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Poker Strategy
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Knowing when to bet is an important skill in poker, but an equally or even more important skill is to know how much to bet in each situation. A good knowledge of bet sizing can help save you from making very unprofitable plays, as well as allowing you to maximize the amount of money you can make in each session. All winning poker players have the ability to make the correct size bet when necessary, and so its pretty important piece of no limit holdem strategy that you should learn.
As a general rule to start off with, you should always try and be aggressive and strong with your bets. More often than not, a small and weak-looking bet will not give you any leverage in the hand or give you any information on the strength of your opponent(s) hands. If you regularly like to make minimum bets and raises, you will find that you are almost always giving your opponent the right odds to call you if they have a draw or even a small piece of the board. So you should try and get into the habit of making strong bets to protect your hand when you think that you are ahead and to get more information from your opponents.
The first opportunity you have to make a bet or raise is on the flop. It is here that you have the opportunity to thin out the field when you have a strong hand and make your post-flop decisions easier by reducing the number of players that continue to see a flop. The way to reduce the amount of players in the hand is to make a decent size raise that forces other players into either calling or folding. A minimum raise before the flop isn’t going to make much of an impact, and so you will find that you get a lot of callers. A good preflop raise should be at least 3 times the size of the big blind, with the optimum raise in my opinion being around 4 big blinds.
From here on out, the size of your bets should be in relation to the size of the pot. This means that you should always look at how big the pot is before deciding how much you should bet. If you feel you have the best hand or looking to bluff, you should try and bet around 75% to 100% the size of the pot. This will give your opponents bad pot odds to call for any draw and make them consider folding with decent hands that may be slightly better than yours. Any bet larger than this will make little difference as far as odds are concerned, and you will be risking too much if your opponent has a stronger hand than you and decides to play on.
As a final note on bet sizing, you should make your re-raises strong, just as you do with your standard bets. If a player bets into you and you decide to re-raise for whatever reason, you should be looking to re-raise around 3 times the size of that player’s initial raise. Again this will put them to a tough decision and give them poor odds to call if they are on a draw.
So hopefully as you can see, the key to good bet sizing in no limit games is to stand your ground and bet strongly. If you are too afraid to put money into the pot when you feel you have a winning hand, you should probably take up another hobby. There is no room for fear in poker, and so you should always make strong bets to keep your opponents on their toes and force them to decisions.
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Poker Strategy
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Just as there are many hands in Texas Holdem that will win you a lot of money, there are a number of deceptive hands that may lead you into believing that they are profitable when in real fact they will often lose you decent sums of money from your bankroll. The sooner that you learn about the hands that are costing you dearly, the sooner you can start saving yourself from losing money. This article will address the most common hands that novices play with and highlight the reasons as to why they can be dangerous hands to play.
The ‘any two suited cards’ is a very popular hand that all varieties of beginners like to play. A flush is a pretty strong hand in the game of Holdem, and so if you manage to make one there is good chance that you will win a nice bit of money with it. Therefore many new players to the game will be prepared to enter pots with any two cards as long as they are suited just in an attempt to catch a flush at some point during the hand. There are two reasons as to why playing any two suited cards is dangerous.
Firstly, it is not that much more likely that you will make a flush just because your cards are suited. The probability of making a flush in Holdem is pretty low, and so it does not justify calling bet and raises in an attempt to catch one on the flop. On top of this, amateur players will often continue to call bets and raises with bad pot odds to make a flush on future streets, which just adds to the problem of playing such hands. The second reason is that you can catch half a hand like second pair on the flop, and end up losing money to another player that has formed a better pair than you. So by playing random suited cards you are setting yourself up for two great opportunities to leak money, so don’t do it.
Another type of hand that always manages to cause the beginner poker players a problem is the low connecting cards. These are almost identical to the problems caused by any two suited cards and can help players to lose money over the long run. It is not too likely that you will form a straight every time you enter a pot with connecting cards like 5c 6h, so don’t enter the pot under the false pretences that you will. You will simply be losing more money in the long run, as well as losing money in pots where you catch half a hand and your opponent catches a stronger one. So save yourself some money and fold before the flop.
One final hand that amateur players get overly attached to is a rag ace. Rag aces are simply aces that are accompanied by a low ranking holecard below a Ten. The problem that these hands cause is that players find it difficult to let the hand go after they pair their ace, and so they will often end up losing a lot of (if not all) of their stack to a player that also makes a pair of aces but with a better kicker. The best way to play these types of hands is to exercise a little self-discipline and fold them before the flop. It is unlikely that you will win a big pot with them, but it is likely that you will lose a big one. Save yourself a bit of money by folding and catch out the other amateur players the next time when you hold a stronger ace than them.
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Poker Strategy
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To be a successful poker player you have to be able to exercise good bankroll management skills. If you are unable to manage your poker money correctly, you will never be able to become a long term winning poker player. Even if you were the best player in the world, it would be impossible to be able to make money from poker if you did not use good money management skills.
Bankroll management basically involves playing at a certain levels and buy-ins to help prevent yourself from going broke at the poker table. You have to set yourself limits to where you can play poker due to the variance found in every poker game. There are always going to be times where you have runs of bad luck that you cannot control, and you will lose money due to the bad runs of cards, and not necessarily due to any bad play. Therefore there is no use in putting all of your poker money on one table, because there is a good chance that you will lose it all and not be able to continue playing poker.
As a result, it is important that we have a large enough bankroll to absorb the effects of this variance so that we can continue to play poker even when we have very bad runs of cards. In addition, we don’t want to go over the top and play at micro levels with a huge bankroll because it is unlikely that we will go broke, and we want to give ourselves the opportunity to win a decent amount of money from our poker sessions. Therefore there are useful rules that you can follow to make sure that you give yourself the best opportunity to make money from poker without going broke.
In cash games, you should never put more than 5% of your bankroll onto the table at any time. So if you want to play in $1/$2 cash games and intend to buy in for the full amount, you should have a bankroll of at least $4000. This will then give you enough room to take a few bad beats and losing sessions, but still be able to continue playing poker without the fear of going broke. Another way of looking at the 5% rule is to remember that you should have 20 times the maximum buy in of the level you wish to play at in your bankroll. Most online poker rooms offer a wide range of limits, so it is perfectly possible to keep your bankroll under control, no matter how large or small it might be. Alternatively, if you are a tournament player, you should have around 40 buy-ins minimum for the level of tournaments you wish to play in.
It is important to remember however that bankroll management is only useful if you intend to play poker regularly, and that you are a winning player. If you only play poker casually then it is not as important to have a set bankroll, but to just be careful with your money instead. In addition, bankroll management will have no effect on your moneymaking endeavours if you are a losing poker player. However, bankroll management will slow down the time it takes for you to lose the money if you are used to playing at higher stakes.
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Poker Strategy
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I wanted to pass along some information I learned from a really good article I ready by Annie Duke. It dealt with the concept of "sunk cost."
You might be wondering, "What are "sunk costs?"
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Poker Strategy
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With online poker becoming so prevalent, many players are exposed exclusively to it, never touching real felt and clay at a cardroom. Because many players are choosing to try out brick-and-mortar poker for the first time, here are some tips that should make your playing experience more enjoyable and make you more comfortable. |
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