Crushing Live Poker With Twitter

Dec. 12 – Most money won and lost in live poker is due to steaming

One of the most important elements in making successful short term gambles is the ability to control one’s emotions when something does not go your way. The above tweet, which I took from a Barry Greenstein quote regarding tilting, cannot be more accurate.

It is amazing to me how emotional most recreational poker players are, especially when they receive a bad beat. These are the same type of people that would easily put down loads of money on a good investment and understand that risks that go into making short term gambles. They may back a business that they think will be successfully and shrug it off when they do not get good returns. However, if they get into an 82 percent-to-18 percent situation all-in preflop and do not win they lose all emotional control. 

These types of players get incredibly angry and let this anger creep into their future decision-making. The simple fact of the matter is that if you want to be a successful poker player you must keep your emotions in check. Who would not want to take a gamble where you are taking far the best of it? If I flipped a coin and told you that if you win you would get paid four times as much as you would have to pay out if you lost you would take that bet all day, right? How can anyone possibly get angry at that proposition? The funny thing is that it is usually people that are big favorites in a hand that when they lose, start to badly tilt.

We as observant, good poker players, really have to pay attention to the short-term results that are constantly happening around us. People’s “tilt factor” can hugely influence the way that they play future hands. Usually if someone tilts badly, their bluffing frequency goes up and they tend to play more like a calling station. Hence we should call them down lighter and value bet against them thinner. If you are playing on a table of average to decent players sometimes the quality of the game has to do entirely with who is winning or losing. A good player that has a mean tilt streak can turn a below average game into a great game. I have seen some of the most skilled players in the world not be able to make it as professional gamblers because they play so awfully when they are on tilt. Obviously we want to be the recipients of this tilting money, so it is very important to pay attention to what is going on at the table.

Dec. 11 – Just because someone checks doesn’t mean that they are going to check/fold.

If you are a serious poker player you know how much of an advantage it is to have position especially in big bet games.  Books like the original Super System taught us that when our opponents checked that they were weak and that the pot was ripe to be taken away. 

Through the years, however, people have started to understand the concept of way ahead/way behind. They realize that if they three-bet or four-bet from out of the blinds with K-K that it is going to be tough to be called by worse if they continuation bet an ace-high board. So when the pot gets bloated by your opponent preflop and then they follow that action up by checking the flop, that does not necessarily mean that they are going to check/fold. In fact, a lot of the time when a player makes an aggressive action and then checks, he has every intention of check/calling.

The same can be said when a preflop raiser continuation bets the flop on a ragged board and then follows up with a check on the turn when a card comes that should hit their preflop raising range. Let us take a look at an example. Let us say that in a $5-$5 game with $1,000 effective stacks we call a $25 raise with 9 7 in position. We are heads-up and the board comes out 6 5 4. Our opponent bets $40 and we call. The turn brings the K. Our opponent now checks. What should we do? In order to evaluate our best action, we have to put our opponent on a reasonable range. What types of hands would he bet this type of ragged flop with and then check the turn? If our opponent is any type of player, he should have  some sort of hand with reasonable showdown value. If he has no showdown value than he should almost always use this overcard as a good double barrel-bluffing card. So the fact that he doesn’t barrel means that he must have something. I actually discuss this specific hand and delve deeper into this concept in my podcast (Seat Open) episode “My Mistakes.”

Another common example of a player not intending to check/fold is when they are the preflop raiser and a flop comes out unconnected with one high card. Let us say that we have called a raise with 5 4, with position and the preflop raiser checks a K 7 2 board. Is this the type of flop that we should try and steal? What do you think our opponent has? Well, if he had a hand like A-Q, or A-J, he would most likely try to represent like he had something with the king on the flop. So, when he checks, it is much more likely that he has a hand with medium strength showdown value like Q-Q, or J-J. Just because he checks does not mean that he is going to fold. In fact I would almost guarantee in most cases that when a preflop raiser checks a board like this he has every intention of continuing on. What is different, however, is a board like A-K-Q. There you might want to take a stab at it after being checked to because you do not expect hands like A-K or A-Q to check and you most likely will get a hand like J-J, 10-10 or any other pocket pair to fold.

Dec. 20 – Often times you can trick inexperienced NL players, especially limit hold’em players, by checking back top pair to get future value

As more of the money in poker has switched over to big-bet games, often times you will see limit players making the transition to no-limit. Usually you can spot these players because they buy in for the minimum and have absolutely no clue about correct bet sizing. The concept of way ahead/way behind escapes them. They also constantly make bad decisions preflop as they do not understand the necessary stack depth needed to call with implied odds types of hands (suited connectors) and they also undervalue certain hands that are strong in no-limit like small pocket pairs.

Since checking top pair is almost always a crime in limit hold’em, you can sometimes play hands backwards against these types of players in order to extract multiple streets of future value from their weak hands. Let us say, for example, you raise with Q 10 from the button to $20 in a $5-$5 game. A limit hold’em player, waiting for his $20-$40 game, calls from the big blind. This is another telltale sign of a transitional player, by the way, defending his blinds way too often. The board runs out Q 6 2. The blind checks and you decide to check behind. The turn is a 3, he checks again, and this time you bet out $30, he calls again. The river is a 9. He checks to you again and you bet $75. The blind reluctantly calls with A 2 and you scoop a nice pot of almost forty-five big blinds.

Why did this opponent, who knows nothing about you, decide to call you down so light? It is simple, because you checked the flop. Limit players cannot comprehend why someone would not bet with top pair, especially on a draw-heavy board, and will simply think that you are bluffing on later streets. I see this time and time again. They do not realize that you actually have won more money by checking back the flop because it has induced them to call you down light on the turn and on the river.

This is one aspect of the game that takes a long time for an experienced limit player to understand. Because the betting structure is no-limit we can actually make up for some lost value later on in the hand, something that you rarely have the opportunity to do in limit. Now obviously you should not take this advice too far. When you are playing against someone with deeper stacks and you have a strong hand you must “spike” the pot so that you can bet larger later on to make the most amount of money. This is another concept that the inexperienced player has difficulty understanding. The deeper the stacks the less “trapping” should go on and the more betting for value should be done with the best hand. ♠

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Follow Bart for daily strategy tips on twitter @barthanson. Check out his podcast “The Seat Open Podcast” on seatopenpoker.net and his video training site specifically for live No Limit players ­—CrushLivePoker.com. He also hosts Live at the Bike every Tuesday and Friday at 10:30 pm ET at LivettheBike.com