Hold Em Authority - Texas Hold Em Strategy and advice for all levels of players

There have been multiple times in poker where I have a perfect read on what someone is holding and I end up losing. No, I’m not talking about a bad beat here - I’m talking about not knowing your opponent as well as you need to. Let me give you an example:

You think you have an opponent pegged as being a reckless poker player. He’s in every hand preflop and ultimately just loves seeing flops. You decide that on one hand you’re going to blow him off his hand, because what are the chances he’s going to have anything worth calling a good chunk of his stack with? The cards are dealt and you have a measley J3. Of course your opponent calls preflop, and the flop comes A62. Chances are this guy isn’t going to have an ace, so this flop is gorgeous for you - you bet, and your opponent calls. The turn is a 3. You bet bigger this time, and your opponent calls. The river is a 9. He wouldn’t call you three times would he? You bet the remainder of your stack and get called fairly quickly. He flips over Q6 and sends you to the rail.

Your intuition was right - he didn’t have a strong hand. What you may have forgotten to take into consideration though was what this guy is willing to call with. He risked almost his whole stack with middle pair which is ridiculous (most of the time), but because you didn’t know he was willing to do that, he took you for all your chips. You can blame your misfortune on him being an idiot if it makes you feel better, but whose fault is it really?

Getting a read on your opponents is important, but taking your read a step further can keep you in a tournament that much longer.

In this age of aggression in the poker world, we sometimes get so caught up in winning that we do whatever we think it takes to bring home a victory.  It’s easy to do, and I’ve done it myself numerous times.  However, here’s a little food for thought the next time you’re playing in a poker tournament:

I recently played in a tournament on Full Tilt in which I reached the final table with a fairly short stack.  Nine players sit at the final table, and within fifteen minutes, seven of them were gone.  I played two hands before it got to three way and didn’t knock out a single person.  Everyone else at the final table was throwing their chips around in hopes of giving the chip leader a run for his money.  As it turned out, I was severely short-stacked (6:1) when it got down to heads up, but second place wasn’t a bad payday.

If you find yourself fortunate enough to be at a final table with a lot of aggressive players, don’t think it’s a bad thing to sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.  You can’t win every all-in, but if you don’t put your chips in the middle, you can survive for a long time unless you’re really short-stacked.   If you think about the other players at the table as your teammates instead of your sworn enemies, in certain situations, it can work to your advantage.

If you read my last post, you know that I just won an online poker tournament. It was a sizable tournament, with 350+ people playing in it. Needless to say, I’m pretty pumped about it, and I feel like I’m at the top of my game. Numerous people have either told me or others that after winning an online tournament, beware!

Why?

Well, they say, because you won’t win anything for a long period of time after that.

That’s ridiculous - if the online poker sites focused on making sure you lose after a sizable win, they would be expending unnecessary time and energy on something that is completely immoral and illegal.

It may seem that you might not win after winning a poker tournament, and a couple of reasons could come into play.

1. You feel that everyone in the poker world should know that you have just won a poker tournament, and you are a force to be reckoned with. This line of thinking makes you a little bit more aggressive - a bad call here, a dumb raise there, and before you know it, you’re on a losing streak.

2. You think you’re invincible - You’ve just won a poker tournament, things are good. You can’t win a tournament without playing well, right? Maybe this means that anything you do turns to gold now. All of a sudden, you start playing more hands because you know good things are going to happen, and before you know it, your stack is whiddled away to nothing because of your not necessarily aggressive, but loose, style of play.

3. Finally, and probably most logical - the law of averages are starting to bite you. If you win a poker tournament, that means that at each point all your chips were in the pot, you won. Chances are, it also means you survived a few big pots that went to showdown. If you win 3 coin flips and lose 1 throughout a tournament, you’re doing pretty well. In the next tournament you play though, you could win 0 and lose 2. You may think this is terrible luck, but the last two tournaments you’ve played, you’re exactly where you are supposed to be in coin flips won, 3-3.

So, Beware! But don’t beware because of the online poker room trying to cheat you. Beware of your own playing style and make sure it doesn’t change from your tournament win to the next tournament. Beware of the law of averages evening things out for you.

Best of luck at the tables.

So you want to know how to win a poker tournament? Well, I really don’t have a lot of experience on the subject, but I did manage to pull one down the other night.
How about a timeline of events that led up to me luckboxing my way into my second tournament victory this century? Alright, here goes.

901: Draw for the button - I start in the small blind… there goes 5 chips right there.

912: I double up with KK against KQ after a flop of Q32.

913-930: I get too aggressive with my new found wealth and piss most of it away.

931: I almost double up again after turning a flush with a very aggressive opponent.

932-1000: Refer to 913-930.

1000-1005: I go into a secluded area and yell at myself for being reckless with my chips.

1005-1105:  I play solid aggressive poker and chip up - no double ups or huge pots, just a lot of small ones.

1105-1110:  Go to the bathroom.

1110-1140:  Go card dead - the blinds start to eat away at my stack a little bit.

1141-1210:  Fight to survive - I go all in three times in this period, surviving all of them.  At this point, I have managed to make it into the money.  One point to note here is that I didn’t play to cash, I played to win by going all in with various hands at different points during the bubble period.

1210-1215:  Do absolutely nothing .

1220-1240:  Double up with AQ against AK, and with 77 v AK.  Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.

1240-130:  Never look back.

I played the last hour of the tournament putting constant pressure on my opponents.  As my stack grew, my confidence grew.  At one point in the final table, there were 8 of us left and I had 3 times the chips of everyone else at the table.  I mention this because if you come to this site often, you know I’m a tight player.  Even though I’m a tight player, I know what to do with a lot of chips when I get them.

There was one point in the heads up match when I got short stacked, but I was fortunate enough to suck out one time, and that’s really all I needed to get my head back into the game and take the tournament down.

Another point I want to make about this tournament is the fact that sometimes it’s just about keeping your emotions in check more than anything.  I was really lucky that my aggression early on with a big stack didn’t come back to bite me either time.  My regrouping at the first break was a big reason I won the poker tournament.

You can play great poker and lose, and you can play bad poker and win. Honestly though, in one way or another, you really have to get lucky to win a poker tournament - Good players just have to get a little less lucky than someone with less experience and talent.

Bodog has a great summary of which hands can be played in which position, generally. As a beginner, I would recommend playing no more hands than this until you get a feel for what’s going on. Don’t think that position is the only factor that weighs on which hands you play, but it is a good starting point. Other factors that determine which hands you play when are your stack size, the other playeres at your table, what kind of action has occured behind you, and the style of play you like to incorporate. We’ll worry about that later after you have a better grasp of the game.

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OK, you’ve decided to play these hands, but what do you do with them? Do you raise, or call? Different situations call for different solutions, but generally, the rule of thumb is that it is better to raise or fold than it is to call. If you’re ever in doubt on whether you should play a hand, fold it. If you are unsure of whether you should raise or call, raise it up.

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Next, a must for the serious poker player: odds. All shapes and forms of odds… get out your calculator.

One of the smartest poker analysts is at it again in the Two Plus Two online magazine. David Sklansky wrote an article about whether one should wait to go all in until another card has been put on the board. Sometimes it’s extremely easy to be willing to go all in if you’ve hit the flop hard, but what happens if you think your opponent is drawing? This is what Sklansky addresses (among other things) in his article. It’s definitely worth a read, and can be directly applied to the previous post about Big Slick. If you haven’t read the previous post, I suggest you do so, because it really does shed some light on the debate about the strength of Slick.

Fox over at Pocketfives wrote an article on Deal Making at the poker table a few months ago, and I’ve been meaning to make a note of it on the site. Obviously deal making doesn’t really apply to you unless you are at or close to the final table of a tournament, but if and when you make a final table that involves some big money, this article is a good starter on how to attack deal making.I think the most important point made in this article is: you don’t have to accept the deal offered by someone. Enjoy!