At the Foxwoods WPT main event this year I found myself in a hand where pot the ability to calculate pot odds became critical.
It was during the last level of day one. I had managed to grow my chip stack to 50,000 putting me in the top 25% for the day. A comfortable position and the chip leader at the table. The blinds were 300-600 with a 75 ante. So there were 1,650 in the pot pre-flop every hand. I picked up 10h-10d on the cut off. There were two limpers in the hand already. I raised to 2,000. Both the blinds called as did the two limpers. Continue Reading »
In this article I wanted to explore two sure fire methods of trapping your opponent into paying you off in No Limit Hold’em. We will first explore setting up and opponent in the beginning of the hand and then we will look at how we can set up an opponent during the middle of a hand. Continue Reading »
One of the things that separate poker from other games of chance is our ability to select the odds under which we are willing to wager money. One can encourage action by providing the appropriate odds for a call, as one can also discourage action by “pricing someone out” of a pot. However there seems to be a great misconception as to what “True Odds” are and how they are calculated.
Let look at one hand for example and see if we agree on how many outs a particular player has. The player is holding Kh-Qh. Continue Reading »
The month of December is always a very difficult time for us in the business world. Everyone is running around trying to close out the fiscal year, finalize last minute details and push to a close any last minute transactions that still linger. This December was no different as I found myself at my desk for the 10th straight 14-hour day, trying to keep up in hopes of enjoying the Holidays and getting back to the tables for a much needed break.
As I turned on my computer one morning my jaw dropped at a story that I found in my inbox. The story was an interview with Doyle Brunson on the recent death of Chip Reese. A sudden numbness came over me, as time appeared to stand still for a moment. Trapped in a state of disbelief facing my own mortality, I soon realized that a big part of and what I have grown to be also died with Chip that day. Continue Reading »
All too often you will be watching a major televised tournament and witness two players getting it All In on a proverbial coin flip. This is something I have always had difficulty understanding. You make a $10,000 investment to enter the tournament. You devote a week of your life to it. You grind it out for forty hours of play. And then, you push it All In with a hand like Ace-King, hoping your opponent only has an under pair, so that you could flip a coin and see who wins.
This is a practice I often try to avoid, whenever possible. At the tables, I usually have a conservative image, especially in major tournaments, and, players that have been paying attention are aware of the fact that I have a hand, especially when raising pre flop. What I have found is that most players today have trouble getting away from hands like A-K or A-Q, and the new bread of internet players have difficulty getting from any Ace for that matter. Continue Reading »
I recently decided to take a shot at the WPT Event taking place at the Borgata Hotel in Atlantic City. The Borgata has opened a brand new poker room that leaves little to be desired. The high stakes section alone has over 40 tables with plenty of action to be had at all levels and variants. This was a welcomed site as I needed to earn my buy in for the main event. Continue Reading »
The Big Blind position is one that gives even seasoned players a bit of trouble. Many players will find themselves in a pot as a result of several limpers while they are holding a poor hand. Or, perhaps, they called a small pre-flop raise with a mediocre hand as they were getting ample odds to do so. Best case scenario? They fired out a raise from the big blind to isolate or even take the pot down right there and then, and were called.
Regardless of how you found yourself in the hand the bottom line now is you are in the hand post flop in a very disadvantageous position. As such we need to explore our options, but before we can do that we need to qualify who we are in the pot with and what their impression of us is thus far. This may sound familiar to our regular readers as I will rarely submit a strategy piece for publication that does not include the following questions:
- Your table image
- Your opponents table image
- What hand could they have put you on
- What possible hand might they be on.
Assuming you have answered these questions, we can now move on to our post flop strategy. Continue Reading »
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Posted 20 February 2007
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In the last piece we discussed the subject of playing creatively under the gun. I wanted to utilize this article as a continuation and take the opportunity to expand a bit especially with regard to post flop play.
Example 1
Let’s take a step back for a moment and define our situation. We are under the gun. We have decided to enter the pot from this disadvantageous position with a mediocre hand and play the hand aggressively. We initially fired out a pre-flop raise of 4X the big blind and we got two callers. One from late position, and the big blind. Now we need to begin to assess our situation the same as we would do in any other hand. First, let’s rate the players in the hand with us. Are they loose, aggressive, skilled, novice? Assuming we could identify the competition, our next step is always to try to put them on a particular hand. What type of hands have they shown down before? What type of hand would they simply call a raise, from under the gun, with? This information is more important then our starting hand or the flop itself. The best post flop strategy is to play based on your opponent’s hand, not your own. Being that most flops will miss a player 3 out or 4 times, it is critical to be able to assess rather quickly if that particular flop has improved your opponent’s hand. Continue Reading »
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Posted 09 December 2006
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A great deal has been written about how one should play when under the gun, pre flop. Conventional wisdom tells us to only play premium hands from this position. Secondly we are told that if we are a conservative player we should be aggressive and if we are a loose player we should try to camouflage our hand.
In my opinion it is far more complicated than that. One can play rather creatively under the gun and approach this disadvantageous position from a position of strength. Before one can begin to contemplate defying conventional wisdom, one must first have a good grasp on the following: Continue Reading »
Some people would say that I am the wrong individual to be giving advice on the subject being I have never won the main event in my two attempts, and will probably never win it, as I have no intention of ever playing it again in its current format.
One would think that a skilled player would have a significant advantage over a field of players, and in most cases this would be accurate. After all, a skilled player is most likely to get his chips in when he is ahead rather than behind, thus, a skilled player is more likely to face a bad beat than the novice player. Let’s look at some examples though as to how the probability of a skilled player surviving a particular field of players varies significantly. Continue Reading »
At the Foxwoods WPT main event this year I found myself in a hand where pot the ability to calculate pot odds became critical.
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