Most players know this definition and may fold over cards and low pairs to avoid falling victim. This over compensation allows for the cheapest bluff in poker. I bet small every once and a while and the most common response goes something like this: “Now, that’s a sucker bet! I’m not falling for that.” And fold. They don’t always state their thought process, but often they do. I suppose to show their “superior” read and justify their fold to a weak bet.

This tip works best against tight players, both passive and aggressive, and when you have established yourself as a tight player. I recommend it when you are heads-up and post-flop, best as a continuation bet. I tend to throw out my small bets when I have absolutely nothing.

Try it, you may be surprised at the results. It doesn’t work all the time, but you are only losing a little more than you would have with a fold. The beauty of the sucker-sucker bet is that it doesn’t have to have a high success rate to still be worth it.

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Coming to a cash game as a short stack is, as a rule, not a good idea. By doing this you are putting your fate a little less in your hands and more at the mercy of the poker gods. There is a law of poker that states that a player with infinite finances will always win the money off of a player with a finite bankroll given enough time. This stays true regardless of the players’ skill levels, but if the cash impaired player is the more skilled, it will likely take more time. This is true because of dumb luck. The law can be scaled back on a kind of sliding scale. I started with less than half of my opponent’s chip stack, which meant I required more luck to win, even if I was the better player.

As a side note, coming to the table on the cheap is also a strategy. Nearly all the on-line cash tables I frequent have a player or two who are playing short-stack with the intention of going all-in before the turn hits. When they double, triple, or quad up, they often cash out returning to their short stack status. I find these players are unsure how to play their hands past the flop, but as long as they have at least slightly above average luck  they make money. After all, you can’t be bluffed off a hand once you’re all-in. I imagine the profits last only for the short-run for these short-stackers, as most of it probably goes to the rake.

When you are on poker cruise control, you probably don’t have any clear tells. Tells haunt me most when I am in debatable situations. These situations come with the most frequency short-handed, when I’m betting with weaker starting hands than I would like. I’m not a computer, which means I need time to think about the best decision. Which means I hesitate.

The obvious solution to said problem is to simply not deliberate. However, there is a way to throw off you eagle-eyed competitors while still allowing yourself some headspace: misdirection. You need to put the breaks on your no-brainers. The next time you are faced with a clear call, don’t make it clear. Pretend to consider a fold, or a raise for the matter. Burn a little time off the clock. You aren’t acting for the benefit of that hand, but for future hands. The next time you truly must take a moment, your opponents will read you based on misinformation. And that is always a good thing.

He who hesitates cannot play in a real casino. Online blackjack is not comparable to the real game. This holds true for poker as well.

The number one identifier of your skill is money. It is, after all, how we keep score. Macro-consistency is everything. Marco meaning not micro. If you have a bad day, or an unprofitable week, it doesn’t necessarily meaning you are a bad player. You want to play long enough to look at the big picture. Do you average a strong profit? What’s you standard deviation? These are questions that can be, and need to be answered with good record keeping and a lengthy poker history.

There isn’t much to learn in the short run. Wins and loses are subject to some luck day to day, but you can still assess your play by looking at how you won or loss. When I correctly read my opponent on a straight draw and bet the pot at him on the turn, I played well, regardless if he calls and catches on the river. Inversely, if I catch trips on the river against an aggressive two-pair, I know I misplayed the hand even though the poker gods were kind to me. I’d go so far to say, as your play on the turn is concerned, luck is inversely related to skill.

Before you make the jump to big money games, also look at the caliber of your normal opponents. You may be winning not only on your own merit, but also due to the lack of skill or seriousness of the rest of the table. Although this is just what you want in poker, it can be hard when gauging your play relative to Gus Hanson. Be sure to go up against more than just the same five guys to experience more styles and see if your consistent winning pattern holds up.

That’s the long way of saying, if you are making money, go to the next level and make more of it. Give yourself a “raise.” You can always go back to the drawing board if  it doesn’t work out. Don’t rush, but don’t be afraid to play to your potential either.

The first step to making your own game is to choose the type of poker play. The most popular choices are stud games, draw games, or community card games. From there you can decide how many cards to use and how they are distributed. All that really matters is that you keep all the players on a fair, equal playing field.

The easiest way to mix-up any game is by adding wilds. This will seemingly elevate your average hand strength, but relative to the rest of the table, winning rates should stay about the same. The most popular cards to have as wilds are aces, deuces, One-Eyed Jacks, Suicidal Kings, and of course Jokers. You can also let the game play decide what cards are wild. For example, the river card could be wild or even one card could make another card wild as in Follow the Queen games. I’ve played games in which entire suits were made wild. but that may have been going to far.

To keep games active, I like to have multiple betting rounds. With games that the cards are slowly made available to the players, (like hold’em with the flop, turn and river) betting rounds are nicely built-in. You may design a game where this isn’t the case and the entirety of the player’s hand is known at the outset. If this is the case, I add betting rounds by having players roll-out their hands. If you don’t know this term, it is when you arrange your cards in the order you want to reveal them to the rest of the table and bet in between reveals. As you may have guessed, there is an extra layer of strategy involved with the roll-out.

The final step is important. Name your game. You can name it after the creator or its inspiration or anything you want. If it is a popular variation, people will want to play it again and it is no fun referring to it as “that game with the thing that Bob came up last week.”

If you have come up with any fun game variants of your own, leave them in the comments! I’m always up for trying new ways to play the game of poker.

Although lottery too is a way of gambling, people prefer thinking of the national lottery is a poor man’s wildest dreams come true.

Senario one: The bettor is bluffing you off the hand. A raise from you, I’m thinking a raise about the size of the pot, will make him fold. Period. You win the hand.

Senario two: The bettor hit the flop, probably a pair or two pair. He will either fold his hand thinking your hand is stronger, or he will call. The advantage with the call is that he probably won’t bet the turn knowing your aggression with this hand, whether he improves or not. If your flush card doesn’t hit the turn, you may want to not invest anymore to the pot until you see the river, which you probably will for free. After seeing both the turn and river there is almost a 50% you have found the flush. If you have, take down the pot, it’s yours. If not, and your opponent has checked both the turn and river, there is a good chance you can buy it anyway.

The problems that can arise are few and unlikely, but you should always be aware of the unlikely. First, you may catch the flush on the turn and not bet your opponent out of the hand. If the river is also of the same suit and you don’t hold the nut flush, be careful that your flush hasn’t been outdone. Second, if there is a pair on the table, be aware that your opponent could hold a full house. Barring those unfortunate events, feel confident with your flush.

I experienced something this past weekend that I never thought I’d live to see. I had to explain pot odds and hand percentages to somebody who calls himself a professional poker player. The mere fact that this happened terrifies me. How can a man who has over $100,000 in career winnings over the past eight years not know how to compute the simplest of pot odds? (NOTE: I’ll leave it up to you to determine if somebody who cashes less than 15 times in the past eight years should be considered a professional poker player.)

I started to question myself and one of my fundamental concepts of poker. Maybe math isn’t a major component of winning poker?

Then, I took a deeper look and considered what it was that I had to explain to him. The first hand involved my AKo vs. his pocket kings. We ended up getting all his money into the pot pre-flop. When I saw his pocket kings, I commented, “Oh, well, it could be worse. At least you don’t have aces. I’m still only about a 2:1 dog here.”

He laughed out loud at me and said I was nowhere near a 2:1 dog here. You only win this hand about 20% of the time. That should have been my first clue that I should not have let his lack of knowledge make me question my fundamental concepts of poker. I don’t care what type of importance a person places on math in poker situations – I believe most players would agree that you at least need to have a basic understanding of where you stand in a hand to make rational judgments.

After much discussion, I told him I was at least 30% to win the hand. As it turns out, I’m barely over 30% to win the hand, but that’s a lot closer to what I was guessing than him. My second clue that I shouldn’t worry about my belief that math is an important aspect of poker came at this point – at least not in regards to this conversation. He asked, “How does a 30% chance of winning make you a 2:1 underdog? That makes you a lot more of an underdog than that – more like 3.5:1.”

I was floored. Was this person really not able to convert percentages into ratios? As it turns out, he can’t.

After a lot of thought and analysis, I decided that this experience should not affect my opinion on the importance of math as it relates to poker. I still believe it’s a game that takes a basic understanding of math, people, and relationships. I still believe, the more you know about these things, the more you can incorporate them into your experiences. To put it simply, the more you know about these things, the more you will get out of your experiences. The more experiences you have, the more you have to draw upon when faced with decisions. These things can only make you better.

Until next time,

KC

Today one of our chickens died of rather unfortunate causes. What has that got to do with poker? Well like a cloudy day it will become clear once the downpour has passed. So allow the words of this article to trickle and flow, splatter and pitter-patter through your mind and you will find the answer to why a chicken’s death has so much to do with poker and beating micro stakes cash games.

As the title ensues, one of our chickens has died. This chicken was not just any old chicken. I personally gave her the name Ginger after the chicken in the movie Chicken Run. Why did I name her after a fictional movie character? Because Ginger was our only chicken who refused to stay within the confines of the chicken run. No matter how often or how hard we tried she would always find a way to escape from the chicken run and roam free around the garden and, on occasions, through the house. All of which is much like Ginger in the movie.

Unfortunately things did not end well for our Ginger, today we found her dead after sticking her head into a possum trap, trying to eat the apple, and had unwittingly set of the trap which broke her neck.

You are probably still wondering what this has to do with poker. As some of you may have guessed I am referring to setting traps or slowplaying. Why some work and why some do not.

When setting a trap in poker there are a few main conditions that need to occur.

1. You need a very strong hand.

2. Your opponent needs a strong hand also, but one that is dominated by yours.

3. Your opponent needs to be an aggressive player.

Without these key three conditions your trap will very rarely yield the maximum benefits and will most likely not be the most profitable play for the situation because of it.

NOTE: All examples and advice is assuming that your are playing a heads-up pot and I only delve into setting the trap post flop. Whilst pre-flop traps can be set I am directing this article at post flop trapping.

Condition 1 – A strong hand

The term “strong hand” is relative to the situation. On a 7c2s8h flop a set of 8’s has a great chance of taking down the pot on the river, in this situation you have a strong hand. Whereas on a 8hAh9h board there are multiple draws and made hands that will beat you and your hand is likely beat against a TAG (tight/aggressive) player showing large amounts of aggression.

The definition of a strong hand is also relative to what type of opponent you are facing. If your opponent is TAG then TPTK (Top pair/Top kicker) is probably not going to cut it at showdown. The opposite is also true, where TPTK against a super lag donk is the best hand 75%+ of the time.

To define whether or not your hand is infect “strong” you must look at it in relation first to the board cards and secondly to the type of opponent you are up against.

Condition 2 – Your opponent needs a strong hand that you dominate

To some this may just seem that it is a luck of the draw thing. You do not get to decide what cards your opponent has so how can you tell whether he has a strong enough hand for you to trap him successfully.

This is where your hand reading skills, his actions in previous hands and the earlier streets in this hand come into play.

Effective stacks 100bb. Lets say that a TAG player who plays solid ABC poker and very rarely bets without a hand. You mad a standard 3xbb raise from late position and villain 3-bets you from the bb to 10bb. You call with your 8c8h. The flop comes down 8dAhKs. Villain leads out for a pot bet of 20bb.

At this point in the hand you must decide whether or not to slow play your hand or to fast play your hand. A major contributing factor will be whether villain has shown that he can let go oh his flopped TPTK type hands to big re-raises. For the sake of the example, we have seen villain fold AQ on an AJ3 board and show what he folded when he was face with a large re-raise after leading the flop.

Now with that information you should be able to recognize that calling to trap villain is better than raising because of his 3 betting pre-flop range(something like QQ+/AQs+).. By calling we allow villain to make another big bet on the turn with his TPTK or Top 2 pair type hand. The alternative of raising will mean that villain will fold all hands barring top 2 pair and a set. Seeing as though there are two possible sets that beat yours then you can deduct that if you raise then you will be in an effectively wa/wb situation where your raise is getting called by more hands that beat you than hands that you beat.

So by using information that you gained in the early rounds of a hand and in previous hands we can make better assumptions on villains range and on whether or not we are in a good situation to trap.

Condition 3 – Villain needs to be an aggressive player

By this I mean that you can’t trap a calling station or passive player because they simply don’t bet their hands so trapping would yield less profit than value betting your hand the whole way.

Example hand

Continuing from the example I used in the condition 2 section. The turn comes a blank and villain fires out another 2/3 pot size bet of 40bb into a 60.5bb pot. Here villain has just committed himself to a showdown and your trap has worked. Shove it in, villain only has 40bb of 100bb left and is committed to calling your all-in.

Alternatively, villain hesitates on the turn and fires out a small 20bb bet. Here is where you should take your trap to the river. Villain is slowing down and will most likely fold to a raise here so call and value bet the river if villain checks or shove if he bets.

Summary

If the 3 conditions I mentioned above arise then it is most likely an ideal trapping situation and you should give your opponent enough rope to hang himself with and unleash your raise on the river by which point villain is committed to calling your all-in the majority of the times.

Good Luck with your traps! You can follow mine at http://becoming-poker.blogspot.com.

Munchrs.