the key to becoming a solid tournament player.

Learning how to adjust your game and varying up your level of aggression is the biggest trick to keeping your opponents on their toes. Being able to hide a big hand when your opponents think you are bullying them around will give you the edge to punish your opponents in no limit. At the same time, being able to scare your opponents away with a weak hand when they think you are strong, is just as important in your strategy toolbox.

Anyhow, hope this mini-guide has helped you get some more ideas on advanced poker tournament strategies. Good luck at the poker tables and whatever site you may play at.

Theorem of Blind Stealing – by MJ

Introduction

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t really want to write this article. It’s such a simple concept yet such a strong tactic in single table tournaments, that it can seriously be -EV for myself if a lot of people start playing this way at Party Poker or any of the other sites I play at.

But, oh well. I know certain people have figured this tactic out already and that smart people will figure it out eventually – so I might as well write about it. I think a lot of people who read this strategy won’t follow it anyways, thinking that I’m crazy, so no loss there.

Single Table Tournament Overview

Most people who are solid single table tournament (STT) players already know that the game is really composed of three parts: early game, late game and heads-up. Each stage is generally very straightforward, with very tight early game play, followed by aggressive late game play, then culminating into a heads-up game (usually aggressive as well).

As many solid players know as well, the majority of the chips are going to be won during the late game phase, where blind stealing and coin flips is pretty much the norm. While you can accumulate a stack early game, it often involves hitting a monster and having a loose player pay you off. Because of this, I would say that late game, including heads-up play accounts for 80% of how well you do in STT games, with the early game only accounting for 20% of your game.

When most players mention their STT ROI, it generally ranges from 50% (lower buy-in games) to 20% (higher buy-ins). So, if there is a late game tactic that could increase your late game by 10%, this would be be the equivalent of a 8% increase in your ROI, a rather large sum. I think this theorem of blind stealing can improve your late game along these numbers (depending on your existing skill level), so it is a very deadly weapon.

Blind Stealing and Folding Equity

Folding Equity is a term used to indicate the value of a play based on the chance that your opponent will fold. Blind stealing and folding equity are often used in conjuction, because blind stealing is all about picking up the blinds by forcing your opponents to fold.

Here is a table that I have constructed that shows what different types of players are willing to call a pre-flop raise with late game:

Table #1 – Preflop Decision Chart

AA KK QQ JJ TT 99 88 77 66 55 44 33 22 AK KQ QJ JT T9 98 87 76 65 54 43 32 AQ KJ QT J9 T8 97 86 75 64 53 42 AJ KT Q9 J8 T7 96 85 74 63 52 AT K9 Q8 J7 T6 95 84 73 62 A9 K8 Q7 J6 T5 94 83 72 A8 K7 Q6 J5 T4 93 82 A7 K6 Q5 J4 T3 92 A6 K5 Q4 J3 T2 A5 K4 Q3 J2 A4 K3 Q2 A3 K2 A2

Player Type Hands Played % Played Very Tight 56 of 1326 5% Tight 194 of 1326 15% Semi-Tight 366 of 1326 28% Loose 846 of 1326 64%

Now, take a look at the upper-right table, where it shows the percentage of hands played by each player type. This number can be used as a quantitative figure to figure out the folding equity of stealing from this type of player. The following table will illustrate how the calculation of folding equity works. This chart assumes that you are in the small blind, attempting to steal the big blind.

Table #2 – Folding Equity

Player Type	Blinds	Raise Amt	Fold %	Fold Equity	Caught %	Chips Caught	Min Profit
Very Tight	1.5 BB	3 BB	95%	1.4 BB	5%	0.2 BB	1.2 BB
Tight	1.5 BB	3 BB	85%	1.3 BB	15%	0.5 BB	0.8 BB
Semi-Tight	1.5 BB	3 BB	72%	1.1 BB	28%	0.9 BB	0.2 BB
Loose	1.5 BB	3 BB	36%	0.5 BB	64%	1.9 BB	-1.4 BB

From a very quick skim, we can see here that it’s worth it pre-flop raise any tight player with any hand based solely on folding equity. The reason is that even if you lose every single hand that you are called or raised on, you will still make a profit. The reason you will make a profit, as the chart shows, is simply because the very tight and tight players will give up their blinds much more than they are willing to defend it. If you raise by 3BB, you have a guaranteed profit if they are defending less than a third of their hands

Another important thing that we see here, is that our minimum profit drops significantly starting with semi-tight players, because they are actually calling or raising enough raises that it offsets the amount you are making from pure steals. Does this mean we shouldn’t raise against looser players? Not necessarily, as it only means that we are break even at worst. To determine if we should raise, we need to examine how well our ‘caught chips’ fare.

Caught on the Blind Steal

In the chart, I had a column titled ‘caught’. Caught is which is what I refer to as chips that have been called or raised in a blind steal attempt. Let make up a scenario and say that your opponent has 10BB in chips and re-raises all-in on your steal. It takes 7BB for you to call, while the pot is at 14.5BB, which gives you 2.1:1 pot odds.

For those of you who know your odds, you will know that 2.1:1 pot odds is almost always good enough to call. In the chart below, I’ve illustrated how a completely random hand stacks up in this scenario, if you call the re-raise.

Table #3 – Caught Equity

Player Type	Win %	Odds to Win	Pot Odds	Avg Win	Call Cost	Total Cost	Call Equity	Caught Equity
Very Tight	29%	2.5 to 1	2.1 to 1	6.2 BB	7 BB	10 BB	-0.8 BB	-3.8 BB
Tight	35%	1.9 to 1	2.1 to 1	7.5 BB	7 BB	10 BB	0.5 BB	-2.5 BB
Semi-Tight	38%	1.6 to 1	2.1 to 1	8.2 BB	7 BB	10 BB	1.2 BB	-1.8 BB
Loose	45%	1.2 to 1	2.1 to 1	9.7 BB	7 BB	10 BB	2.7 BB	-0.3 BB

The call equity shows that if we go on a blind steal by raising 3BB with any hand, we can call any re-raise up to 10BB (and in reality, up to about 13BB), with the exception of a re-raise from a very tight player. For those of you who have read about the concept of pushing all-in when you have 10BB or less, you can see the exact math here for why this is the case, as you have pot odds to call most players after already committing 3BB into the pot.

The caught equity column shows the actual equity of our play, since in reality, we put 10BB into the pot instead of 7 BB. The data also shows that when we do get called, it is a negative -EV play. However, what we really want to know is if our folding equity can offset our losses by being caught.

Combining Folding Equity with Caught Equity

If we apply what we just learned from Table #3, we can figure out that if we have 10BB or less or our opponents have 10BB or less, we might as well push all-in since we would be correct to call any re-raise after putting 3BB into the pot. Not only is this correct in terms of pot odds, but it also increases our folding equity, since most players are more reluctant to call all-in as opposed to calling two more big bets.

So, in Table #4, we will assume this type of push situation and see what numbers we get.

Table #4 – Fold Equity and Caught Equity

Type	Blinds	Fold %	Fold Equity	Caught %	Caught Equity	Caught Result	Total Equity
Very Tight	1.5 BB	95%	1.4 BB	5%	-3.8 BB	-0.2 BB	1.2 BB
Tight	1.5 BB	85%	1.3 BB	15%	-2.5 BB	-0.4 BB	0.9 BB
Semi-Tight	1.5 BB	72%	1.1 BB	28%	-1.8 BB	-0.5 BB	0.6 BB
Loose	1.5 BB	36%	0.5 BB	64%	-0.3 BB	-0.2 BB	0.3 BB

Table 4 can be a little bit confusing, so I will show a calculation below on how Total Equity is calculated from the beginning. In this example, we’re going to assume that we are playing against a Semi-Tight opponent raising all-in with 10BB:

Fold Equity   = Blinds * Fold%

              = 1.5 BB * 72%

              = 1.1 BBCaught Equity = (Win% * Pot) - Total Cost to Play

              = (38% * 21.5 BB) - 10 BB

              = 8.2 BB - 10 BB

              = -1.8 BB

Caught Result = Caught% * Caught Equity

              = 28% * -1.8 BB

              = -0.5 BB

Total Equity  = Fold Equity + Caught Profit

              = 1.1 BB - 0.5 BB

              = 0.6 BB

Though I’ll admit my explanations so far have been a little dense, upon seeing the Total Equity column, there should be a spark of light among many of you reading and interpreting that data. The data shows that a random pre-flop hand raising 10BB to steal the BB from the SB, will always generate positive long term equity. In English, this means you can always push any two cards when you or the BB has less than 10BB (and if you look ahead, 13BB).

Raise Range on Blind Steals

Since we’re all about finding razor edges in any situation, we can also look at how increasing our pre-flop raises affects our overall equity in these steal situations.

Table #5 – Total Equity and Raise Amount

Type	8 BB	9 BB	10 BB	11 BB	12 BB	13 BB	14 BB	15 BB
Very Tight	1.3 BB	1.3 BB	1.2 BB	1.2 BB	1.2 BB	1.2 BB	1.2 BB	1.1 BB
Tight	1.0 BB	0.9 BB	0.9 BB	0.9 BB	0.8 BB	0.8 BB	0.7 BB	0.7 BB
Semi-Tight	0.7 BB	0.6 BB	0.6 BB	0.5 BB	0.4 BB	0.4 BB	0.3 BB	0.2 BB
Loose	0.5 BB	0.4 BB	0.3 BB	0.3 BB	0.2 BB	0.1 BB	0.1 BB	0.0 BB

Intuition should give us the same conclusion as the data, which is that as you increase the value of your raise pre-flop, your overall equity goes down. The important thing to note is that equity is positive across the board for all player types, but begins dipping the most after about 10BB.

A good side-effect that may occur from raising over 10BB pre-flop however, is that your opponent is most likely going to tighten his calling requirements in order to call your raise. This would mean that most players will probably go up in level, so a semi-tight player would only call tight hands, and a tight player would only call very-tight hands. The effect of this of course, is that it improves your folding equity and thus, your overall equity as well.

The Effect of Variance

One thing about applying this theorem is that you will experience much greater variance than you are probably accustomed to. For the solid players, this should not be an issue. For players who multi-table, this strategy is extremely useful, as multi-tablers are already accustomed to variance, but essentially provides a logic for auto-playing steals in certain situations.

I will repeat once again that variance will naturally be very high with this type of strategy. Your opponents will think you are a maniac or a fish. Solid players will question your logic. You yourself may question the play after pushing dominated hands time and time again. If this is not acceptable to you, then you should not play with this strategy.

Strategic Adjustments to Stealing

As mentioned earlier, if you are caught and survive on a push, your opponents will most likely view you as a complete maniac – and quite likely lower their calling requirements for you. This doesn’t matter however. You can see that even if they loosen up their requirements, you still have positive EV on them when stealing. The worst they can do is lower your EV, but even then can never make it go negative (unless you are raising over 14BB).

If you are seen as a maniac, you can exploit your own imagine to an absolute advantage over your opponents. For instance, you are playing this strategy and pushing everytime you or the BB has 10BB or less. When you finally accumulate up to 13BB, you decide to slow down and play normally again. Upon getting a strong hand such as KK, you then push in any position. Your opponents who have seen you push with rags will not give you any respect and are much more likely to call your overbet.

Another adjustment to make, is to pre-flop raise 3BB when you hold a monster. The BB who is sick of your all-in raises will likely see this smaller raise as a weak play and come back at you, which in case you can then call and likely dominate his hand. A 3BB bet can also be used against very tight players, as it still retains a high degree of folding equity and minimizes your loss when you are re-raised by them, as you are fairly certain to be dominated.

Independent Chip Modeling

Personally, I don’t put a lot of value into ICM, but regardless of what I think, it’s good to know. In short, ICM is the concept of putting a real dollar value on your current stack, relative to your opponents and the total payout in the tournament.ICM is an important early on (and even in mid-stages) of a tournament because it dictates that you shouldn’t make any extreme or risky plays to win a few chips, when you aren’t getting a true money return on your play.

For example, if you have pocket Tens and someone who you absolutely *know* has AK pushes all-in early game, ICM dictates that you should not call this bet. In the beginning game, your stack in dollar amounts is worth your buy-in. However, if you double up, your stack is only worth 184% of your buy-in (according to ICM). So, while TT has about a 5% edge over AK, ICM actually states that by calling, you are risking more “real money” than you are winning with your edge (as opposed to just tournament chips). As such, ICM dictates that you shouldn’t call with small edges.

ICM applies to the theorem of blind stealing, because from reading this article, you may get the idea to push in every single situation where you are heads-up with the BB. This will be incorrect at times however, because you don’t always want to risk many chips – especially early game. In a late game situation, my feeling is that aggression is far more rewarded than timid play, so ICM does not play as big a role. So, the general rule of thumb is – don’t start stealing until the blinds are at least 50/100.

If you want to explore ICM more, here is an ICM calculator.

Heads-up Play

The writing is on the wall, so I’ll let you figure this one out…

Defending against this strategy

If you understand all of the math involved, you will understand that there is no way of truly defending against this tactic. If you are on the BB and your opponent raises on every hand, your only option is to gamble with him and call every hand that he raises as well. This is actually an +EV play for the both of you, since the blinds are ‘dead money’ and you are both eventually splitting them.

The only real defense that you can mount, is reducing the amount of total equity that the attacker can obtain, by widening your push hands substantially to defend against steals. If you increased your range of hands to a set such as all pocket pairs, Ace/x, King/x, Queen/7+, Jack/7+ and Ten/7+ – you can effectively reduce your attacker’s total equity to 0.4BB. This would be the equivalent of letting them keep their SB and you keeping your BB.

Conclusion

Hopefully (or not if you play at my tables) this article will have made something click inside your head. Because if it did, you can see how extremely effective this strategy is to use in any tournament situation, but especially Party Poker STT games. In the Party Poker $30+3 games for example, with starting chips of 800 per person, mathematical strategy can and will completely take over the end game. This is one of the reasons that any of the Party Poker STT games can be crushed by anyone who knows what they are doing.

Anyhow, I regard this as a big trick being let out of the bag. If it turns your game around, I’d always like to hear it on the forums. Good luck – although it’s not really luck.

Conclusion – Part Deux (Added: 10/24/04)

There has been a number of analysis and discussions as a result of the article which you should know. The foremost is that the article did not emphasize enough that the averaged EV of random hands will be profitable over the long term, but any particular hand may not necessarily be profitble. An example is 23o, one of the worst hands in poker, would not be +EV in many situations, because it simply fares very badly vs any hand. This can apply to other rag hands as well.

The conclusion to draw from this, is that against players who are more apt to call your all-in bet, you should be more discriminate in the hands you will be pushing with. If they’re loose enough to call you with 64% of their cards, you can wait for a good hand, then punish them for calling you when you have them dominated.

SNG Moves – by vqc

SNG Moves
*These are not moves that I made up. I do not claim to be the creator of these moves. These plays are ones that I have collected, saved, and typed up from multiple sources.
*if anyone who DID create these moves objects to me posting the move here, please tell me
* I am bored at work so I am posting these. yay.

PVS
Pushing all in when there are multiple limpers with any 2 cards.
This move should only be used when the pot could add a significant amount of chips to your stack.
I.e. The blinds are at 30/60. You have taken some bad beats and your stack is now at 650. There are four limpers before you each contributing 60 into the 90T pot. You pick up 25o on the button and decide that these chips will be good for you. You push.
I.e. The blinds are at 30/60. Your stack is at 700. You are sitting in the BB. There are 4 limpers before you. The pot is now at 330. You push with 27o. You push.
Why does this move work?
The idea is that anyone who limps is playing a hand that is marginal and will most likely not be willing to play for all their chips on that hand.
Things to watch out for.
If you have seen someone limp AA or AK or QQ, and he limps this hand, this might not be the best hand to push on. Pick and choose your spots.
Here is a hand that illustrates this move:
Table $10,000 Guaranteed(364968) Table 2 (Real Money) — Seat 10 is the button
Total number of players : 10
Seat 1: gabefish (700)
Seat 2: bayoubetty (1165)
Seat 3: DEMONONE (1770)
Seat 4: masonpark1 (895)
Seat 5: gorg0505 (2183)
Seat 6: Nutz2big (1175)
Seat 7: FlaJackStraw (1722)
Seat 8: WOLFEK219 (915)
Seat 9: mikenjjets (3045)
Seat 10: Mig1517 (1940)
gabefish posts small blind (25)
bayoubetty posts big blind (50)
** Dealing down cards **
DEMONONE folds.
masonpark1 calls (50)
gorg0505 folds.
Nutz2big folds.
FlaJackStraw folds.
WOLFEK219 calls (50)
mikenjjets folds.
Mig1517 folds.
gabefish raises (675) to 700
gabefish is all-In.
bayoubetty folds.
masonpark1 folds.
WOLFEK219 folds.
Creating Main Pot with $850 with gabefish
** Summary **
Main Pot: 850
gabefish balance 850, bet 700, collected 850, net +150

Stop and Go
http://www.flopturnriver.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=22191
1. You will be first to act on the flop.
2. Everybody but one opponent has folded preflop before the betting gets to you.
3. Calling or checking the bet will not put your whole stack in.
4. You have determined that you are going to play this hand to win it.
5. You are willing to risk your whole stack to win this hand.
6. You would prefer that your opponent fold rather than going to a showdown.
7. You have little or no preflop folding equity.

OR

1. You are in the BB.
2. You are short stacked.
3. You have decided that you must win this hand NO MATTER WHAT.
4. When the betting comes back to you, there is only one person left in the hand.
5. That person’s bet does not put you all-in.
6. You believe that there is 0% chance that you can get this person to fold with an
all-in bet.
7. Therefore call the bet, and push the flop.

Continuation Bet
You are the preflop raiser.
Half pot to 3/4 pot bet.
Most players to continuation bet is 2 or 3. If up against 3 or more, you have to have hit the flop to keep playing.
Missing the flop completely is a good time to continuation bet.
If you have some sort of draw, it might not be a good time to continuation bet, especially if you’re last to act and the flop is checked to you
A good Flop Texture is:
low cards
medium card with a low pair
three widely separated cards

4th St Continuation bet
You are the preflop raiser.
2 players
You act second
Sequence of Play
On the flop: He checks, You check
On the turn: He checks, You bet
This works when you have a draw after raising preflop, but you don’t have a made hand on the flop.
The opponent gives you a free card by checking to you on the flop. If you raise, it gives him a chance to check-raise you out of the pot
i.e. AK on a QT5 flop.
When he checks again on the turn, it is usually a sign of weakness, bet into him to see if you can take it down.

Blocking Bets
Made on the river in order to price the showdown.

Here is a post about it.
http://www.flopturnriver.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=118358#118358
what I think is important is the following:
“If you decide that your going to showdown the hand, then price it to ur standards. Lets say your willing to show down the hand for at max 200 chips. Why not just bet it instead of hoping that your opponent will play the way wish. This is a case where aggression doesn’t MAKE you chips, it SAVES you chips. Let’s say you bet 200 and you get reraised to 600. Well you priced what you were willing to play and it didn’t work out for you. If you dont want to pay anymore then you fold out. I think that this is much better than checking and hoping that the opponent prices the bet to your standards.

If the villain has the nuts, he’s going to reraise your river bet in the hopes of getting more chips. If the villain has a marginal hand that’s slightly better than yours, he might fold out because he is afraid of a hand Thais better than his non nuts at the same time, he might also call. But in either case you priced your show down.”

Pricing Draws
Betting your draw on the flop in order to let you control the pot odds
Gabe
if I raised before the flop, I will almost always bet or raise my draws.
if I’m short stacked, I will just push when it gets to me if I have a strong
draw.

Squeeze Play
Player 1 Raises
Player 2 Flat Calls
You bet hard forcing both players to fold their hands

Preconditions
Player 1 does not really have the hand that they are representing. Look for an aggressive player who raises many marginal hands.
Player 2 only calls. A reraise by player 2 does not allow you to try this move.
You must have a tight table image.
Do not try this move if you have already done it once at that table or recently with the same people.

All-in semibluff
A bet you make when the pot gives you a combination of many small things.
I.e. mid pair + OESD.
If there’s as much as a 30% chance that your opponent will fold the hand, the semibluff bet/all in is a good move to make.
Generally: All in with a Pair and a flush draw.
I.e. reraise his flop bet all in with Ac5c on a Tc3c5d board.
Chances are, if you are behind now, you have many chances to win the hand if you are called. In the example above, If the opponent has a pair of Jacks, and calls your all in semi-bluff. You have 9 outs to the flush (he if doesn’t have a Jc), 3 outs to a pair of aces, 2 outs to a set of fives. With 15 outs that’s about 15*4-(15-8) =60-7=53% chance that you win the hand. If you push you could pick up the pot, if you get called, you can still draw to win.
This is a very very strong play.

All-in semibluff fake
Faking the all in semibluff.
You want your opponent to think that you are on a draw of some sort. When he calls he finds out that you weren’t on a draw and you have a real hand.
I.e. Reraise his flop bet All in with Top and bottom pair on a 2 flush flop.

Quick Advice on how to play JJ early – by curtains

By curtains on Jun 21 2006, 04:02 PM

It’s time to tackle another hand that commonly gives people problems, a pair of jacks. I believe that Jacks are a bit simpler to play than AK, but it helps to have a good feel for when your opponents are likely to have AA-QQ and to not be tempted into donating all of your chips when you flop an overpair in such situations. I’m going to try to give a few ground rules that I generally follow when I have jacks early in a sit and go. The comments I make are generally geared towards those who play at buyins of $55 and higher. Please note that there will always be exceptions to such rules and that there are reasonable alternate ways of playing this hand, however I have done well using the following strategies:

1. If no one has opened the pot, I always open for a raise, usually to 2.5-3x the BB. In level 1 (blinds 20-40) I generally will raise it to 100-125 and in lvl 2 (blinds 30-60) I usually raise to 170. Open limping isn’t terrible, but I’m quite certain that it’s not the best habit. The best evidence of this is that a lot of people support the idea of open-limping with JJ, however the large majority of these people aren’t big winners at the highest levels, but only at the $55s and under. I don’t know of any serious winning player who regularly open-limps with JJ at any stage of a sit and go.

2. If there are a few limpers I raise the large majority of the time, but occasionally I will just call, especially when I’m in one of the blinds. However I believe that raising 100% of the time in such cases would be perfectly fine.

3. If the pot is raised before me the decisions become much tougher. I will sometimes raise, sometimes call and sometimes fold. I’ll try to give an example of each:

3a. If a tight player raises to 3x the BB in early position, and I’m also in early position, I will usually just fold the hand. The reason for this is that a lot of really tight players at the higher limits, will have the following hand range after raising in EP (AA-JJ, AK). I have no interest in taking my jacks up against such a strong range of hands. Folding JJ for a single raise in lvl 1+2 is the exception however.

Also I will almost always fold to two raises in front of me. There are exceptions of course, as if the Button open raises and an aggressive SB reraises, my hand probably has way too much value to fold. However in a typical situation where someone in early position raises and then someone else in late position makes a sizable reraise, I will almost always fold the hand.

3b. If a reasonable player in EP has raised to 3x the BB and there is a caller, I will strongly lean towards calling. Also if someone has raised in MP to 110 and there are 2 callers, I will generally flat call from the SB or BB. Reraising is probably okay, but I prefer to use my skill instead of getting a huge percentage of my chips in the pot early on, when I’m basically still playing a guessing game.

3c. I will reraise if a really bad and loose player has already raised the pot. I will also reraise if Im dealing with an open raise from late position. For instance if I’m in the SB and the cutoff raises to 120, I will almost always reraise. Even a tightish player is going to have a relatively loose range in this late of a position. If it’s folded to the SB preflop and I have JJ in the BB, I am almost always willing to get all my chips in before the flop.

Anyway the above are just some simple ground rules. I haven’t covered all situations but it’s difficult to do that. I’m going to show a few hands where I held JJ, and you can try to guess my play in each circumstance:

Hand #1:

***** Hand History for Game 4230845644 *****
NL Texas Hold’em $109 Buy-in Trny:23338035 Level:1 Blinds(20/40) – Wednesday, May 10, 01:36:55 ET 2006
Table Speed Island Getaway (Real Money)
Seat 9 is the button
Total number of players : 10
Seat 5: dogkicker111 ( $2000 )
Seat 8: curtains_ ( $1700 )
Seat 4: nadeamnahas ( $2060 )
Seat 1: mitsui4 ( $2660 )
Seat 3: Farmer42 ( $2000 )
Seat 9: codbua07 ( $1920 )
Seat 2: tlbcaptain ( $2320 )
Seat 6: cntonelli ( $1400 )
Seat 7: DeStructure ( $1980 )
Seat 10: Bud1935 ( $1960 )
Trny:23338035 Level:1
Blinds(20/40)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to curtains_ [ J J ]
2 folds
nadeamnahas raises [100].
dogkicker111 folds.
cntonelli raises [350].
DeStructure folds.
curtains_ to act ??

What is your play?

1. Move allin
2. Call
3. Fold

Curtains_ folds

This falls under one of the situations that was mentioned above, namely that the pot has been raised and reraised in front of me. As embarrassing as it is to see that my opponents held AQ and ATs, and managed to get all the chips in the pot preflop, I firmly stand by my decision to fold here. Sometimes you will make the right play and you can’t let it influence you that this time your opponents had weak hands.

codbua07 folds.
Bud1935 folds.
mitsui4 folds.
nadeamnahas is all-In.
cntonelli is all-In.
** Dealing Flop ** [ 3 , 9 , 6 ]
** Dealing Turn ** [ 2 ]
** Dealing River ** [ 6 ]
>You have options at Speed Kicker Trouble Table!.
cntonelli shows [ Q , A ] a pair of sixes.
nadeamnahas shows [ T , A ] a pair of sixes.
nadeamnahas wins 660 chips from side pot #1 with a pair of sixes.
cntonelli wins 2860 chips from the main pot with a pair of sixes with queen kicker.
>You have options at Speed #1186420 Table!

Hand #2

2. ***** Hand History for Game 4328187368 *****
NL Texas Hold’em $215 Buy-in Trny:23881083 Level:1 Blinds(20/40) – Sunday, May 21, 18:31:09 ET 2006
Table Speed #1183211 (Real Money)
Seat 5 is the button
Total number of players : 10
Seat 7: rosekto ( $2000 )
Seat 1: curtains_ ( $2000 )
Seat 4: cjfltruylkj ( $1720 )
Seat 10: hullmorra ( $2240 )
Seat 9: acehigh4 ( $2000 )
Seat 6: Huskers67 ( $2080 )
Seat 2: fulltilt72 ( $1960 )
Seat 3: THOMPSON789 ( $1980 )
Seat 8: PHAETON44 ( $2100 )
Seat 5: Wadells ( $1920 )
Trny:23881083 Level:1
Blinds(20/40)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to curtains_ [ J J ]
PHAETON44 raises [80].
acehigh4 folds.
hullmorra calls [80].
curtains_ to act ?

What is your play?

1. Raise
2. Call
3. Fold

Answer: 2. Call

I decided to call here for a few reasons. First off if I reraise I have destroyed the value of my hand if someone moves allin on me. For instance if I make it 350-400 and someone raises to 2000, I really can’t call. So suddenly I took a hand that had monster potential preflop and turned it into garbage. It’s possible I will write an entire article on this concept in the future, as it’s extremely important and in my opinion it’s by far the most important topic that Sklansky discusses in his Tournament Poker Book.

By just calling I accomplish a few things:

1. If I hit a set I stand to win a gigantic pot
2. If someone has an overpair I will likely be able get away with minimal damage.
3. If I flop an overpair and have the best hand, it will be difficult to play, but there are quite decent chances of winning the pot. This takes a lot of experience though, and sometimes you will have to be willing to accept that you may fold the best hand after the flop on occasion. For instance, if the flop comes T75, you do have to tread quite carefully. For instance I would usually flat call a bet on the flop, instead of raising, although this really depends on my feeling at the time, the bet size, the timing of the bet, who made the bet etc etc. The point is that you aren’t forced to simply throw all your chips in the middle when you have a big pair and flop an overpair. Sometimes you will do so, sometimes you won’t.

Curtains_ calls [80]
fulltilt72 folds.
THOMPSON789 folds.
cjfltruylkj folds.
Wadells calls [80].
Huskers67 folds.
rosekto folds.
** Dealing Flop ** [ A , Q , 7 ]

Ok, this is simply a terrible flop for me and it was pretty easy to fold to the flop bet. I asked another very successful high limit player about this hand and he said that he agrees with calling before the flop, although he would raise to around 240 if he was in later position. Because 240 is only about 10% of the hero’s total stack, it leaves for a lot more flexibility in the postflop play, and it isn’t a huge disaster if we are reraised and need to fold. If we wanted to raise to 400-500 and then fold to a reraised we should be more cautious, as then it becomes a serious disaster to put in such a large % of our chips and fold our hand.

PHAETON44 checks.
hullmorra bets [100].
curtains_ folds.
Wadells calls [100].
PHAETON44 calls [100].
** Dealing Turn ** [ J ]
PHAETON44 checks.
hullmorra bets [175].
Wadells folds.
PHAETON44 raises [450].
hullmorra calls [275].
** Dealing River ** [ 6 ]
PHAETON44 bets [375].
hullmorra calls [375].
PHAETON44 shows [ 7 , 7 ] three of a kind, sevens.
hullmorra doesn’t show [ K , A ] a pair of aces.
PHAETON44 wins 2330 chips from the main pot with three of a kind, sevens.

Hand #3

3. ***** Hand History for Game 4450998437 *****
NL Texas Hold’em $109 Buy-in Trny:24567091 Level:2 Blinds(30/60) – Monday, June 05, 23:15:55 ET 2006
Table Speed #1183231 (Real Money)
Seat 2 is the button
Total number of players : 9
Seat 3: skin1935 ( $1388 )
Seat 4: curtains_ ( $1940 )
Seat 5: msdos ( $2552 )
Seat 6: BenzoFive ( $2018 )
Seat 8: Rlxtn_Thrpst ( $3150 )
Seat 2: Baddmoon22 ( $2947 )
Seat 10: humbledog ( $1950 )
Seat 9: AzRawDawg ( $2700 )
Seat 1: sharples ( $1355 )
Trny:24567091 Level:2
Blinds(30/60)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to curtains_ [ J J ]
msdos raises [120].
BenzoFive folds.
Rlxtn_Thrpst folds.
AzRawDawg calls [120].
humbledog folds.
sharples folds.
Baddmoon22 folds.
skin1935 folds.
curtains_ to act?

Again I decided to just call. Reraising is always possible, I’ve just always enjoyed playing JJ like this against a raise. I have no hard evidence/proof to offer as to whether calling/raising is correct, I just know that playing this way makes me feel a lot comfortable. One note, if we do decide to raise here, a normal raise size is about 450-600, as we are out of position, thus we should generally raise more than usual. At this point we have committed a huge portion of our chips with relatively little information about our opponents hands. It’s VERY annoying to have the original raiser move allin on us in this circumstance, and by making this raise, we are close to turning our hand into “72” (See Sklanskys TPFAP for details on this concept)

** Dealing Flop ** [ 2 , 5 , T ]
curtains_ bets [175].

This was an interesting moment in the hand. The large majority of the time I check in such cases. This time I felt like I wanted to find out where I was at right away. Honestly I have no huge preference between checking or betting. If I did check, I would sometimes check raise and sometimes check call, based on my feeling, bet size and so forth. There are often many reasonable ways to play, and so by sometimes betting out with overpairs here and sometimes check calling/check raising, its difficult for your regular opponents to easily put you on a hand.

msdos calls [175].
AzRawDawg folds.

So it’s good news that my opponent has just called. This generally means something like AK.

** Dealing Turn ** [ K ]

Blah! Definitely not the card I wanted to see, athough it’s better than an ace. I decided to check. If I’m ahead here, sometimes my opponent may bluff me out, but definitely not always. Against regulars you must occasionally check raise with your big hands in this exact spot, otherwise they know they can simply bet every time and take the pot. My opponent was unknown to me though.

curtains_ checks.
msdos checks.

Well this is good news!

** Dealing River ** [ K ]

A good card, my opponent didn’t show any interest in the turn king, its unlikely it helped him and he probably has the worst hand, but might have something worth calling a small bet.

curtains_ bets [200].
msdos raises [724].

Wow, I definitely wasn’t expecting this. Now it’s time to backtrack through the hand and make sense of what’s going on. If my opponent had AA, KK its very likely he would have either raised the flop or bet on the turn. It’s possible he could have these hands but not likely. If he had QQ he would definitely be likely to raise the flop (as he would now feel less comfortable about slowplaying his hand, due to a possible ace or king on the turn), and also he would be more likely to raise a bit more preflop. So QQ is another hand that is within the realm of possibility, but not highly likely. My main concern is that my opponent has a king. Now some players may check behind the turn with AK, attempting to get one solid bet from me on the river, however I do believe these players are in the minority. Something about this hand and the betting patterns just seemed way too fishy and illogical to me, so I decided to make a tough call…

curtains_ calls [524].

msdos shows [ 8 , 8 ] two pairs, kings and eights.
curtains_ shows [ J , J ] two pairs, kings and jacks.
curtains_ wins 2188 chips from the main pot with two pairs, kings and jacks.

And fortunately it works out! The river raise by my opponent was really ballsy, because he basically has to hope Im going to fold a pair in between KK+88. Of course I am not going to just give my opponent credit for being able to logically think through such decisions, but in general I think his raise was quite poor, and that if he wants to play the hand, calling the river is a much better play. His play was too illogical for me to consistantly fold something that beats 88 here. For those times that I can’t beat 88 he can simply call and win the pot. His play makes a lot more sense if he’s on a total bluff.

Anyway if I had the time I could write 30 pages full of hands where I had JJ, there is so much to poker and so many different examples one can think of for every hand and scenario. Hopefully this article shed some light on the way that I play with jacks early in a sit and go, and leaves something for you to incorporate into your game.

Continuation Betting – by curtains

By curtains on May 6 2006, 01:30 AM

In this article we are going to talk about when it’s a good time to make a continuation bet and when it’s best to pass up this opportunity. Before I even get started, I want to discuss a few of the absolute basics when dealing with the topic of continuation bets.

What is a continuation bet?

A continuation bet (I will call them c-bets for the rest of the article), is when you have raised or reraised the pot before the flop and have gotten callers. The spots that we will be discussing are those times when the flop doesn’t help your hand, and you have less than top pair. Usually when you make these c-bets, you will be betting anywhere from 50% to 100% of the pot (in Sngs I usually avoid making full pot sized c-bets). The idea of making these c-bet is that in Holdem, your opponent will miss the flop a lot more often than the will actually hit the flop. Because you have the initiative due to your preflop raise, you are hoping that by making a bet on the flop your opponent will fold often enough to make it a profitable bet. I do not consider it to be a continuation bet when you actually flop something, instead I consider that a value bet.

Let’s look at some of the most important factors that one should consider when deciding whether or not to make a c-bet, in order of importance. We are going to assume in all of these cases that we have no pair on the flop, yet have raised preflop.

1. Number of opponents:
2. Flop Texture
3. Buyin Level
4. Value of a free card
5. Stack Sizes

1. Number of Opponents:

The number of opponents you have in with you is usually the most important factor in determining whether or not you will fire again in order to win the pot. This can be looked at very logically, as the fewer opponents you have in the pot with you, the more likely it is that your c-bet will succeed. The general school of thought is to c-bet quite frequently against one opponent, to c-bet significantly less frequently against two opponents and to c-bet very rarely against three opponents. If you are betting into 4 or more opponents with just ace high, then you are almost surely too brave for your own good.

I do warn the readers that I do not just blindly c-bet against one lone opponent. I believe in checking behind a lot more frequently than most players do, and I hope to explain the reasoning behind this in some hand examples.

2. Flop Texture

The texture of the flop is extremely important in determining whether or not you should make a c-bet. If you have 2 callers and the flop comes 876 with a flush draw, you should almost surely not bet into them with your missed AQ. If the flop comes K22, you can make a much better case for firing another bullet.

Another important factor is the presence of an ace. If you find yourself raising preflop with something like KQ and receive one caller, you should often bet any flop that includes an ace. The reason behind this is that it’s just so natural that the preflop raiser would have an ace, that your opponent will usually be less likely to mess around with you.

3. Buyin Level

This is an important factor where my advice is probably the opposite of most pundits. Most would assume that you should c-bet more often in higher limit games, because your lower limit opponents will call you with anything. I actually believe this to be false. Players around the $22-$55 level will see a lot more flops than the typical higher buyin player, however the will often just fold to a relatively small bet when they have nothing on the flop. When I played those limits I had to constantly force myself to make c-bets because I was just amazed at the frequency at which they would fold. At the higher limits, players are still not geniuses, but they are much trickier and aggressive, and are more capable of trying to put you on a hand. When the flop comes 763 they know that often you will have missed overcards and they will be able to make a play at you. It’s this extra level of thinking exhibited by higher level opponents that I believe makes it correct to c-bet LESS frequently in the higher buyins. The other reason to c-bet less often in the higher buyins is that the hands that you are called by preflop will likely be stronger than those that called you in a $33 sit and go.

It’s also good to remember that at the lower buyins, it’s less important to mix up your play. For example you will sometimes want to check behind with an overpair in a higher limit game against a regular opponent. This will make them understand that they can’t just bet you out of the pot every time you check. At the lower buyins where your opponents are thinking less strategically, the mixing up of your play becomes a lot less important.

4. Value of a Free Card

The above two rules are the most important, however there are other factors to consider as well. Let’s imagine an example where it’s the first hand of a PartyPoker sit and go and you have AKd. Let’s say you have raised in MP and both blinds called you. The flop comes QT5 with one diamond and now they both check to you. In a situation like this I will most often check, because it’s quite unpleasant to get check raised. Your hand has a decent amount of value because a jack makes you the absolute nuts, while a diamond or Ace/King make you a decent hand on the turn. If you end up having to fold this hand because you are check raised, then you may have missed out on a great chance to win a huge pot. If for example you decide to make a c-bet on a flop of T73 rainbow, it’s usually much easier to fold if you are check raised, because there aren’t many cards that will improve your hand a great deal. I am not advocating blindly c-betting in the latter example, but I would surely be more likely to do so.

5. Stack Sizes

This is a relatively unimportant factor but can be important. If you have doubled up to 4000 early in the tournament and are facing another very healthy stack of about 3000, they are usually going to be somewhat wary of tangling with you. When your opponents are scared, they tend to play more straightforwardly, thus there is usually a smaller chance they will raise you or check raise you with nothing. If you reverse the stack sizes so that you have 3000 and they have 4000, they now are more likely to feel this psychological dominance over you, and may make a move on you with no hand.

This factor becomes quite important if you happen to be shortstacked. Then you are often not worried about being checkraised and it will simply be correct to just move all-in in order to win the pot right away.

Ok so those are five factors to think about every time you want to make a c-bet. I don’t think that these are the only important factors (i.e. position of the callers is also important), but I believe strongly that factors 1 and 2 are extremely important in almost all cases.

There is one other important idea to discuss and that’s the idea that checking behind often gives you extra information. If you are considering a c-bet on the flop, you have very little information on your opponent’s hand, because most people “check to the raiser” no matter what. If your opponent is not especially tricky, you can check behind in some situations, and if they check again on the turn, you are now much more likely to pick up the pot with a bet than you would have been on the flop.

Of course there are very clear problems with this idea, as your opponent may bluff bet the turn or may hit a nice turn card. Your opponent may even check raise the turn as well. Even though this idea is far from full proof, it’s important to understand that every time your opponent is forced to act, you are gaining some information about the quality of their hand. In my experience the opponent’s turn check is more likely to be sincere than the flop check.

Now let’s move onto some hand examples that deal with each of the above topics:

1. Number of Opponents Hand Examples:

Q1: Ok this will be the first hand of the tournament in a PartyPoker $55 event, thus everyone still has 2000 chips. We raise to 110 from 3 off the button with AQo. The button and both blinds call. The flop comes K97 rainbow. The pot contains 440 chips. What is your play?

A1: I would not bother firing a c-bet here. You have 3 opponents on a relatively coordinated board. Even if they don’t have a king, there are numerous other hands they can call you with as well, such as JTo, A9, 88 etc…..yes calling with 88 isn’t a brilliant play but you aren’t playing against geniuses most of the time. I would strongly recommend a check here.

Q2: Same situation as the above but only the BB calls your preflop raise. Now what is your play?

A2: You make a standard c-bet in this example, because the chances of getting played with are significantly lower. I apologize if this is too obvious but it’s extremely important to be more careful when there are multiple opponents and you have missed the flop.

So you should get the general idea at this point. When there are 3 opponents you should not be c-betting too often. When there is one opponent you will bet often but not 100% of the time. You should especially check behind occasionally at the higher buyins. When there are two opponents is where you really need to use your judgment. I would suggest that you should check more often than bet if you have missed against two opponents, however most of the other factors I’ve laid out in this article (Flop Texture, buyin level, stack sizes etc) will come into play for such decisions.

2. Flop Texture Hand Examples:

Flop texture is extremely important when deciding whether to fire another bullet after missing the flop. Number of opponents is more important but really easy to gauge. If you have a lot of opponents check, if you have very few you can bet more often, so it’s pretty simple. Flop texture is much harder to gauge. Let’s take a look at a hand and assume it comes from a $109 buyin:

Q3: You raise to 120 from 2 off the button with Ad Jc. You are called by both blinds making the pot 360 chips. Now I’m going to give a list of 6 flops, and you decide whether you will bet when the blinds check to you:

Flop 1: Kh Qc 3s
Flop 2: Tc Td 3s
Flop 3: 6s 5s 4d
Flop 4: Qs 9h 3c
Flop 5: 9s 5c 2d
Flop 6: Kh 8h 4h

Flop 1 Answer (Kh Qc 3s): I think this is a good flop to check behind. First of all the presence of a king and a queen is annoying because these are both reasonably likely hands for your opponents to hold. There are also many straight draws possible as well. The other factor that would lead me to check is that by checking I could make a huge hand if a ten falls on the turn, and it would be some shame to get check raised off of this hand. Note that you will sometimes be able to win this hand without improving, even after checking behind on the flop.

Flop 2 Answer (Tc Td 3s): This seems like a great flop to bet. The board is unbelievably dry and it’s very likely that it missed both of your opponents. The bad news is they will probably at least call you with a middle pair, but for the most part, betting about 200 chips here will be a +EV play.

Flop 3 Answer (6s 5s 4d) : Clear check. There are a ton of draws that are believable for the blinds to have. The board looks like it missed a preflop raiser, and many of your opponents may even call with pure overcards. I doubt you will get folds here often enough to make betting a good play. I would also tend to check this flop against one opponent.

Flop 4 Answer (Qs 9h 3c): Again I like checking. The queen and nine are quite dangerous cards for you and your hand value is practically nil. I would tend to bet this flop against one opponent here, yet would be somewhat more likely to check behind with AK. The reason I would bet more often with AJ is that folding is so painless if I’m check raised. With AK my hand doesn’t have a tremendous amount of value, but it does have quite a bit more then AJ. This doesn’t mean that I would always check behind with AK against one opponent, it just means that I would be more likely to than if I held AJ.

Flop 5 Answer (9s 5c 2d): This is a very reasonable flop to bet as it’s quite possible that no one has a piece of it. I still am a big fan of checking the flop early in sit and go’s when I miss against multiple callers, and would be more likely to check behind here. However I believe that on a flop like this it’s more a matter of style and that betting is extremely reasonable.

Flop 6 Answer (Kh 8h 4h): This flop I would check for certain against two opponents. The problem with monotone flops is that they give your opponents a lot of excuses to call/raise you. For instance many will call with any heart and check raise with a high heart. They may call with any pair or check raise with top pair. Also you will often have extremely few outs. You don’t want to make a habit of betting on boards where there are going to be many excuses your opponents can make to play with you.

It’s very important that you are constantly thinking about flop texture. It’s one of the most important things to look at in almost every single NL Holdem decision. This holds true whether you miss the flop, or hit the flop hard. For example if you have AK and the flop comes QJT, you should generally avoid slowplaying, because the texture is such that it’s likely to have hit your opponents and there are very cards that can come later in the hand that will convince your opponent to play with you. If you have JJ and the flop comes J62, you can strongly consider slowplaying due to the fact that it will often have missed your opponents and many cards can come later in the hand to encourage your opponents to play. The key is that in almost every postflop decision you make you should be looking at the texture of the flop and using it to influence your decision.

3. Buyin Level Hand Examples:

We are just going to take a look at a very simple example here. Let’s say that you have raised preflop to 120 from the cutoff with AcKd. The BB is the only caller. The flop comes 9s 8c 2s. What is your play:

In a $215 buyin?
In a $55 or lower buyin?

$215 buyin:

I would check here more often than I would bet, but it would depend on my opponent. This is the kind of flop where a tricky player will often make a move with nothing against a preflop raiser. At least they will do so often enough to make things annoying. This combined with the likelihood of them actually having a hand/strong draw leads me to check behind here a decent percentage of the time. Note that checking doesn’t simply give up. Yes if your opponent bets the turn you will often have to fold, but the will not bet the turn anywhere close to 100% of the time. You will often win with an unimproved ace high, you will often win by betting the turn on a relatively harmless card (this is often referred to as a delayed c-bet). If you are playing against a regular whom you see often, it’s important to occasionally check behind here with something like AA. Please don’t take this advice too far however, as most players really don’t pay attention to stuff like this, and they also probably won’t see your hand at showdown.

$55 or lower buyin:

In these buyins your opponents tend to play a bit more of a fit-fold style postflop, and they also play less aggressively when they do have a hand worth playing. For instance if you fire a bet, and your opponent has JT, they may simply call with their open end straight draw. Quite often you can check behind the turn and river and simply win with ace high against such passive opponents. Your life will not be as easy on this flop in the higher buyins. Please don’t bet the entire pot size as well. If the pot contains 250, bet something like 150-175, and they will usually just go away if they have nothing.

4. Value of a Free Card:

¬ This factor is an interesting, although not quite as important as the ones above. What it generally means is that you should be more likely to bet if you don’t mind being raised. For instance, if you have AK on a QT4 board, it’s a little annoying to get check raised, because you know that if a jack fell you might have won a nice pot. If the flop is Q84, you don’t really care as much if you get raised because you have no real hand anyway.
The best example of this is when you flop the nut flush draw but have multiple opponents. For instance if you have Ad Td and the flop comes Kd 8d 7c you may often want to check behind, although this depends very much on the stack sizes….

MISCELLANEOUS NOTES:

Hopefully the above examples will help you to determine whether or not it’s a good idea to make a continuation bet. Please note that all of these examples assume you are playing a sit and go, although for the most part I agree with these plays even in MTTs. One key difference of MTTs and STTs is that it’s much more correct to gamble early in MTT’s. That could change the dynamic in a lot of situations like those listed above.

I asked two players about the six examples involving FLOP TEXTURE. One of the players who has a very long history of success at the $215s agreed with my play in every example. They said they would usually bet in hand 5 and this is the only slight difference. The other player I asked is a well known MTT player. He disagreed with a lot of them, often betting where I would check (3+4+5) and checking where I would bet (2). The MTT player does profess to being not very experienced in STT play. To be honest I don’t think the correct play should change very drastically whether it’s a STT or MTT, I just want to make it clear that there are other players with proven winning track records who would approach the above situations differently.

POSITION: You should generally be more careful when you are out of position for a few reasons. First off when your opponent calls you and isn’t in the blind, they are likely to have a stronger hand. Secondly, if they call your flop bet, you can’t just check behind them on the turn for a free card. Most of the time if I have nothing and am OOP (out of position) I will check on the flop, however as always it depends on the texture of the flop, the opponent who called and so on.

It’s also important in higher limit games to check raise in these spots a lot more often. A preflop raise followed by a check is a signal to a lot of players that you are just giving up on the hand, so against regular opponents you are going to need to mix it up sometimes, and occasionally even check raise with nothing. However this type of stuff should be reserved only for the highest limit games and the most regular players who aren’t extremely tight preflop.

PSYCHOLOGY: I want to discuss one more factor, which is the psychology of c-betting. I believe that c-betting too often causes players to want to play fewer hands postflop. What happens is that when you think about raising preflop, you also sometimes feel that no matter what you also have to fire a large bet postflop. This way instead of risking like 2.5-3x the BB, you are actually risking something like 7-8x the BB, just by making a simple raise preflop. Thinking about this can often cause players to get sick and tired of raising with marginal hands and can stifle their creativity. When I first started getting decent at poker I would c-bet practically every single flop where I had raised before the flop. As soon as I cut down on this habit and started to use logic to decide my play my results improved dramatically and I felt a lot better about playing more hands because I knew that sometimes I could just check behind the flop and that I didn’t have to lose a ton of chips every time I flopped nothing and my opponent flopped something.

SUMMARY: One of the main points of this article is that it’s very important not to be robotic when you play poker. You need to take into account many factors before each decision and use them to come up with your play. With practice you will be able to more accurately come up with the correct solution. The trap that you don’t want to fall into is to start making your decisions in a robotic, preconceived fashion. When you think to yourself too often, I will raise preflop and bet the flop no matter what, then you are probably making some mistakes. There are many spots where I do raise preflop and bet the flop almost 100% of the time, but this is due to many other factors present in the situation and it’s not my default way of playing.

Just be sure to constantly take into account every little piece of your surroundings.