The first part of this two-part series (see: How Poker Has Changed) discussed continuation bets, defending against continuation bets, raising on air, range versus range, and fold-equity – all elements of the new poker that’s come into being in the past few years. Here are a few more:

Third Level Play

Most poker players talk this talk but far fewer walk the walk. If first level play is the elementary process of considering the strength of your hand, and your hand only, and second level play involves thinking about what your opponent might be holding, third level play involves making a determination about what your opponent thinks you have in your hand.

If your opponent is reading you as you’re reading him, and you can take whatever steps are needed to plant a seed in his mind that you have a very different hand than whatever it is you’re really holding, you can simply play off the way your opponent reads you, and the actual hand you have is of little importance.

For instance, if you can convince your opponent that you have a huge hand, you can bet or raise, secure in the knowledge that he will fold because you know that your opponent has convinced himself that you have a huge hand.

If you’re able to convince him that you are horribly weak but really have a very big hand, you can play off of your opponent’s read of you and allow him to do the betting until the time is right for you to put the hammer down and take all of his chips.

That’s third level play, and while we all discuss it, very few of us do it as well as we’d like to. But just by thinking about it, and reviewing hands you’ve played in terms of third level thinking, your game will improve by leaps and bounds.

Decision Support Tools

While they’re only useful in online games, there are a raft of online support tools that render decision making easier when playing online poker and provide the ability to perform post-mortem analyses of poker hands you’ve played and possibly mangled. But by reviewing them, you’ll learn and probably won’t make those same mistakes the next time – which is what growth and development as a poker player is all about.

These online support tools are changing all the time, and newer models, and new tools altogether come on the market all the time, so there’s no point in reviewing a spate of them here – the review will be dated by the time you read this – but that’s not the point. The point is to make you aware that many online poker players use decision support tools to take some of the guesswork out of online poker decisions, and help them play better poker as a result.

These tools have changed poker dramatically, and the ability to revisit decisions and learn from errors and good choices too is one reason why online players are so skillful, and probably why they are able to make a quick and easy transition to brick-and-mortar games too. Even without their electronic decision support gadgetry, the know-how gained by employing decision support tools leads to learning things that make for better decisions even when weaned from their use and playing in a traditional casino.

Editor’s note: For more information please see the ‘poker tracking software‘ page in our beginners guide to online poker.

Playing Through Multiple Streets

One of the expensive lessons learned when taking up no-limit poker is that decisions made on one betting round impact those made subsequently. In a fixed-limit game, a bet on the flop or the turn is sort of independent of what might transpire on subsequent rounds. Sure, your opponent might bet the turn if he bet the flop, but the amount of his bet is a known quantity and can easily be factored into a play-or-fold decision on that earlier betting round.

But whenever an opponent bets or raises on the flop or the turn in a no-limit game, there’s a good chance he’s going to make an even bigger wager on the next betting round. When all of your chips might be at risk on subsequent betting rounds, you have to consider the potential cost of impending bets when considering a decision to call now.

This has the effect of implied odds being leveraged against you. A call made at the price of a few chips when you have a drawing hand must be made with a considered awareness of what you intend to do if you miss your draw on the current wagering round and your opponent fires a very big bet at you subsequently. If that happens the cost to take a card off and see the river will have gone up dramatically, and the odds against completing your hand with only one card to come – as compared with the odds against making your hand with two cards to come when you’ve just seen the flop – have just gotten significantly longer.

Here’s a case in point. Suppose you flopped a flush draw. The odds against making your hand with two cards to come are only 1.86-to-1 against you. But if your flush card fails to show up on the turn, then the odds against completing your hand with only the river card waiting to be delivered are 4.11-to-1. And when your chances of connecting have just gotten longer and the price to draw that final card has escalated, a decision on the flop can only be made correctly if you consider what your cost of continuing to play might be on a subsequent betting round.

You might be in a situation where you are not looking at two chances to complete your flush. You might simply be looking at a marginally affordable price to see the turn, along with the knowledge that you’ll probably have to release your hand if you fail to complete it because the cost to see the river is likely to be prohibitive.

You also have to think about what will happen if you do make your flush. What, you have to ask yourself, does your opponent suspect you have, and what will he do about it. If your opponent figures you for a flush draw and you come out betting when a third suited card hits the turn, you might not be getting the implied odds you needed to draw for that flush in the first place. But if your opponent is not the kind of player who is willing to lay down a hand either because he doesn’t suspect that you are drawing or has talked himself into the fact that you really aren’t on a draw – even when all his inner voices are telling him you are – then you are probably getting the implied odds needed to draw for your flush because you realize that this particular opponent will pay you off if you get lucky.

Calling – the New Disguise

Back in the day, and we’re only talking about a few years ago – callers were the wimps of poker. “Pump it or dump it” was a popular saying, and players who preferred to call were considered weak, or weak-tight, or just plain fish who didn’t get full value out of their hands like those who played aggressive, raise-oriented poker.

It’s all changed… somewhat. Raising and aggressive poker still gives the proponent two ways to win – the raiser might have the best hand or his opponent might fold – but calling has found a newer place in the hierarchy of poker tactics.

Suppose you’re playing no-limit hold’em and you come out betting. If your opponent folds, that’s great news; you just won the pot. If you bet and he raises, he might have a better hand or he might be bluffing and you’ll have to figure that out. But if he just calls, you have no idea what he has in his hand. He could have anything form an uncertain holding to a hand he simply wants to defer taking action on. When the next betting round comes around, what do you do?

It’s tough to put a caller on a hand because his action did not portend anything special. You might bet and he might fold. Or he might call again. He might even raise, particularly if you figured he might have a drawing hand and made a much bigger bet in order to drive him off of his draw. Now you can no longer interpret his call on the previous round as a sign of weakness. You can only see it for what it was, a successful attempt to lure you onward and induce you to do the betting for your opponent. You were trapped by that seemingly weak play.

Like so much in poker, there’s nothing new about calling. It’s been around since the first bet was made. But now it’s been twisted around a bit with a new strategic wrinkle. Now calling is no longer a universal sign of weakness; it can be a sign of a tactically astute player simply deferring his decision to show you the true or purported strength of his hand until a subsequent betting round.

And if you’re easily led into wagering traps by this kind of tactic, you’re not alone. It’s part and parcel of the “new poker,” but now that you’re aware of it, you can always check behind tricky opponents when you’re not sure what they have and you don’t have much of a hand yourself. Who knows, you might even get lucky and complete your hand with the next card that’s exposed and along with it, turn the tables on your slick adversary.

Related posts:

1. How Poker Has Changed, Part I

Poker has changed more rapidly over the past few years than it has in the entirety of the game’s history. Seven years ago, just before the beginnings of a poker boom that was triggered by Chris Moneymaker’s improbable World Series of Poker win, when he overcame a then record field of 839 players to take home $2,500,000 and become a household name in the process, poker was a different beast altogether.

In the US, at least, prior to Moneymaker, poker was mainly a cash game, played at fixed-limits. No-limit poker was mainly confined to tournament offerings, seldom played in cash games in the United States, and the internet boom was just beginning. To say Chris Moneymaker’s victory – a parlay of astronomical proportions that began when he won a $55 online satellite and ran it into a multi-million dollar payoff – had an impact on the growth of both online poker and the number of entrants in the game’s biggest event, the World Series of Poker, is an understatement of massive proportions. From 2003’s then-record number of 839 entrants to 2006, when 8,773 entered, the WSOP grew to more than ten times the number of players in the main event.

But size isn’t everything, at least not in poker. The nature of the game changed too, and giant leaps forward in poker strategy and tactics have been made, as new players, younger players, and older players too, continued to raise their games, which in turn forced others to upgrade their skill sets in order to compete, or else risk dropping by the wayside as their bankrolls vanished into the hands of more skillfed, sophisticated poker players.

Some of these changes were subtle, almost imperceptible, while others represented big concepts that were either new to the game, or concepts that had been used in the past, but never to the degree that’s seen now, or used by so many sophisticated poker players.

Continuation Bets, Defending Against Continuation bets, and Raising on Air

One big poker concept was that took hold in recent years is the massive popularity of the continuation bet. It’s nothing new; poker players have used this tactic for years. You raise before the flop and regardless of whether the flop hits you or not, you’re going to bet if you’re first to act or if the action is checked around to you.

The thinking behind this play is that unless the flop also helped your opponent, he will have a hard time calling if you raised both before and on the flop. But its popularity led to many players adopting a counter strategy of raising those who almost always make a continuation bet if they raised before the flop. Their reasoning is simple. A raiser is statistically more likely to raise with big cards than a big pair, and if he does, there is only one chance in three that the flop will help him. Since the flop is more likely to miss a player than to help him, then by raising his continuation bet, it will be the original raiser who has a tough time calling with nothing more than two big cards.

That’s where we are right now. The fact that players who raise are more likely to have nothing after the flop than a big hand, led to the prevalence of raising on air, with nothing at all other than audacity and the idea of taking the play – and the pot – away from an opponent who more often than not, isn’t likely to have much of a hand.

Range Versus Range

Five years ago poker players were trying to put their opponents on hands, and many still do just that. Haven’t you heard opponents say, “I knew you had AK,” or something equally specific. Well, there’s little chance that your opponent can figure out your hand well enough to be specific about it, especially in early betting rounds. Poker players who think they can do this with regularity are just dreaming.

What good poker players do is assign a range of hands to you based on the hands they’ve seen you play. For example, if you raise from early position, I might assign a range to you of any pair of tens or higher, along with AK, AQ, AJs, and KQs. That’s a total of five pairs, and since there are six ways to combine cards of the same rank into pairs, it’s a total of 30 hands – six pairs of aces, six pairs of kings, etc. To that I can add 64 big-card combinations, since there are 16 ways to combine and ace and a king into Big Slick, and you’re likely to play any of these four, 16-way combos, that’s a total of 64. Added to the possibility of your pairs, that’s 90 possible hands you could raise with, assuming my assessment of your likely raising hands from early position is accurate.

While I was not able to assign a specific hand to you, I don’t really have to. After all, I’m not playing a specific hand against you. Regardless of the cards I happen to be holding, I’m playing the range of hands I need to have to warrant a call – and to do that I’d need to hold a hand that’s bigger than half of your raising range in order to make a solid call with some expectation of winning. So if I can beat the bottom half of your range – basically, all of your big-card combos with the exception of AK, I have a hand I can call with. Since 30 of your raising hands will be pairs and there are 16 ways to combine big cards, the top half of your range are pairs of tens or higher and AK, for a total of 46 out of the 90 hands you’d raise with. If I’m not somewhere north of there, I’m better off folding.

That, in a nutshell, is the basic thinking behind range versus range. If you had a much narrower raising range, the hands I’d have to have to call you would be much smaller. If you were prone to raising with lesser poker hands, such as pairs of sevens, eights, and nines, as well as with AJ, KQ, KJ, and QJ suited or not, I could call with weaker hands and still figure to be north of your median raising hand. Not only that, I could also reraise with lesser hands too.

It usually doesn’t pay to put a player on a specific poker hand. Put him on a range of hands instead, and based on how he bets and raises in conjunction with the community cards on the board, you can often narrow down your assessment of his holdings. But even if you can’t, if you are accurate about your opponent’s playing proclivities, you can put the odds in your favor by playing hands that figure to be better than his the majority of the time. There’s no mystery to this. The mystery lies in how accurate you are in determining the range of hands your opponent will play, and how he will play them most of the time. That’s where the art of poker comes into play, and while it’s something you can improve with experience, it doesn’t lend itself to a formulaic approach.

Fold Equity

The concept has always been with us, though its name is somewhat new. The concept comes from semi-bluffing, a bet made with a hand that’s probably not the best hand right now, but a hand that stands a good chance of outdrawing any opponents who call.

Semi-bluffing provides two ways to win. Your opponent can fold and you’ll win the pot, but even if you are called, you have a reasonable chance of catching one of the cards you need on a subsequent round to make your hand.

But to give yourself two ways to win, a semi-bluff can only be made with more cards to come. If you bet the river with an unmade draw, you’ll only win if your opponent folds; you can’t win if he calls. If you bet on the flop or turn, you can win if he folds – this is referred to as “fold equity” – and you also have a chance to win by improving.

When you add the idea of fold equity – that percent of time an opponent will fold to your bet – to whatever your chances are of improving to the best hand, it might raise a hand from one that would otherwise be a loser to one that’s worth playing.

Thinking in terms of fold equity allows a poker player to become creative with hands that would otherwise be folded if considered solely from the perspective of the hand’s chances of improving to the best hand on future betting rounds. That’s why you often see good poker players raise with otherwise suspect hands. They’ve done the math and realize that a bet from a hand that’s currently only a 40 percent shot to win, but has a 15 percent chance of inducing the opposing player to fold, now has a 55 percent chance of winning.

The danger of fold equity, of course, is that many weak players use this notion simply as a way of talking themselves into playing hands that ought to be folded because their assessment of fold equity is horribly wrong. If, for example, you’re playing against an opponent who seldom folds and cannot be bluffed, just forget about fold equity. You have none. Instead, all you should do is value bet your good hands instead, because while you can’t bluff this kind of player you can and will get paid off every time you wager.

The second of this two-part series will explore Third-Level Play, Decision Support Tools, Playing Through Multiple Streets, and Calling: The New Disguise

Related posts:

1. How Poker Has Changed, Part II
2. On the Short Stack

“Trust your instincts, class.” Those were a teacher’s words back when I was a teenager and prepping for one of the myriad standardized tests administered to see how we were progressing with our lessons in comparison to kids from other schools in other cities, all across New York State. What out teacher meant was this: When confronted by a multiple choice question, or one that could be answered “true” or “false,” and you aren’t sure which answer is correct, go with your initial instinct.

Little did I know that this would turn out to be terrific poker advice, though poker is infinitely more complex than true-or-false, always-sometimes-never, or some collection of five choices labeled “a” through “e” and plugged into a multiple-choice grouping.

While all good poker players have the skill to make tough decisions correctly more often than not, great players also have courage that supports their convictions. Once players learn to make accurate reads and decipher the range of hands their opponents are likely to play under whatever the current circumstances happen to be – great poker players have the guts to stick with their reads and act on them. And even when they’re occasionally wrong – and everyone is wrong some portion of the time – they have the fortitude not to let a bad read or a protracted slump turn them around and take them completely away from trusting their instincts.

I’ve often talked about taking advantage of your opponent until they give you a good reason to change your strategy, and why it’s important to hold tight to this approach: Never change a winning game; always change a losing one.

I’ve occasionally been told that these two phrases seem to be at variance with one another. What do you think? Should you stay the course, or do so only when it’s working, but try another approach if you’re not getting the results you’re hoping for?

When analyzing our opponents’ play, trusting our analysis and committing money to it is really the only choice we have. To second guess ourselves without good reason renders us directionless and adrift without a rudder. Our actions – whether it involves betting into an opponent, checkraising aggressive players, or bluffing overly tight opponents, are all the kinds of things you shouldn’t change when you’re winning, but if your results are not what you’re hoping for, you need to pull apart your game and rebuild your strategic and tactical approach.

Analysis – as opposed to what we actually do – is poker’s inner game. After all, you can put your opponent on any range of hands and then take whatever action you think is best under the circumstances. You can check or bet, fold, call, raise, or reraise, and whatever action you select is probably predicated on whatever you believe will win the most money (or lose the least) – and the tactic you select is quite independent of the analysis you made. But analysis is the foundation upon which this house is built; and unless your analysis is right, you don’t have much of a basis for selecting the best tactic from your bag of tricks.

Sometimes you’ll be wrong because your opponent stepped out of character for just one hand! During the 2004 World Series of Poker, both Josh Arieh and Greg Raymer, who were playing very aggressively at the final table, folded when “Action” Dan Harrington reraised even though they had a significant amount invested in that pot. Harrington’s tongue-in-cheek nickname suggests a very tight player, and at the final table he entered very few pots. When he played a pot, he came in raising, and all the hands he showed down until that point were high-quality holdings.

Arieh and Raymer each folded rather quickly when Harrington made his completely out-of-character play at the pot with two worthless cards in his hand. Harrington created such a tight image at the table that it earned him a license to steal, as long as his read told him that neither of his two opponents really had much of a hand.

Arieh and Raymer probably said to themselves, “Oh, no; he’s got pocket queens, kings, or aces,” before folding their hands, and until they saw it all on TV a few months later, they never realized how easily “Action” Dan swiped a big pot right out from under their noses.

They read it incorrectly. And that’s not because Arieh and Raymer do a bad job at sniffing out another’s cards; they whiffed here because Harrington set them up, and they read him based on his pattern of play up until that point. They couldn’t know he was bluffing, and even if they suspected that he might bluff at some point during the final table, they had no reason to think it would be this particular hand.

Harrington’s playing style earned him at least one ticket to steal a big pot. Had a big raise come from either Raymer or Arieh, the player stirring the pot would probably have been called by the other. Raymer and Arieh each realized the other was very aggressive, and each would have made a stand if they had a real hand. But to call Harrington in that situation they needed a great hand, not merely a good one, and if “Action” Dan was able to read both of them for good-but-not-great hands – the kind most expert players will lay down to a tight, conservative player who comes in raising – he earned that pot.

The fact that Raymer and Arieh misread Harrington on that particular hand does not mean they needed to question their card-reading based on what they’d observed thus far; in fact, that would have been the worst thing they could have done. They each took the hit and continued on from there. Their ability to make good reads most of the time had gotten them to the final table and there was no need for radical surgery just because another expert player had set up a terrific bluffing situation and followed through with it. On that hand, Harrington succeeded. He never showed his hole cards, so as far as his opponents knew – at least until they saw the results on TV later that summer – he did have a big hand, and they made good lay-downs.

(If you’ve not yet seen it, watch the video of this famous hand and my analysis of Harrington’s squeeze play in the masterclass section.)

Don’t distrust your reads when you’re playing poker as long as they’ve been correct more often than not. What might seem like a bad read may simply be a reaction to your opponent stepping out of character for a hand or two. Trust your reads as long as they’re working for you the majority of the time. If they’re not working, it’s usually a case of interpreting betting patterns incorrectly, so watch your opponents, watch the hands they turn over at the showdown, and adjust accordingly. If you seem to go astray only every now and then, just keep on course. It’s usually the right one.

Related posts:

1. Phil Ivey Reads Souls
2. Dan Harrington’s Squeeze Play

Playing Poker on Other People’s Money

It may come as a surprise to you, but a large number of tournament poker players – the pros that you see every week on television, not the amateurs who take a flyer on an occasional big buy-in event – are staked. They are playing poker on other people’s money, and as a result stand to win only a percentage of what it appears they have won when they make a big score.

Why do they do this? Aren’t these big name pros good enough at poker to make it on their own? The reasons are myriad. But the variance in tournament poker is huge – much bigger than in cash games, and even a good poker player who is probably a winner in the long run can go a very long time without cashing high enough up on the pay ladder to show a profit.

Not only are the swings big in tournament poker, the costs associated with playing are high too. After all, when you play big tournaments in brick-and-mortar casinos, you have to play them where they are, which often means plane fare from your home to the tournament as well as the cost of in a hotel for however long you plan to be there. For someone flying from Europe to Las Vegas to compete in the World Series of Poker, it means factoring in the cost of a hotel, meals, and getting around town in addition to entry fees.

While the top echelon poker players usually don’t have to be staked – Doyle Brunson and Phil Ivey, for example, can play on their own money – the tournament players slightly below them really need to minimize the risks of going broke. It’s also important to realize that Ivey and Brunson are marvelous cash game players who win millions each year in the day-to-day grind of high stake, cash game poker. But many otherwise good tournament players are lifelong losers in cash games, and do not have the ability to build their tournament bankroll this way. To make a living they have to beat tournaments and avoid cash games.

Being staked is the answer. Other players who have the cash at the time stake players, or others stake them – non-poker playing investors who see a chance to make a score by backing a winning tournament player.

Amateurs who take a piece of someone on a one-time only basis stake some players. You can invest $500 or $1,000 to help your favorite pro buy into a $10,000 buy-in poker tournament and share in the rewards when he cashes in the event. Guys who invested in Greg Raymer when he won the World Series of Poker’s main event a few years ago must have felt very happy indeed when he won and his investors collectively reaped a small fortune as a result.

Erik Seidel and John Juanda staked Mike Matusow to a million-dollar payday at the WSOP’s main event. Erick Lindgren backed Josh Arieh when he won $2.5 million for third place in the 2004. Billy Baxter invested in the late Stu Ungar during the 1997 WSOP championship, which Ungar won handily.

But being staked usually means one of two things. You are on a makeup deal, or you’re not. When you’ve struck a makeup deal with a backer, you agree to repay him the costs of entry and fees from tournaments where you’ve failed to cash before winning any money for yourself. The basic staking deal calls for a backer to pay another player’s buy-ins and entry fees, then split the winnings only after buy-ins and entry fees are recouped.

Staked players who don’t cash for four, five, maybe 10 major events can owe their backer $100,000 or more because buy-ins and entry fees get taken off the top before the winnings are split. When a poker player is in the hole for that kind of money, even if he wins an event he may not see much of a payday. So there’s a tendency for players who are on makeup with one backer to terminate that relationship as soon as their agreement is up and find a new backer, where the books are balanced at the outset.

The other kind of arrangement does not involve makeup. Each tournament stands alone, and if the player doesn’t cash in three straight events, but wins $50,000 in the fourth event he plays, he would win his share of the $50,000 and not have to worry about paying makeup to a backer.

On first glance it seems like makeup is a better deal for the backer. But maybe not. There is a tendency for the staked player to bolt whenever he is on makeup and in too deep of a hole. Then the backer has no chance of getting back his investment, the player is out on the street, broke or close to it and looking for another backer where he can start at ground zero all over again.

In a deal without makeup, the backer can take a higher percentage of the money his player wins to account for his added investment. In other words, a backer could offer a player a makeup deal where he is playing for 50 percent of himself, or a deal without makeup but the player keeps only 30 percent of his winnings. The backer assumes all the risk related to entry fees, but will come away with more money if his stake horse is a winner.

Backing deals that do not involve makeup also tend to last longer, because the player always starts from square one in each tournament, and doesn’t have to climb out of a hole to pay makeup before winning any money for himself.

Playing on other people’s money also keeps the staked player free from worry during the tournament itself. When facing a big bet with a strong suspicion that an opponent is bluffing, it’s easier to make that call when there are no worries about surviving in this tournament to win enough to play in the next one. When playing on their own limited bankroll, players may tend to fold that hand because mere survival often becomes more compelling than a desire to win.

Rather than having a single investor stake him for one tournament and risk losing that entire stake, some players develop an investment portfolio of sorts. They might map out ten or 20 events, figure the cost to enter all of them, then sell shares to investors or other players. This method hedges against bad runs and short-term variance. The drawback is a lot of bookkeeping and communicating with backers. But for a winning poker player, this might be the best staking method, since it doesn’t involve digging one’s self into the makeup hole, nor does it run the risk of burning up a backer due to a short term run of bad cards. This method also avoids giving a single backer a sense of ownership over the player.

But is staking ethical, or is it a potential conflict of interest that threatens the public’s fascination with big buy-in tournament poker if one player backs another? Whenever another who is also playing the same tournament backs a player, the appearance of a conflict of interest can raise its ugly head.

Suppose an investor and his horse wind up at the same poker table, or perhaps two players backed by the same investor are squaring off against one another? Will one player dump chips off to another for the investor’s benefit? While it’s possible, the penalties for this type of collusion, including a lifetime expulsion from tournament poker events, serve as deterrents.

Nevertheless, the appearance of collusion can be as damaging as collusion itself. While poker has experienced incredibly rapid growth worldwide, it hasn’t consolidated those gains to the point where it can survive a big collusion scandal. Tournament directors have the added job of ensuring that their events are clean, and that includes a game free of players influenced or directed by financial backers.

If you’re looking for a stake, don’t expect it to be easy. First, you’ve got to be a winning player, otherwise why would anyone take a flyer on you? In addition, most investors want to have some sort of relationship with you. This is a character and trust issue. If you cannot be trusted, if your character is called into question, backers won’t touch you. Backing can also provide a measure of prestige. If you were to be backed by Phil Ivey, it conveys a large amount of status and prestige.

If you’re exclusively an online poker player then backing is a tougher nut to crack. Building relationships is more difficult online and there’s little real chance to get to know players who are, for the most part, merely screen names to their playing peers. It’s tough to assess someone’s character and trustworthiness unless you interact with them in person.

Nevertheless, players who meet others in live poker games and brick-and-mortar tournaments can easily build relationships that extend over into the virtual world. If you develop a relationship with a backer or a group of them, there’s no reason why you can’t be backed for online poker tournaments too. One of the added benefits of online backing arrangements, is that your backer can always watch and assess the quality of your play, regardless of whether you cash in a given event or not. If you play well, your backer will know it. If you win money but play poorly, your backer will know that too, and he may well want to get out while the getting is good.

The bottom line is that being staked offers skilled players who do not have a big bankroll an opportunity to play in events they otherwise couldn’t afford, and maybe a chance to earn more money than they could if they played on their own dime in smaller events. The drawback is that you don’t keep all of what you win. It’s entirely a case of circumstances, and this is a decision you’ll ultimately have to make on your own.

No related posts.

I was playing in a $1,000 maximum buy-in, $2-$5 no-limit game recently, when a new player sat down two seats to my right and bought in for $1,000. On the third hand he played, he checked when the turn card was dealt and his lone opponent, a guy seated to my immediate right and the new player’s immediate left, made a smallish wager. The new player thought for just the briefest of moments before saying, “all-in.” To his surprise and dismay, he was beaten to the pot by his opponent who said, “I call,” and then added, “I’m pretty sure I’ve got you covered; I have about $1,300 here.”

The new guy looked like he’d been shot. He bolted upright in his seat and then said, “I never saw his stack of hundreds. I thought he only had about two-and-a-half stacks of reds ($5 chips).” His opponent said that his black, hundred-dollar chips were in plain view, unobstructed and unhidden, and that his opponent now had to call for the rest of his thousand-dollar buy-in or fold. After hemming and hawing, he called, showed down two pair that failed to improve when the river card was dealt, and lost to the nut flush his opponent made on the turn.

The new player was unhappy and couldn’t let it go. “Why didn’t you tell me how much he had in front of him?” he said to the dealer, who responded by saying, “You never asked me. It’s not my job to count each player’s stack every time there’s a bet. But any time a player asks me to tell him how much a player has in front of him, I will gladly do that.” A floor supervisor was finally called to the now-escalating fray, and he supported the dealer’s explanation. Only then did the losing player seem to exhale (all the argument taken out of him) – and then he bought in again for another thousand dollars.

I didn’t say a word during the discussion. I didn’t need to. The dealer and floor supervisor had all the facts at hand, had the situation it under control, and made the right decision too. My take on the situation was that the new poker player didn’t take the time to scope out the table and was really unaware of how approximately how many chips each player had in front of him, and in his haste to bet his two pair – thinking that when he said “all-in” the most he could lose was somewhere in the neighborhood of $250 – he acted before gathering all the necessary facts and thinking things out clearly.

Had he said to his opponent, “How much do you have in front of you?” before making his wager, he would have had an opportunity to size his bet based not only on the inherent strength of his own hand, but he could have factored stack size into the betting equation too. He probably would have lost less in the process. If he bet about $250 and his opponent – who was sitting there with his newly-minted nut flush – then pushed all in, he could have folded and saved himself $700 if he thought his only chance of winning was that slim 8.7 percent chance of improving from two pair to a full house on the river.

Since he just sat down at the table, I have no idea what he would have done. I don’t know whether he was familiar with his opponent’s playing style, so I’ve no idea what percentage of time he would have figured his opponent for a bluff. But if he read his opponent for a flush and assigned only a small percentage to the chance that his opponent was trying to steal the pot, folding still would have been the smart play.

The outcome of the hand is not important here. What matters is that the guy who misread – or more likely, really never even took a good look – at his opponent’s stack size, committed a very basic error. He didn’t look before he leaped. So eager was he to play his own hand for its intrinsic merit, he never considered what his opponent might be holding, nor did he account for the number of chips in his stack.

I’m just guessing, but I suspect that if this same opponent had been at the table for 15 minutes or longer when this confrontation happened, the results would have been quite different. The new player probably would have acclimated himself to the table, not jumped in with both barrels blazing, and taken the time so size up his opposition and have some rough idea of each opponent’s chip count.

Poker is unique among sports in that it has no warm-up period. Every other athletic endeavor has its own pre-game rituals of getting ready to play. But poker players don’t get dealt a few practice hands when they first sit down; they have to pony up real money and play it for all it’s worth.

Poker pro Barry Tanenbaum has said on more than one occasion that he likes to win the very first hand he plays. There are lots of reasons for this, but one of the more subtle ones is that it forces you to take a look around, scope out your opponents, and have a pretty clear idea of how your hand stacks up to your opponent before you commit an entire buy-in to it, even if that commitment is less than enthusiastic and made almost inadvertently.

Related posts:

1. On the Short Stack

This is the second of a two-part series about common mistakes made by poker players.

#8. Putting Your Opponent on a Single Hand, Rather Than a Range of Hands.

I always get a charge out of opponents who say something like, “I knew you had AK,” when I show down big slick and win a pot with it. For one thing, it marks them as a really poor poker player. Consider this. If my opponent knew with certainty that I had AK, which gave me top pair with the very best possible kicker, and he had a hand that couldn’t beat it, why did he call? Either of two reasons would suffice. For one, he wasn’t really sure what I had. He may have suspected I had top pair-top kicker, but wasn’t certain and was very reluctant to throw away what otherwise might have been a winning hand. Another possibility is that he had no idea at all what I had, but his insatiable and costly curiosity pushed him over the line and he called that one last bet.

The truth is you almost never can put a player on a specific hand, especially not before the flop. The best you can do – and what you should do – is to put your opponent on a range of hands, and keep narrowing down the range based on the cards that appear on future wagering rounds and the actions your opponent takes.

To put your opponent on a range of hands, you first have to understand something about his playing proclivities. Ask yourself what he’s likely to raise with in early, middle, or late position, both as the first player to voluntarily enter the pot, after one or more players have called, after there’s been a raise, after there’s been a call and then a raise, and after there’s been a raise and someone else has called.

If you don’t have these answers, and they’ll vary for each opponent, you’ll have to assign some default options for the opponents you know nothing about. And when you do, be sure to modify these default positions based on the knowledge you gain from observing what kinds of hands your opponent actually tables, and the kind of wagering action that took place during the hand.

Once you can place your opponent on a range of hands, you need to begin to play against his entire range of hands. But you shouldn’t do this just with the cards you happen to hold at that moment; you need to play your range of hands against his range of hands. If, for example, you simply play each two-card starting hand based on its own inherent strength, your opponents will quickly discern how you handle big pairs, big connectors, and all the other hands you might play. To counter that possibility, you might usually raise with pocket Aces, Kings, and Queens – and to throw in some deception, raise the same amount with 98 suited and pocket sixes.

While you’ll be tossing those sizes and 98 suited away after the flop the vast majority of the time, when you do flop a big hand with those value-added hands, you’ll win a lot of money if you can trap your opponent with a big pocket pair, big kicker or better yet, two pair, when you’ve flopped a set or a straight.

The idea of putting your opponent on a range of hands is so important that it’s worth a future article all by itself – maybe even a series of articles or even an entire book – but for purposes of this list, just make sure that if you catch yourself thinking in terms of single hands instead of ranges of hands, sit up, start over, and begin analyzing your hand and your opponents in terms of playable ranges and wagering accordingly.

#9. Playing Your Own Holdings as a Single Hand, Rather than a Range of Hands.

This is so closely related to the previous concept that it could have been included as part of it. Poker beginners often bet proportionally to the strength of their hand. When these players attempt to become deceptive, they fall into the sin of playing Aces and Kings like they were weaker hands. Instead, they should play some weaker hands like they were Aces and Kings, which is generally a better way of engendering deception than giving your opponents a free or very low cost chance to draw out on you by playing your strongest hands as though they were weaklings, but never playing weaker hands like they are pocket Aces or Kings.

#10. Calling When You Should Raise.

While not as common or as significant an error as calling when you should have folded, failure to raise when the time is right will cost you money in the long run. One key to successful poker is to charge your adversaries for the opportunity to draw out on you. In a fixed-limit game you can only charge them as much as the betting limits allow, but in a no-limit game you can bet enough so that the cost for them to draw exceeds their chances of completing their straight or flush. When that’s the case, the long run supports bets of that nature. Even if your opponent gets lucky this time, he’ll lose in the long run when he’s drawing to longer odds than are offered by the payoff.

When you structure your no-limit bet so that the pot is offering even money on a call, but the odds against your opponent completing his hand are 2-to-1, you’ll win in the long run. And that’s what poker is all about. Make ‘em pay to get there, and charge ‘em what you think the traffic will bear.

#11. Hopefulness.

Hope is the death of poker players. That’s not the case in other endeavors, when hope can play a major role in accomplishing goals, in survival, and in providing the wherewithal to persevere in the face of incredible odds. Hope is food for the human spirit – the sustenance that tells us to never give up, never retreat, and never surrender.

Although hope supports a lot of what we accomplish as people, winning at poker is not on that list. Players who hope are players who base their actions on hunches, who wish rather than analyze, and who continue to call in the face of long odds that are not nearly offset by the size of the pot being contested.

In the 50-year old ballad, Springhill Mine Disaster – a song that tells the story of some miners who survived a cave-in in a coal mine – originally sung by Ewan MacColl and more recently by U2, the lyric goes;

Three days past and the lamps gave out

And Caleb Rushton got up and said

There’s no more water, or light, or bread

So we’ll live on song and hope instead.

While hope may have gone a long way toward keeping those miners alive for a week and a day in a dark and airless chamber deep in a collapsed mineshaft, it won’t do you much good at the poker table. If you need some poetry to keep hope at bay during your time at the poker table, a better choice might be “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” the inscription at the entrance to Hell taken from Dante Alighieri’s allegorical epic poem that was written sometime between 1306 and 1321.

#12. Playing too Big for Your Bankroll.

How often have you seen someone who is losing move up in stakes in order to get his bankroll back where he thinks it ought to be in the least possible time? Sometimes it works, but most often it’s a complete step in the wrong direction. When your bankroll has been beaten down it’s time to drop down in stakes in an attempt to keep your bankroll large enough to survive the predictable swings and variance that’s likely to befall you in any game you play.

Moving up carries with it the chance that your bad run of cards or poor play will conspire to destroy your bankroll completely, and if that happens, how will you get back in the game? You’ll either have to borrow the money, get a job, or watch from the sidelines, and none of those choices are very desirable.

Better than that is dropping down, winning, rebuilding your bankroll, and then moving back to the limits you prefer.

#13. Not Being Accountable for Your Results

Don’t blame the dealer; don’t ask for a deck change, and don’t blame anyone else at the table for the results you achieve. Poker is a blend of skill and luck and your short-term results may be due to one or the other, or a combination of both, but regardless of the source of your losses, only you are accountable for your results at the poker table. You can’t lay the blame anywhere else but squarely on your shoulders.

If you do take responsibility for your achievements and failures, you are likely to assess your results with an eye toward improving, and having even better results in the future. If you deflect and deny accountability, there’s no motivation whatsoever to try to improve, and in the long run you’ll fail to make progress while your opponents are improving all around you.

In relative terms you’re taking on water and sinking fast. It’s not a pretty picture, but one that’s easily rectified. All you have to do is hold yourself accountable for whatever you achieve, and if you aren’t pleased with what you see, improve your play, upgrade your skills, and do better next time.

#14. Failure to Keep Good Records – or Any Records At All.

Closely related to avoiding accountability is the failure to keep good records. If you don’t keep good records, or if you don’t keep records at all, how in the world will you know how you’re doing? You won’t have any idea in a traditional casino game. You will online, because you can see your bankroll grow or shrink – or even disappear altogether – but records are more helpful than an aggregation of your results. They will show you which games you perform best in, and whether your cash game or tournament play is more productive for you.

If you’re serious about your poker play, you have to treat it as a business, and a business that fails to keep records is as business destined to fail.

#15. We Have Met the Enemy (and he is us).

You are your worst poker enemy, as Dr. Al Schoonmaker would say. Your toughest poker adversary looks back at you in the mirror daily. To improve your poker skills you must first be brutally honest about them. There is always room for improvement, and it’s up to you to examine your skills, determine your shortcomings and then decide how to go about raising your game to the highest level within your reach. But you need to be accountable for your results, you need to keep good records, and you need to realize that the vast majority of challenges you will overcome on the road to becoming an excellent poker player probably reside within you.

These are only 15 of the common mistakes found among poker players. There are many more. But for now, there’s plenty to keep you busy identifying your weaknesses and leaks, developing a plan to raise your game and putting the plan into action.

Here’s where the Japanese concept of kai-zen comes into play. It’s the philosophy that focuses on continuous improvement in business and even life in general. If you look for incremental improvements in your poker skills, your game will improve, and if you are able to improve at a faster rate than your opponents are improving, you will catch and pass them on the high road to success.

Go forth and fix. And remember to have fun. After all, poker’s a game and you have to enjoy it to play your best.

Related posts:

1. Poker’s Most Common Mistakes, Part 1

When I was in college, a journalism professor told our class (we all fancied ourselves future newspaper or magazine columnists back then) this wonderful truth: When you have trouble coming up with a subject for your column, make a list and all your problems will be solved.

“How many items on the list?” someone asked.

“It doesn’t matter. The subject defines the size of the list,” he said.

With that golden insight in hand, our study group tossed some less-than-scintillating column ideas among ourselves: “New York City’s Ten Hottest Hairdressers,” “Brooklyn’s Seven Best Delicatessens and Why You Should Try All of Them,” “Five Items That Will Make or Break Your Wardrobe,” “Manhattan’s Nine Most Romantic Places to Kiss,” and “A Dozen Incredible Eastside Irish Pubs.” You can make lists until the cows come home, and once you have the idea, a column based on a list just sort of writes itself.

I’ve periodically written list columns, though I try not to overdo a good thing so I don’t overuse them.

Recently I was rereading some of what I like to think are my best quotes, and came across this one: “Most of the money you’ll win at poker comes not from the brilliance of your own play, but from the ineptitude of your opponents.”

I wrote that a long time ago and still believe it fervently – so much so that it spurred me to offer up another list column in two parts: the most common mistakes made by poker players. It’s not an exhaustive list – you can probably think of three or four others for each mistake I listed here – but it’s a good start if you want to take it for what it is: A chance to review your poker game and correct any of these leaks.

#1. Immutable Standards

Beginning poker players often look for an immutable set of standards to tell them in deciding which poker hands to play and which ought to be released. Although the boundary between playable and unplayable poker hands can sometimes be crystal clear, it’s often fuzzy. While even the newest of newbies can learn to play a pocket pair of aces and throw away seven-deuce, what should our new player do with QJ in middle position if no one has entered the pot, if one player has limped in, if there’s one limper and one caller, or if someone has raised? And for each of these situations, how should you modify your tactics based on perceptions about your opponents’ relative aggression or passivity? The more layers to sort through, the grayer things frequently become, and when that happens, situational awareness is far more valuable than any set of hard and fast rules.

Because new poker players aren’t facile enough to maneuver their way through all these changing shades of gray, starting standards can serve them as a set of rules. But more experience players should think of starting hand standards as a guide that can and should be modified depending on the situation, while an expert should view starting hand standards simply as a point of departure based on his analysis of the situation, his opponents, and his perceived ability to use his chips to maneuver opponents into and out of the pot.

#2. Don’t Get too Emotional.

This is when you’re most likely to make mistakes. Try to remain detached from the poker game and bet with your head instead of your heart.

It’s all too easy and commonplace to graft sports analogies onto poker. Emotion can be a life-saver in physical sports. The ability to go all out can lead to a vital rebound in a basketball game and to a sprinter holding his form and finding victory even if he isn’t inherently faster than his foes. A bicyclist who isn’t prepared to suffer won’t win a time trial, or a bunch sprint, or a hilltop finish. What’s required is skill plus training plus the willingness to push through pain to victory.

But not in poker. The willingness to run up and over or through a brick wall won’t win many poker tournaments. It’s always a fine line between aggression and knowing when to pull back, tactically withdraw, and save chips for another confrontation. Poker is a high wire act of sorts, and unrelenting will, brute force, and the willingness to suffer won’t serve you well. You have to be prepared to drop in and drop out, take your chances with the best of it, and save your chips when the odds don’t ride with you.

#3. Avoid Playing Early-Position Hands too Assertively.

Reserve that ploy for late positions. It allows you to see what your opponents are doing. That’s when you should be more aggressive. Early position aggression is really blind ambition. You’ve no idea what your opponents have and you don’t know what they plan to do when it’s their turn to act. With each step closer to the back of the betting order, you have that much more information at your disposal about the real or purported strength of your opponents’ hands and how much it might cost you to make the play you’d like to.

#4. (Fancy Play Syndrome) Spare the Bluff.

Don’t get cute too often. If you do, you can expect to be called more frequently. Betting on a weak hand just reduces your chips. Bluff in moderation.

Too many players like to trot out fancy plays for no other reason than to demonstrate to the rest of the table just how facile, smart, sophisticated and cool they are. But many players won’t even recognize what you’re doing, and you’ll just cost yourself money. Poker expert Mike Caro labeled this phenomenon “Fancy Play Syndrome,” or just plain “FPS.”

If you must use fancy plays, use them sparingly, and only against your very best opponents. Players who have the skill to read and decipher your actions – and are good enough to be fooled by your ploy – should be your target, not weak players. An opponent who is blind to your actions won’t see what you’re up to and can’t be faked out. Against weak opponents the best play is usually the simplest: Bet your good hands and watch them pay you off.

#5. Calling When You Should Fold.

Don’t play too many hands. Most players do, and it’s probably the single most common mistake made at the poker table. After all, whether you’re playing online poker or in a traditional casino, most of your opponents – like you – love poker. They came to play, not to throw away hand after miserable hand that doesn’t warrant wagering on. Unless you’re having a rare run of extremely good hands, most of the time you should toss your starting hand away with no regrets and save your money. Marginal poker hands are the downfall of the majority of players who want to get in on the action, to play, to see if they can get lucky or make a move by bluffing opponents off the best hand.

But it doesn’t happen often enough; it only happens enough to be seductive, to lure you into playing weak hands because you want to play instead of fold. But that’s when you’re prone to making mistakes – when you play marginal, unprofitable hands. You might flop something, but the sad truth is that the best hand going in is usually the best hand coming out. So when you start second best, it’s all too easy to seduce yourself into sticking around with something that’s second best and figures to stay that way.

If you’re playing poker correctly, you’ll fold more than you raise and raise more than you call. That’s the ticket. Calling too often with mediocre and weak hands is a one-way street to a busted bankroll.

#6. Limit Your Booze Intake.

Actually, this is true for all altered emotional state – regardless of the cause. Alcohol, drugs, feeling depressed, an argument with your spouse of significant other and poker don’t mix well. Playing poker online alone can be hazardous to your wallet if you’re prone to substance abuse – or even just substance use. And stay away from those free drinks in a casino. It’ll cost you more money than you realize if you blow through your bankroll because your altered state says “call,” when your good sense would tell you to either to raise or fold.

If you must drink, do yourself a favor and do your drinking after you’ve played poker, not while engaged in the game. Your decisions do matter at poker, and when you’ve altered your logic and reasoning, your decisions don’t figure to be very good. If you must drink and gamble, do it at the roulette table. After all, your results won’t be any worse there drunk or sober because your decisions don’t matter. As long as you can crawl back to your room once you finish playing, whether you played with a clear or clouded mind won’t impact your results one iota.

#7. Poor Game Selection.

It’s all relative in poker. We figure to win if we play better than our opponents, and figure to lose if they are more skillful than we are. Game selection is critical. Good as you may fancy yourself, your chances of booking a win are scant if you’re playing against a table full of poker experts. But even if you realize that you’re just a bit above average, and not a world-beater at all, if your opponents are mostly fish or degenerate gamblers, you figure to book a win, and you can’t ask for much more than to have the best of it.

This is good reason to learn to play all games well, rather than specializing in just Texas hold’em. If you can play a variety of games, regardless of whether you’re online or playing live, you might recognize that some other game is much better than your usual hold’em game, and if you’ve taken the time to school yourself in a variety of games, you’ll stand just that much better a chance of coming away a winner.

We’ll cover the remainder of this fifteen-mistake list in the next article.

Related posts:

1. Poker’s Most Common Mistakes, Part 2

Regardless of whether you’re playing in a poker tournament or a cash game, it’s seldom fun to play on a short stack, although it’s easier out in a cash game because you can always reach into your wallet and buy more chips. Most players prefer a big stack rather than a short one and play better when they have a boatload of ammunition, although some no-limit players deliberately buy into cash games for the table minimum. They do this to avoid having to decide whether to play for of their chips, because playing for a large amount of chips represents a sizeable risk every time they play a hand.

One of the reasons some casinos spread no-limit cash games with a capped buy-in is to mitigate the downside of a player being drawn out for his entire bankroll.

Playing with a short stack also makes some otherwise tough decisions no-brainers. When you’re short-stacked in a cash game it’s no longer a tough decision if you’ve flopped top pair with top kicker and are facing a raise. With a big stack and a pocket pair of aces, or even two pair, deciding whether to call a big raise is a much tougher decision simply because you can lose a lot more. But with a short stack, you can call and reload if you lose.

Playing in a cash game with a cap on the buy-in falls somewhere between playing real no-limit – where everyone is deep stacked and a confrontation for all or most of your chips is always a possibility – and a spread-limit game. Although a wide betting range can hurt you even when you are playing a short stack, it’s not likely to be a mortal wound.

But it’s a different story entirely in a poker tournament. That short little stack represents your entire tournament equity, and it means you’re in jeopardy. Now you have two tasks at hand: You have to protect your chips while simultaneously rebuilding your arsenal.

Protecting chips usually means caution and conservative play, while stack-building suggests an aggressive posture that leans heavily on taking every possible edge to maximize your ability to acquire chips.

Even so, you shouldn’t take untoward risks on speculative hands when you’re short stacked. That means no more flush draws, no more straight draws and avoiding pots when you have a speculative hand. Most of your speculating should really be done early in the tournament, when blinds are small compared to your stack size. You can also play speculative hands when you have an overwhelming chip lead and have earned the right to bully your opponents every chance you get.

Nevertheless, you still need to aggress to grow your stacks. When you raise with a short stack, it’s tantamount to risking all your chips in a defensive raising posture, not an offensive thrust. When you’re near the back end of the betting order with A9 and no one else has entered the pot, that’s the time to raise – and hope you’re not called. Your defensive raise is aimed at winning the blinds and antes so you can fight another day.

Even if you’re called by a hand like KQ, you’re favored over suited connectors falling in range below your ace but higher than your side card. You’re a 56 percent favorite if your opponent’s connectors are unsuited, and if your opponent called with an unconnected high and low card, such as K6 offsuit, you’re a 64 percent favorite to win the pot.

Here’s an example. Suppose the blinds are $1,000-$2,000, the average stack is $80,000, 15 people remain in the tourney, and you have $20,000 on the button.

If your raise is called, it’s a race for all of your chips, and you’ll either have $40,000 or a seat on the rail at hand’s end. If no one calls your raise, you’ll win $3,000, which increases your stack by 15 percent – and more if antes are in play.

An accurate assessment of your opponents is your best friend here. Will they fold or call? If opponents on your immediate left are short stacked too, they figure to fold more often than not. But the chip leader might make a $20,000 call with any playable hand, especially if it’s small potatoes to him.

Do your opponents include anyone about to make a last stand with any two cards? A desperate, down-to-the-felt opponent will probably call with any two cards. But if your opponents are not on tilt and playing well and view you as a patient poker player who is likely to have a good hand when he finally raises, they might be willing to let you escape with the blinds and antes.

Regardless of how opponents see you, you just can’t wait around for premium pocket pairs before making your move. With AK or AQ and a short stack, it’s time to put your tournament life on the line by raising all-in. It’s not such a bad deal even if you’re called. If you win, you’ll have $40,000 in front of you, and one more double-up after will put you right back in the hunt, along with the maneuvering room you wish you had right now.

The key to short-stacked play is to be the aggressor. You can’t call your way back into contention. When you call, you can only win by showing the best hand at the end. Not only that, you lack fold equity – the possibility that your raise will cause other opponent to fold, thereby winning you the pot.

With a really low stack you just have to pick a hand and make a stand. When it’s very short, you can count on being called by the big blind and perhaps one other player. In that situation, you’re better off going all-in with suited connectors like 98 than a hand like K8 or Q7 because the most likely hands to call will be two high-card hands, and you run the risk of being dominated to only three outs.

The numbers prove the point. A single overcard is a 52 percent favorite against two suited connectors, and two overcards are a 58 percent favorite. But if your hand is dominated, you have less than a 30 percent chance of winning.

Here’s the key point: Two suited connectors are usually both live cards, and that’s a lot better than being dominated to three outs.

When you’re short stacked you don’t have the opportunity to wait for big hands. You must make a stand sooner or later, and once you’re holding the right kind of hand and the situation is right, just push your remaining chips across the betting line and hope for the best.

Desperate times demand desperate measures. But if you’re lucky enough to propel yourself back into the poker tournament, you’ll have another opportunity to let your skill do the talking instead of your luck.

Related posts:

1. Pay Attention to Your Opponent’s Stack Size

Split-pot games are different by nature than games like Texas hold’em, where the high hand is usually the only winner. Whenever the pot is split in hold’em, it’s because two or more identical high hands were made incidentally, and not by strategic design.

Things are different in Omaha/8 and in 7-stud/8, where someone always makes a high hand, but a low hand can win half the pot too, as long as it qualifies for the low side of the pot.

This arrangement – splitting a pot between two players – changes the basic nature of the relationship between the cost of betting and the portion of the pot that’s likely to be won.

We’ll use Omaha/8 to illustrate our points. As long as the flop doesn’t contain three cards with the rank of nine through king (remember, an ace counts as both a high and low card), there’s a chance that the best high hand will have to split the pot with the best low hand, and it’s a foregone conclusion that anyone with a one-way low hand will have to split the pot with a high hand.

Why Scooping a Pot Can Be More than Twice as Good as Splitting It

If you are playing in a Texas hold’em game, where presumably there’ll be only one winner, and you have two opponents, you figure to earn two dollars in profit for every dollar you have to invest to win the pot.

You bet a dollar. Joe and Tom call a dollar each. If you win, you get three dollars. One dollar is your investment; the other two dollars represent the profit you made by winning. The objective of split pot games is to scoop the entire pot, not to split it. If you follow the money, the reason for this objective becomes crystal clear.

Now, instead of playing hold’em, imagine you’re playing Omaha/8 against the same two opponents. You bet a dollar and are called by Joe and Tom. That same three dollars comprises the pot. But if you win the high side of the pot and Joe takes the low end, you’ll each come away with a dollar-and-a-half. One dollar represents your investment and the remaining fifty cents is your profit.

The cost to call was identical – a dollar each time – but the return on your investment was substantially less. In this case, you earned fifty cents on your dollar. In the hold’em game, your profit was two dollars – four times as much!

Suppose you had five opponents. In the hold’em game, you’d invest that same dollar and if you won after everyone called, you’d walk away with a total of six dollars, of which five was pure profit.

If it was a split-pot game and you captured half of it, your cost would still be a dollar but you’d walk away with three dollars whenever you won the pot. Two of those dollars would be the return on your investment.

The Relationship Between the Cost to Play and Your Return on Investment Says One Thing Clearly: Play to Scoop the Pot

It’s clear that the relationship between the cost to play a pot and your return on investment for winning argues strongly for trying to win the entire pot rather than playing poker hands that result in having to share the spoils with a neighbor.

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t ever play hands that have a shot at winning only half the pot. Far from it. Profit is profit. But your big winnings in split-pot games will come when you’re able to win a hand in both directions and scoop the entire pot – low as well as high – or win with a high hand when you have numerous opponents chasing a low draw that never pans out.

If you have enough opponents, splitting the pot is profitable, and you can and should play some one-way hands.

But my point is to make it crystal clear that your orientation and mind set in any split-pot game is to be greedy and scoop the entire thing.

The mathematical relationship between your investment and potential reward supports this approach. Regardless of whether you’re playing a one-winner game, such as Texas hold’em, or a split-pot game like Omaha/8, your investment costs are the same.

But in a split pot game, your rewards are reduced substantially any time you decide to play for only half the pot.

As a general rule, if you only have a shot a winning half the pot, trying to win the low end offers better value than going just for the high side. Why? Because it is easier to catch a card that will make your nut low than to catch a card for the nut high. As an added bonus, low hands can become high hands a lot more readily than high hands can go low.

Here are some examples. Suppose you hold A-2 in an Omaha/8 game with a board containing two non-counterfitting low cards and one high card, but no straight draws. You have 12 outs to make your nut low.

You hold the AK and the flop shows 2 or 3 low cards with two clubs. You have 9 outs, some of which make the low or can even improve a low hand you’ve already made.

It’s not quite the same when you’re drawing for the best high hand. Suppose you hold T-9 and the flop is 8-7-2, all of different suits. You have 8 outs that can improve your holding to a straight, and in all liklihood you’ll have to split the pot with a low hand even if you complete your hand.

Suppose you have 8-8 and the flop is 8-7-3. Now you have 10 outs for the likely high winner if the turn is lower than an 8, and only 1 out for the nut high.

If you have 9-8 in your hand and the flop is 9-8-2, you have 4 outs if no card higher than a 9 comes on the turn.

Guideline: Look for a return of 4-to-1 or better on one-way draws, and avoid falling into the self-deceptive trap of using implied odds to justify making these kind of plays. Implied odds really only factor into two-way and scoop hands.

Say you are playing $10-$20 Omaha/8 and there is $80 in the pot. If there is a $20 bet and you call and scoop, you will get 5-to-1 on your call, but if you can only split, then you are only getting 2.5-to-1 on the cost of your call.

There’s a reason why split-pot games are predicated on scoops instead of split pots, and that reason is the unbalanced relationship between the return on investment when you scoop and the return you’ll earn when you split the pot. While the cost to call is the same regardless of whether you’re trying to scoop or hoping for a split pot, the return earned on a scooped pot is much more favorable.

Related posts:

1. Cash Games or Tournament Poker
2. Get Invited Back to Home Games

Way back in poker’s dark ages (the years prior to 2003, before Chris Moneymaker won the World Series of Poker’s main event after gaining entry via a $40 online satellite) no-limit hold’em was a game played during tournaments in brick-and-mortar casinos by experienced cardsmiths who honed their game over years of play. But once TV caught up with the democratization of poker courtesy of very inexpensive satellite tournaments available everywhere online, everyone who fancied him or herself a poker player – new and old alike – wanted to compete like the pros they saw on the small screen, and no-limit hold’em replaced fixed-limit hold’em as the game of choice.

This led to a veritable feast of knowledge and information about the game in all its varied iterations – tournaments, cash games, sit ‘n’ go tourneys, six-handed games, and even micro-limit games. You name it; someone wrote a book about it. Books led to online poker teaching sites, and a plethora of poker “boot camps” held in casinos – usually in conjunction with a major tournament series – all across the world.

The result was that everyone was playing no-limit hold’em, and with all of the learning opportunities that were available for the taking and the ability to play thousands of hands and hundreds of tournaments in a shorter time period online that one could ever imagine playing in a brick-and-mortar casino, skill levels increased rapidly and dramatically.

But while everyone was becoming pretty adept at no-limit hold’em, most folks weren’t paying much attention to other forms of poker. While the average skill level in no-limit hold’em was rising every year, most of us still played all of the other games just about the way we did years ago, which really points to an opportunity to make a score in those games. Trouble is, when you walk into a brick-and-mortar casino, not many other games are spread. A rotation of mixed games can be found occasionally, albeit at stakes higher than many people can afford or are comfortable playing.

And while you can find Omaha and 7-stud/8 games online, many of the players who populate them are strong players, since the overwhelming majority of new players venturing online come there for one thing and one thing only—to play no-limit hold’em.

But in brick-and-mortar casinos, at least in the United States, you can still find a cornucopia of fixed-limit hold’em games, and along with it, a lot of opportunity for savvy players. Moreover, the very nature of the game provides some advantages that you won’t find in no-limit games.

For one, there seems to be a real skill difference between the habitués of traditional casino poker games and those who have played and prospered online. Online poker players tend to be more aggressive, more experienced, more knowledgeable, and more skillful. Online is where many of the new and improved poker strategies were developed, honed, promulgated, and learned – and someone who has no experience playing online is likely to have missed out on much of poker’s information explosion. And while fixed-limit hold’em is a very different game than no-limit hold’em, a good no-limit player should be able to adapt to a fixed-limit game in short order.

Another advantage offered by fixed-limit games can be found in its diminished variance. When all of your money is potentially at risk on every hand, one misstep, one lucky draw by an opponent, or one unforeseen and unexpected hand, can really spoil your day and your bankroll too.

But in a fixed-limit game, where the amount of exposure on any one wagering round is limited to a bet and some predefined number of raises, one bad play can still hurt, but it can also be overcome without facing the sort of oblivion that happens when your entire stash is snatched right out from under you.

Every player goes through protracted streaks of good luck and bad, but in no-limit it hurts a lot worse. You needn’t look any further than Isildur1, the enigmatic Swede who, during the period from November through December 2009, won and lost some of the biggest pots ever seen in poker. At one point he was up over $5 million, only to lose $4 million in one disastrous night and go broke a few days later.

He rose and fell like a rocket, and while some of it was undoubtedly attributable to his hyper aggressive playing style, a lot of it was caused by nothing more than the variance anyone can expect to encounter in a no-limit game. And while it’s true that he wouldn’t have won as much if he was playing fixed-limit poker, it’s equally true that he wouldn’t be broke now either.

Mitigating against the extreme variance in no-limit games is the very reason many casinos offer a hybrid game of sorts: no-limit with a cap on the amount of a player’s buy-in. Because there’s a limit on how much a player can buy-in for, it’s less likely that anyone will bust his bankroll on any single hand. The game is different too. It plays somewhat more like a spread-limit game than deep-stacked no-limit poker.

Of course you have to adjust when coming from no-limit to fixed-limit games, but those adjustments aren’t extensive. Starting hands change dramatically, and hands that can build top pair with top kicker are much more playable in fixed-limit hold’em than they are in no-limit. You’ll see hands like KJ played regularly in a fixed-limit game, and a player holding KJ who sees a flop of K-T-4 or J-8-3 is likely to play it through to the river, unless the wagering goes through the roof, or a flush card pops up on the turn and it’s bet and raised before it’s time for top pair, top kicker to act.

While the concept of implied odds are important in fixed-limit hold’em, they are not as important as they are in a no-limit game, which is a game that’s all about implied odds. The lack of a cap on the amount that can be wagered really makes it profitable in the long run to take some thin draws if you believe you can capture an opponent’s entire stack if it pans out.

There are myriad other differences between the two games, but that’s the subject of a different article. The point of this one is to tell you that opportunities abound in fixed-limit cash games in brick-and-mortar casinos and online casinos too. If you feel you’ve run up against no-limit hold’em’s brick wall and the opposition is improving just as rapidly as you are, and it’s all you can do to hold your head above water while hoping to take down a couple of really big pots but fearing a major hit to your bankroll when the variance is running the other way, take solace in the fact that the pickings look pretty good in the fixed-limit patch.

And it’s enjoyable too. After all, you get to play a few more hands, your entire stack is seldom in jeopardy, and your opponents have not been as dedicated, by and large, to upgrading their skills over the past few years as the no-limit crowd has. Give it a try. You might be glad you did.

Related posts:

1. Micro-Limit Online Poker – Part I