Poker Strategies

Online Hold'em Strategy (Part II)

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Swim against the current.
A dusty old piece of conventional wisdom in poker is to play tight in the loose games and play loose in the tight games. The idea is to assess the action of the table and go the other way - to swim upstream, as it were. It turns out that this is rather a good approach to the smaller online Hold'em tables. As stakes rise, however, the game tends to get more complex and sophisticated, and poker generalities work even less than they do otherwise.

In a small cash game where bets and raises are flying around, you're better off hunkering down and playing very conservatively. In this case, you're basically staying out of harm's way. On the other hand, if the game is really locked down and quiet, it often pays to loosen up your game and try to steal some pots. Again, remember that this is only generally speaking. Each of your individual decisions, from hand to hand and betting round to betting round, will be informed by many other factors.

Online Hold'em Strategy (Part I)

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The following tips and suggestions can apply to the game of poker at large, but are particularly useful for new online players at low-stakes Hold'em tables, whether in cash games or tournaments. Remember that these tips and observations are generally true. Particular game circumstances can change everything in a heartbeat.

Be selective with starting hands.
The awful truth is that, as a rule, you should be throwing away most of your starting hands in Texas Hold'em. What is meant by "most?" It's impossible to say anything exact here, but a ballpark figure of 75-85 percent is not unreasonable. That means that you'd be mucking three hands out of four - at a minimum. Conservative players tend to wait for a premium hand before even getting involved in a pot. What constitutes a premium hand varies, but AA, KK, and AK are some usual suspects.

By folding junk hands early and often, you are minimizing potential losses. A couple of other points are critical here:

  • The strength of your starting hand depends on the number of other players at the table. In a 10-player game, you should tighten up your criteria for a playable starting hand. In a two-player heads-up match, you obviously would loosen up quite a bit.
  • Keep your position (relative to the dealer) in mind. Starting hands that would be marginal in early position may be playable in late position. Remember that the benefit of late position is the ability to act last, to see and take into account the actions of all the other players in a round of betting.

Online Poker Advices

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When you play poker (especially in the online world, where you don't have to even pretend that you can act), your adrenaline flows and your impulses fire heavily in the "hunter" (versus "gatherer") part of your brain. We provide some advices here that, we hope, can keep those annoying license plates out of your gums.

1. Don't bluff lesser opponents.
If you run up against an opponent who plays worse than you — especially if he has a tendency to call most bets — don't try to bluff him. Your dunderheaded opponent may think you have the hand you try to feign and call anyway because he thinks he can get lucky. As a result, you end up losing because of his loose play. And that's not good.

2. Don't make a 50/50 bet against an inferior player.
Sure, pushing all-in in a no-limit Hold'em tournament with a 2-2 is a mild favorite against an A-K suited, but why reduce your skill level to a mere coin flip against a player you can beat in the long run?
Conversely, don't be afraid to push all-in against a superior player in a tournament. You want to have the odds on your side, no matter how slim, for one go rather than to sit and battle it out for hours on end with a player who holds an edge against you.

Classifying Players In Texas Hold'em (Part II)

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The implication is that there are four different types of players, but that's true only from the very widest of standpoints. Again, as you gain your poker experience, you'll probably find yourself fine-tuning your evaluations to each individual, but the following are a good set of evaluations to begin with - along with some advice on how to combat them effectively.

Battling aggressive/tight players.
Playing against an aggressive/tight player is fairly simple. Because he's tight, he'll play only the highest quality hands. When he does, your response is fairly straightforward: Fold unless you have a hand that is extremely good.
Tight players tend not to bluff much, so don't be afraid to throw away the occasional hand that's only okay by your estimation. And if you're going to start aiming your hold cards at the trash can, the earlier you can throw it away, the better - their raising and reraising will gnaw on your stack in a big way.

Classifying Players In Texas Hold'em (Part I)

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When you play against people on a poker table, to the best of your ability you want to try to classify their play. Beginning and intermediate players tend to think of players by general categories of classification. Eventually, though, you'll want to get to a point where you classify each and every player individually. The more you can say about an individual player whom you're competing against, the more likely you are to beat her in the long run.

In broad terms, many players tend to be either aggressive or passive in their play. Figuring out where your opponents are in the passive-aggressive spectrum can help you not only win more when you have a good hand, but also lose less when he does.

Aggressive players are the easiest to pick out at a table. Aggression can certainly be well defined but you'll feel aggression as much as you actually see it, and the symptoms are fairly blatant.

Luck In Poker

Luck in any card game is cyclical - it comes and goes in a mysterious fashion. Sometimes the cards run hot, sometimes cold. Many players give no weight to this at all as a factor in the game. But if such events are cyclical, perhaps we ought to take a hard look at this as a factor in the game. It must be of some significance that in some games no matter how well we play nothing works, while in others it hardly matters what we do because we can't do anything wrong. It is unlikely that an effect of such magnitude would have no meaning within our own purposes in the game.

No-Limit Holdem: push-back strategy (Part II)

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A few strategies can counter 3-betting light. The critical parameters are your post-flop skills and, more important, your position. Keep in mind that 3-betting light out of position can sometimes put you in a lot of trouble. In addition to your position, try to analyze your opponent's tendencies with respect to c-betting. If your opponent 3-bets and you know he'll c-bet 90% of the flops, you should certainly call with the intent of raising or check-raising any flop, in order to represent a strong hand.

No-Limit Holdem: push-back strategy (Part I)

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One push-back strategy is 3-betting light, e.g., the pre-flop re-raise.
To 3-bet means to re-raise a pre-flop raise. This term comes from limit hold'em, a poker variation in which 3-bets are very common. To make it simple, in limit hold'em we consider that the initial raiser opens for 2BB. This is a 2-bet. Therefore, a reraise, in limit, is called a 3-bet. When it comes to no-limit, the term "3-bet" essentially applies to pre-flop action. When this move takes place post-flop, it's simply called a re-raise.

Poker Lessons

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Play fewer starting hands more thoughtfully.
Yes, it's true that there are some players somewhere who play too conservatively pre-flop, for the most part, players play too many starting hands - and they play many of them thoughtlessly. There are books that list the types of hands that you should be playing in different positions and against different types of players. We're not going to replicate all of the good work done by many other authors in this brief article. Nor do we expect you to memorize some table of starting hands. This lesson requires that you become more selective by thinking more seriously about which hands you really want to be playing and how you will play them.

No-Limit Texas Hold'em Tips (Part II)

  • If you pick up a big hand in late position and the pot has already been raised, just call if you believe you will be heads-up. Should you flop a monster like trip aces just check-call for more profit and then raise on the turn.
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