If you want to win bigger pots, you need to take into account future betting rounds. Implied odds enable you to calculate the size of the pots you may win in the future if you hit your hand. In this week’s video tip, Team Full Tilt‘s Andy Bloch explains how to calculate implied odds to help you make better decisions at the table.
When playing Limit Hold ‘em, saving bets is a very important skill to master. Watch this video for Howard Lederer’s advice on how to use a combination of bet-saving strategies to help take your Limit Hold ‘em game to the next level.
Roy Winston
Full Tilt Pro
Unless you have a monster draw or are slow playing a big hand, calling is often the wrong play at the table. In fact, it often times takes a stronger hand to make a call than it does to make a raise.
"You raised with that?" is a question I hear a lot after showing down a hand. You can make a raise with any two cards (sometimes less than that), but it takes a real hand to make a call.
When I’m in late position in an unopened pot and someone in front of me puts in a raise, I’ll always say to myself, "Hey, I was going to do that!" The fact is opening a pot with a raise is a good idea because it puts you in control, while cold-calling a raise is not a great option for a variety of reasons.
First of all is the realization that I am probably behind. I have lost the ability to take the lead and be the aggressor, and perhaps represent a wide range of hands. Re-raising in position is always an option. However, if the initial raiser was pretty strong, I could wind up facing a re-raise, which could mean a decision for a lot of chips. I have now put myself in a bad position and made the first of perhaps many mistakes in the hand.
Now, I’m not saying there aren’t hands I like to call with pre-flop. For instance, I’ll limp with hands like ace-rag suited (because you can make the nuts), small pocket pairs (looking to flop a set), sometimes big pocket pairs (to camouflage the strength of my hand) and suited connectors in position. But, making a bad call is almost always worse than making a bad fold.
When in doubt, listen to that little voice in your head saying "fold, fold, fold." Even if it turns out you were ahead in the hand when you folded, it’s still better than making a bad call and losing even more chips.
It takes a great player to make great lay-downs; you have to occasionally fold a winning hand. If you’re not sure what to do with a hand, ask yourself whether or not this is a good place to get your chips in the pot.
A combination of smart and aggressive play will help you to improve your results. And personally, I’d rather be a raiser than a caller…
Roy Winston
Full Tilt Pro
Because Pot-Limit Omaha is a game where the nuts can – and often do – change on every street, many players can’t go too wrong by playing a super tight strategy at a full table. This means being highly selective before the flop and limiting your range to something like the top 15% of starting hands, and then only continuing after the flop if you have a very strong draw or a made hand.
When the game gets short-handed or heads up, however, this strategy simply won’t work. In these situations, you can go very wrong by playing too tight and giving your opponents too many easy opportunities to steal pots through pre-flop raises and post-flop continuation bets. In short, you’ve got to play more hands overall, more marginal hands, and play them more aggressively, in order to succeed in heads-up play.
Let’s look at a situation where someone may be holding a hand like 10-8-A-2 double suited and the flop comes 10-8-2. At a full PLO table, this is a spot where many inexperienced players are likely to go broke because their instinct is to put as many of their chips as possible into the pot with their "big hand". The thing is, while top two pair may in fact be the best hand in this situation, it’s unlikely to hold up against multiple opponents because there are just too many ways to get beat from sets or big draws to straights, flushes and full houses.
Heads up, on the other hand, is a completely different situation. Say you’re holding the same hand and see the same flop described above. Because aggression is such an important part of heads-up play, getting your chips into the middle with what’s likely to be the best hand now makes sense. Because you’re playing Omaha, it’s likely that your opponent may still have a big draw so getting your chips in accomplishes two things – it pumps up the pot when you’re likely to be ahead and prevents your opponent from improving his hand for free.
Of course, there’s more to an aggressive heads-up style than just jamming when you’re holding a made hand. In Omaha, especially, you need to play a much more aggressive pre-flop game when you’re heads up than you would otherwise. Because of the size of the blinds when you’re heads up, experienced players will often raise relentlessly from the small blind (the button), simply because the pot odds are so good. This becomes especially true against opponents who don’t open up their games and who are just looking to peddle the nuts with premium hands.
If you’re willing to raise consistently from the small blind against a tight opponent and then back that up with a pot sized continuation bet after the flop – whether you connect or not – you can show a profit as long as your play works just half of the time. If your opponent does play back at you before the flop, you can assume he’s got a big starting hand like Aces or something like 9-10-J-Q double suited, which helps you define the strength of your hand after the flop. If, on the other hand, he calls you before the flop and then calls or raises after the flop, you can again assume he’s holding a big hand and proceed with caution.
Against tight or scared opponents, it’s not very hard to succeed with an aggressive style once you’ve gotten comfortable with the concept of pushing the action with what, at many times, is likely to be a marginal hand. Against more experienced and aggressive opponents, however, this can be a more intimidating proposition. While these players are more likely to play back at you before the flop, this doesn’t mean that you need to give up your aggressive approach, though you should probably consider tightening up after the flop if you haven’t connected or haven’t connected very strongly.
Say you flop two pair on a board of A-4-7 with two clubs. Your opponent checks, you bet, and then get check-raised. What do you do? The answer really comes down to your read and your previous experience with your opponent throughout the course of the match. Do you think he’s drawing? Bluffing? Would he re-raise with nothing or is he looking to get you to make a bad call when you may already be drawing dead?
With nothing stronger than two pair here, the question becomes, "What hands can I beat that play this way?" Unless you put your opponent on nothing better than a draw, the answer is probably "Not much", and the safest course of action is probably to fold and look for a better spot. Again, though, the decision here really comes down to your read of your opponent and how strong you really think he may be.
In short, the key to succeeding in heads-up PLO is to loosen up your game and play more hands both before and after the flop while also keeping track of how your opponent is playing in relation to you. Remember, tight is right at full tables, but aggression is what pays off when you’re short handed.
Brandon Adams
Full Tilt Pro
Everyone knows that in Omaha Hi/Lo, starting with low cards is your best bet. You want to play hands with two-way potential, hands that can scoop the pot. In any hi/lo game, scooping is the dream.
However, in certain situations, it’s advisable to play a high-only hand. I’m going to give you a specific example from a HORSE tournament where the circumstances were just right for me to not only play a high-only hand, but to raise with it pre-flop.
My hand was Ad-10d-Jc-Qc, and I was seated in the cutoff. We were playing at the 100/200 level in Omaha Hi/Lo, meaning the blinds were 50 and 100. The player in first position limped in, along with the next three players. So, each of the first four players to act had limped in. Here I was, double suited with big cards, and I was armed with a reputation as a solid player who typically raises with strong starting hands that have excellent low potential. If I’m raising in this spot, my opponents should all typically assume I have a hand that includes A-2. And that’s one of the reasons to play high-only hands occasionally, for the element of surprise.
Another reason is that with all of those limpers, chances were that many of the low cards were gone from the deck, since the majority of Omaha Hi/Lo players will only get involved with hands that contain low cards. The likelihood of three low cards hitting the board was greatly reduced. And that’s precisely why I raised the pot to 200. My opponents automatically put me on the A-2, and all of the limpers made the call, helping to confirm my suspicion that they all held baby cards.
The flop was just what I was hoping for: A-Q-J with two diamonds. So I had two pair (or three pair, if you wanted to look at it that way) with a royal flush draw. It was checked all the way around to me; I made a bet of 100 and got four callers.
The turn card was a deuce. This was potentially an excellent card for me because it meant that if someone else held A-2, they’d just made an inferior two pair and would have a hard time folding. Sure enough, the first player to act bet out, everybody called, and it came around to me. My only concern was whether someone had K-10, but I just couldn’t put anyone on K-10 the way the hand had been played to that point. So I raised, pretty confident that the player who led out had A-2, and everyone else had babies and was hoping to make the wheel or grab the low. That first player thought and thought, studied and studied, and finally just called, confirming for me that he didn’t have K-10. The rest of the players called as well.
The river was a beautiful card, another queen, giving me queens full of aces. The first player to act checked, the next player checked, the next player bet, and the next player raised! There was no straight-flush out there – the only hand that could beat me was pocket aces. The way the hand went down, it seemed unlikely that anyone had pocket aces, so I put in another raise. As it turned out, everyone folded, and I took down a massive pot of 4,950 chips.
The lesson to be learned here is that you want to keep your opponents on their toes. You don’t want to play your hands the same way every time; you must use the element of surprise to get the maximum equity on your money. The more people that play a hand in Omaha Hi/Lo, the less likely it is that the board will contain low cards. If you have a strong high hand with big, suited cards, then you want to play that hand because of its potential to scoop the entire pot.
Esther Rossi
Full Tilt Pro
Stephan Kalhamer
Full Tilt
If a poker player wants an edge, he must move with the times. Today, a style which was successful only a year ago can already be outdated; tomorrow, he could be the sucker.
However, in the poker world (as in the fashion world), there are timeless classics: the little black dress for a woman; the pinstripe suit on a man; tight/aggressive play at the table. Admittedly, this type of player is less likely to knock somebody’s socks off, but he is also far less likely to be knocked out of the tournament himself.
Dan Harrington described this style in his tremendous book, “ Harrington On Hold ’em” and, as a result, it quickly became the worldwide standard. Today’s truly smart tournament players, however, were soon tearing up the rule book and, as a result, modern poker has no dominant strategy. Loose/aggressive is currently in fashion and playing out of position has become the Holy Grail. But again and again the strategies turn back to what poker is all about: bet on a good hand and give up a bad or hard-to-rate one.
As soon as one reflects on it, by focusing his own bets solely on “value” instead of bluffing, a good player wins again and again with safe, tight/aggressive play. Why ever not?
Good players do not make plays simply because they want to or to show that they can. They make plays because they represent the optimal decisions. Poker is ultimately a contest of decision-making; he who consistently makes the best decisions, wins – all the same in which outfit he enters the party.
Riskers gamble, experts calculate.
Stephan Kalhamer
Full Tilt
Joe Beevers
Then Hendon Mob
Wherever you go in poker, you hear plenty of poker stories, usually of the bad beat variety and various claims of individuals running bad. But what is running bad?
Most people say they are running bad when, for instance, their top sets are constantly beaten by straight and flush draws or when their pocket Aces get beat by pocket Kings when a King hits the flop. The stories are often accompanied by "he hit a gutshot", "he hit his one-outer", etc.
Did you know though, that there are actually two or more different ways of running bad? It is important to understand the differences.
You can also run bad with the cards you find – and this is relative. Finding Kings three times in an hour would be considered running good. But if every time that happened an opponent found Aces, then that would be running bad, right?
Getting it in with a set against a flush draw and losing is running bad, but making a flush against a better flush is running bad too. If you’re using a tracking system, your EV will show that you should be winning in the first instance but losing in the second over a lifetime.
It is situational. You can play perfect poker, find big hands and still lose because:
There is also potentially a third "running bad": besides the hole-cards you’re dealt and the river cards you hit, there are the cards your opponent has and the actions they take.
By contrast, running good can be that you find big hands and they win or it can be that you get it in with the worst of it and suckout on your opponent. It’s important to understand the difference. You can play perfect poker and make all the correct plays but still lose – that’s running bad.
You may have heard players talk of variance. This is the statistical measure of the dispersion of your results. Running good or running bad does affect your bank roll, but you should try and look at poker as a lifelong poker session and not look at sessions individually. I realise this can be difficult; this is often because you are playing bigger than you should be and the result can hurt if it goes against you.
Try to think of it as a game – no more, no less – and try not to get emotional. What is important is that you continue to make the right decisions day in and day out, session after session.
Joe Beevers
Then Hendon Mob
Jennifer Harman
Team Full Tilt
Poker is a game of decisions. Some decisions are very easy to make, while others will keep you awake all night if you choose poorly. In my experience, the larger the pot size, the harder the decision you’ll be faced with.
On the other hand, the smaller the pot is, the easier the decision. Which is why, especially in tournament play, you want to keep the pot small when you’re holding a marginal hand. You don’t want to be facing a decision for all of your chips in a situation where all you’ve got is something like top pair with a medium-strength kicker. You want to avoid that scenario as much as possible. It’s better to keep the pot small by checking and calling rather than building a huge pot, even if you do hold an advantage in that hand.
Let me give you an example from a hand I played at a 2009 World Series of Poker event. We were still fairly early in the tournament, and I was in the cut-off (the seat before the button) holding K-J. The action folded around to me, I put in a raise and was called by the button. Both blinds folded, and we were heads-up going to the flop.
The flop came J-9-3 with two diamonds. Yes, I had top pair with a strong kicker, but with straight and flush draws on the board I was in no mood to go crazy with my hand. So I checked, and the button bet about two-thirds of the pot.
A check could also tempt my opponent to bluff in this spot, especially if he put me on something like A-K or A-Q. With a bluff or a drawing hand being the button’s most likely holding, I made the call.
The turn was a harmless 5, not a diamond, and very unlikely to help out the button in any way. Once again, I decided to control the size of the pot and keep it small by checking. If I’d bet and the button had a monster draw, there’s a good chance he’d come over the top of my bet to try and push me off the pot. I liked my hand there, just not enough to go broke with it.
After I checked, the button put in another bet, which I called. The river was a non-diamond 2, meaning that neither the flush draw or the straight draw got there. Confident that I had the best hand at this point, I still decided to check the river.
Why? Well, there was a small chance the button had made a set or two pair somewhere along the way, and it’s better to check-call in that spot rather than face a tough decision for a lot of chips if he raises. Also, if he did have nothing but air, checking might induce a bluff on the river.
As it turned out, the button checked behind me and I took down the pot with my K-J. I didn’t win a big pot with that hand, but I also didn’t lose a huge pot. The decisions I faced on each street were made much easier by the fact that I kept the pot small.
Jennifer Harman
Team Full Tilt
Isaac Baron
CardRunners
When you’re playing ABC poker, you always want to start with premium hole cards. Hands such as pocket Aces or A-K suited are solid, no-nonsense cards and it’s reasonably easy to figure out whether or not you have the best hand. Once you’ve mastered these basic starting hands, it’s time to widen your range. This means learning to obtain maximum value from hands such as 9-8s or 6-5s, otherwise known as ‘medium suited connectors’.
When holding medium suited connectors, most beginners are either scared or overconfident. Both attitudes lead to leaks in their game. To play these cards correctly, approach them with a balance of caution and confidence.
The first thing I consider is position. I like to play suited connectors as often as possible (assuming my opponent isn’t severely short-stacked and looking to get all-in versus anything) but it’s a better play in position. You won’t make many huge hands with these cards – expect to make second or third pair often – so position gives you more information, enabling you to make better decisions.
I want to see a cheap flop with as many players involved as possible – the more the merrier. This is a key factor in my decision to play or fold. 8-7s doesn’t hold up in a battle against K-K – you’re a roughly 4 to 1 underdog and you won’t take the pot down often enough to justify calling. However, when there are more people in the hand, there is more money in the pot. If you can cheaply see a flop in a multi-way hand, your potential payback outweighs your odds of not winning the hand.
Moreover, the possibility of hitting the nuts and getting a huge payout from a weaker hand increases with more players in the hand. You’ll also increase the chances of facing a weak player. This is an edge you should always look for, especially when you’re holding medium suited connectors. Weak or novice players often find it difficult to lay down their cards when they make a hand. So, when you’ve got the nuts, they will pay you off big time.
Playing medium suited connectors properly requires a level of sophistication and the ability to make good reads. When you’re comfortable putting your opponent on a narrow range of hands, and good enough to be right most of the time, then you’re ready to start playing these cards more aggressively and more often. I play suited connectors a lot, especially against opponents who put in too much money with hands like top pair or over-pairs.
As I said before: play with a mixture of caution and confidence. If you have position, use the information to decide whether or not you have a strong hand. The worst case scenario is hitting a small to medium flush and losing to a bigger flush. I see a lot of people losing value because they’re scared of this. Don’t be scared – if you’re just playing medium suited connectors in the hope of flopping the nuts, never making plays or making light call-downs, you’re not going to show very much profit.
Isaac Baron
CardRunners
A year before Barack Obama launched his presidential campaign, a reporter asked him if he had a hidden talent. “I’m a pretty good poker player,” he said. That talent, nurtured by his maternal grandfather and then in a low-stakes weekly game with Illinois politicians, is one Obama shares with a host of previous presidents. Yet, only two of them played for serious money, and both were remarkably successful.
Dwight Eisenhower played Stud and Draw for sizable stakes as a young army officer because he needed the money. But he got so good that by the time he reached the higher echelons of the military, he decided to give up the game because he was leaving so many of his tablemates broke.
Eisenhower had learned to play as an eight-year-old in Abilene, Kansas during hunting trips with a guide named Bob Davis, who made him memorize the odds of completing various draws. “He dinned percentages into my head night after night around a campfire,” Ike recalled, “using a greasy pack of nicked cards that must have been a dozen years old. We played for matches and whenever my box of matches was exhausted, I’d have to roll in my blankets and go to sleep.” As an upperclassman at West Point in 1915, he attended “cadet dances only now and then, preferring to devote my time to poker.” He used poker winnings to pay for his dress uniform as well as gifts for Mamie Dowd, a wealthy Denver debutante. Those gifts included her engagement ring, which she accepted on Valentine’s Day, 1916.
Eisenhower was not only a strong player, he was dedicated to keeping the game honest. While stationed at Camp Colt in Pennsylvania, he learned that a well-connected junior officer had used a marked deck in a Stud game. Capt. Eisenhower told him to resign or face a court-martial. When the cheater’s father and Congressman requested that he be allowed to transfer to another unit, Eisenhower firmly explained that no officer could be effective in the field without personal integrity. Even though a more senior officer eventually greased the way for the transfer, Eisenhower never backed down.
While stationed at Fort Meade under Col. George Patton, Capt. Eisenhower continued to dominate the action among his fellow officers. Their highest-stakes game was reserved for bachelors and married men who could comfortably afford to lose. One player who ignored this rule wound up losing so much to Ike that he was forced to cash in his wife’s war bonds to make good on his I.O.U. Eisenhower reluctantly accepted payment, but he felt so guilty afterward that he conspired with others in the game to lose the money back to the man. “This was not achieved easily,” said Eisenhower. “One of the hardest things known to man is to make a fellow win in poker who plays as if bent on losing every nickel.” He then persuaded Col. Patton to ban poker at the fort, if only to keep the same fellow from squandering any more money. The sour experience was enough to convince Eisenhower that, as an officer, “I had to quit playing. It was not because I didn’t enjoy the excitement of the game – I really love to play. But it had become clear that it was no game to play in the Army.”
Any kind of gambling was an anathema in East Whittier, the Quaker suburb of Los Angeles where Richard Nixon grew up. But it didn’t take long for Nixon to become a ruthless poker player when he joined the Navy in World War II. “I found playing poker instructive as well as entertaining and profitable,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I learned that people who have the cards are usually the ones who talk the least and the softest; those who are bluffing tend to talk loudly and give themselves away.”
While serving in the Solomon Islands, Lt. Nixon was invited to a small dinner party for the celebrity pilot Charles Lindbergh, who was testing prototype planes for the Air Force. Instead, he attended a poker game he had previously agreed to host. “In the intense loneliness and boredom of the South Pacific, our poker games were more than idle pastimes,” he wrote, “and the etiquette surrounding them was taken very seriously.”
Nixon liked to compare notes with other strong players, and persuaded one expert, Jim Stewart, to coach him on Five-Card Draw strategy. Nixon’s term for such preparations was “war-gaming.” He began to make serious money playing tight-aggressive poker. He was “as good a poker player as, if not better than, anyone we had ever seen,” said one fellow officer. “I once saw him bluff a Lieutenant Commander out of $1,500 with a pair of deuces.”
By the end of the war, Nixon had won $8,000, a genuinely whopping haul in the forties. Upon discharge, he used it to bankroll his first congressional campaign. In November 1946, he defeated the popular Democratic incumbent Jerry Voorhis, in part by accusing him of being a draft-dodging communist. Four years later, he defeated Helen Gahagan Douglas, a three-term congresswoman, in a mudslinging race for the U.S. Senate. After Nixon claimed the attractive former actress was “pink right down to her underwear,” she retorted with a nickname that stuck: “Tricky Dick;” an unfortunate handle for a politician, of course, but one that any poker stud would be proud of.
Jim McManus
Full Tilt
Card Player Magazine Poker News
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