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Archive for the ‘Texas Holdem’ Category

I always feel that there is a huge misconception with regards to continuation betting in no-limit Texas Holdem cash games. I think that it is clear to me that there is a lot of confusion between tournament play and cash game play. I think that continuation betting in tournaments is more important than what it is in cash games for the simple reason being that there is always a need to amass chips because of the nature of the game. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the biggest obstacles for many people to overcome when they play poker or think about playing poker at a higher level is overcoming the shocks to the system that you encounter when you suffer bad beats and outdraws for money that you perceive to be substantial. If you are not used to this process and the experience of getting smacked hard in a big pot then you will suffer as a poker player. Seasoned players are used to this and ride the blows. Read the rest of this entry »

There is a tremendous tendency these days for players to want to play deep stacked poker but I feel that many players are jumping into deep stacked play without the proper preparation. Recently this has been highlighted to me during my own poker challenge where I set out to turn $100 into $10,000. I actually completed that in December after having started on the 1st April. However what I found was that when I started playing more and more tables in an effort to quicken the process that my game became worse. Read the rest of this entry »

It is often said that switching from tournament poker to poker cash games and vice versa is one of the most difficult transitions to make if you want to be successful in both forms of poker. The significance with tournament poker is that players can deceive themselves for very long periods of time that they could in fact be winning players. The variance in these large field tournaments is so huge that it can take literally hundreds of tournaments before a player really finds out the truth about their overall game. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the biggest factors behind why novice poker players get themselves into trouble is when pots get too large relative to the size of your hand in no-limit Texas poker. This can be a serious problem for players that may have had a limit hold’em background or play a lot of poker tournaments. In tournament poker then your chip stack is often not that large in relation to how many big blinds are in your stack. So it is clear that all-in moves do not carry with them the same danger that they do in cash games where you can buy-in for 100 big blinds.

Let us look at an example to show what I mean and this is where pot control comes to the fore when the stacks are very deep. Let us say that you raised with A-K in a no-limit Texas hold’em tournament and you only started with 20 big blinds and the blinds were 200-400 and so your stack was 8000 before the hand started. You raised to 1200 and an opponent min-raised to 2400. Because you only started with 20 big blinds before the hand then you cannot make a deep stacked mistake.

The bigger the pot becomes then the greater the potential mistake. If you make a mistake for 100 big blinds then that is a bigger and more costly mistake than a mistake for 20 big blinds. But when you look at the A-K situation again in a cash game with 100 big blinds then your opponent re-opening the betting by min raising is a warning sign for your hand when you have 100 big blinds. The re-raiser has still only put six big blinds into the pot and so you have the chance here to control the pot size by calling.

Your opponent has position on you so that is another problem. So if you re-raise here then you are dangerously escalating the pot with a hand that isn’t even a made hand. Although you are less likely to be up against AA or KK because your AK reduces the number of combinations, you must still be alert to the possibility of these hands in no-limit Texas hold’em. Another re-raise by you with AK is basically putting your opponent into a situation where they cannot make a mistake.

You have basically declared that you have a very powerful hand by putting in the third raise pre-flop and you opponent can get away from the situation very cheaply by only losing six big blinds. This is precisely why the concept of pot control is a very important one in poker and especially no-limit Texas hold’em cash games where the stacks can start off very deep and stay that way. Players in cash games have the option to top up their stack and also to buy back in should they lose their stack. This means that they have constantly got a big stack in front of them and are always at risk of making a mistake in a deep stack situation.