I think i saw that same post in the hot seat forum. As far as weighing the risks in your bottom paragraph. What do u really expect from an inexperienced player that has 2500 free chips on a winning draw hand, they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The worst that can happen is they get another 2500 free chips and it seems the odds are in their favor hitting those gut shots on this site too. They see so many players hitting them so why wouldnt they go for it too with nothing to lose and everything to gain. I actually dont blame them for doing that.
Thank you for noticing the repeated post, floridajetski, anyone wishing to read the post , please check the ‘Hot seat’ strategy thread.
your playing for free chips who cares if you win or lose your playing for fun
thats the problem too many people take this site too serious
I’d actually say “you’re playing for free chips, so you might as well try to win”. The fun is in trying to learn and think about how to play, not just clicking buttons and hoping for good flops. So, “taking it seriously” can be the same thing as playing for fun.
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Personally, I think the biggest mistake players make has to do with their betting. Bet too little, too much, poor timing, don’t bet hoping you do bet instead of checking, etc. etc.
Well for me personally, I think winning is fun, and winning more is more fun.
I also enjoy the feeling of improving - for example if I can figure out what a player who has been crushing me is doing and start beating them instead then that for sure is fun too.
Yeah, lots of betting mistakes.
I see a lot of small pair mistakes too.
Flop comes AKJ, all one suit, guy looks down at his hand and thinks, “Yeah, these pocket 4s should be good.” I’ve seen them played all the way to the river, then shown, as if to say, “See, I had something worth playing.” I’ve seen it with my own eyes, I (usually) don’t just make this stuff up!
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i was in a hand today in high rings, guy flops 2 pairs, he bets 10k, i call with my pocket 3s…turn shows a 3, i check, he bets 75k, i re raise double to 150k, river shows a 3 so i go all in with quads and he calls. an easy 1.7 mill or so pot because he made 2 mistakes…not raising way more than 10k after theflop, in which i woulda layed my 33 down, and calling my all in after the turn and river show a 33
i think he thought i was bluffing trip 3s. also the mistakes of under estimating your opponents and not leaving soon enough when u are up big on a ring table. this obviously is also true in live holdem rings.
Funny you should say that. I just busted out of a tournment with a pair of 4s. The flop brought 3, 5,6 so an open ended straight draw. The player on my left, who has a very low Replay Poker rating overbet the pot on the flop.
At this point I had 2 outs to make a set, so 1 in 22, plus 8 outs to make the straight on each of the turn and the river, so slightly less than a 50/50 proposition. However, I was a late reg in the tournament and was only a few hands in and decided to take a shot, as it seemed likely that I would take almost the whole stack of the villain if I succeeded, and at this point I did not have any time invested in the tournament.
As it turned out I lost out , and all he had was top pair which was 6’s. He was taking a horrific risk overbetting the pot with top pair, but it paid off.
In a lot of these games players simply will not fold even though they do not have the odds in their favor, and it is often necessary to overbet the pot.
One of the biggest mistakes, though, that players make is not being clear in their own mind whether they are trying to make opponents fold, or hoping to make them call when they have the nuts. For example, if I flop a set with a small pair, I will hardly ever slam in a big bet or go all in on the flop, because I want opponents to put in more money, or better still try to bluff, not to take a small pot at the flop with a monster hand.
In this case I suppose, on reflection, that the opponent was betting 750 chips to win 400 chips and did not wish to be called at all. However I think he would have called if I had led out on the turn (see below).
However if it is later in the tournament and my stack is small, then I may go all-in on the flop so that a bigger stack may see this as a desperation bluff and call me, or just call with a couple of overcards or some kind of draw. And if the blinds are really high at that point, winning the pot at the flop is not such a big loss.
Here is my beat. I know my play was not optimal, but at least I knew what the odds were and decided to go for it. With a small pair and three overcards on the flop and no straight or flush draws, your odds of improving is only about 1 in 11 and your opponent who has any overcard pair has the same odds of improving his hand too. In this hand my hole cards are a pair of 4s.
Incidentally, the villain has a gutshot draw for a straight flush in spades on the river, so I doubt whether he would have folded had I raised all in first on the turn. Had the four of spades come on the river to give me a set, I would still have lost all my chips as villain would have completed the straight flush.
https://www.replaypoker.com/hand/replay/437186111
Usually I do not try to raise the pot preflop with small pairs such as this, but had I done so in this hand, I think he would have folded preflop. The reason I don’t raise these hands early in a tournament is that it is practically impossible to push opponents off the pot preflop without putting a lot of chips at risk, and if you do get calls, they will be higher pocket pairs or two overcards.
I’m surprised at the amount of players fearful that playing a tight range as the OP suggests will make them easy to play against. Maybe I should add something to it which I don’t believe has been said yet.
If you’re going to play a tight range, this is never wrong to a point. I must add, however, that in order for it to work you must also be quite aggressive. It doesn’t work very well if people know you’ll only bet your AQ on Axx flops. You must attack often and be willing at times to fire turns and rivers without the goods. You must not be afraid to make statistically correct bluffs that will sometimes get looked up, and you must not let yourself be embarrassed by it when someone laughs at you for it.
You must also play your draws with the same fire and aggression. In time, it’s a good thing for you when people realize that although you play strong hands, you’re not afraid to attack with the nuts, decent hands, strong draws, tricky low equity draws like gutshots from time to time, or absolutely nothing at all. You must push your equity and wage total war on anyone who has the guts to enter a pot with you. If they want to draw, they must pay heavy prices in bets. If they want to stand tall with some mediocre hand, they must know that you could very well be on a draw that just crushed them on the turn or river or be outkicked by one of your many premium hands. If they want to bluffcatch, they must know that they face a very powerful range that will naturally have more hands which destroy them than the average player.
Even when someone plays a 15%-20% premium starting range, it is very difficult to read that players hand when they constantly attack. That being said, I’m not advocating being ultra aggressive to the point of insanity, but you would indeed be finding any reasonable excuse to fire a bet. Ultimately getting this right is an art that can take you much further than replay poker if you get it right.
FWIW playing like this on a rakeless site against casuals, combined with a few other tactics that only experience can teach, AND proper bankroll management (aka not playing in games too big) has allowed me to climb from a new account to 148k effortlessly. I honestly don’t pay nearly as much attention to my opponents as I should and never in these games is it ever necessary to deal with tougher situations such as aggressive 3 bettors, other Tight-Aggressive players, or wild, skilled, variance inviting Loose-Aggressive players. Most importantly, you don’t have to fight against crushing rake here. This make Replay the perfect site to practice and research this type of play safely before giving it a go on a real money site. Get this right though and expand upon it on your own time, and you could very easily destroy real money games on sites like Bovada.
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I think here you have to consider whether your outs to a set are going to be good if you do get there. If a 4 comes then there are four to a straight on the board so anyone with any 2 or 7 beats you. Plus you are unlikely to get called by worse if you make your set and bet. With the big raise on the flop from villain you could also easily be up against a set of 6s or 5s, or even something like 74 or 42 for a made straight, though those last two are less likely since you have 44 yourself. Overall when V raises here it screams “good but vulnerable made hand” so you have to start from there when analyzing whether to call.
On the flop, you’re likely a 40-60 underdog or worse, and there are not enough chips behind for you to get paid when you do get there. Either fold it on the flop or jam yourself if you think villain will fold maybe 30% or more of the time. If this was a ring game I might go for the jam here; in a tournament I would conserve my chips, fold to the raise on the flop and look for a better spot.
For what it’s worth, with V’s specific holding I don’t hate their raise on the flop - they have top pair plus a gutshot plus a backdoor flush draw. The minbet lead and flat seem to indicate weak holdings given the wet board (made hands are going to want to raise to charge draws) so it’s a reasonable spot to attack. The raise size is probably a bit too big.
After picking up the flush draw on the turn it seems fine for V to jam - they have a hand that is currently beating most draws and that has plenty of outs against everything except a slowplayed set that turned a boat, and this is unlikely given the flop action.
Great point, and “the reasons why we should bet” could easily be a topic in itself. For me I learned a lot when I started thinking about what hands my opponent could have that I expect to fold or call given my bet and bet size in a specific spot. Which better hands do they have that I expect to fold when I bet? Which worse hands do they have that I expect to call when I bet? If I can’t think of any hands as an answer for either question, then I probably shouldn’t be betting, or I need to adjust the size that I’m betting (perhaps very big or very small) to get the desired result.
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the thing is that replay gives you a small amount of chips and it is up to you to run them up (or buy them) to get into games where people do not think like you…your thinking is ok for you but a lot of people take the game seriously…and want to get to the games (HIigh stakes where others also take it seriously)
Who cares if u win or lose? Well i think every player cares more about winning then losing. And i agree with County29 on everything he said. So what if they are free chips, u still earned them. If u dont play serious or somewhat serious then their would be no competition on the tables and no reason to play. Who says u cant have fun or arent having fun playing serious poker? It should be fun for u to work your way up from low to high stakes so u can play serious poker and have fun doing that. I cant imagine playing on a table if everyone didnt care if they lost or won. Is that fun?
I understand where you are coming from Skippy and for alot of people playing poker is more about socializing and just killing time and nothing wrong with that.
For some competitive people it is about being the “best” but being the best on a free chip poker site when you can buy a huge stack to get a rank doesn’t really say much about a persons poker skills.
For me it is about improving my game and holdem is a game of skill and if you play against good players you will have to develop your skills to win.
I used to play on real money sites for years and that is a whole different game IMO but you can use Replay to work on your strategy and have some fun if you set some goals and study the strategy and tricks advanced players use to increase their odds of winning.
There are a few players that do make a very good living just playing real money poker.
When I play I always have a goal in mind and in tourneys my goal is to get into the payouts and then to the last table or big show where I have a chance of winning the whole thing or at least getting a good pay out for the time I invested. For ring tables my goal is to at least double my buy in.
So if you like a challenge set some goals that will make you work harder to improve you game and a good place to start is in some of the lower buy in tourneys like the Stampede where you get a bounty for felting other players and you can win enough to make it worth your time even if you don’t win the whole tourney.
Either way enjoy the game!
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Well, I had no idea how many mistakes I was making until some lovely people I played with tonight let me know. Apparently, open raising with anything less than QQ is bullying and “ruins the game”. Bluffing, in any fashion is ruining the game. Telling the short stack at your table know that there’s 1 more to go before the bubble breaks is extremely rude for some reason. This ruins the game.
I had no idea that every single thing I do ruins the game for some people. I’m also amazed at how many people seem not to be having fun here. Some don’t appear like the game at all. Weird. Still, even taking bad beats with weird hands and being told I’m all sorts of a horrible player and person, I still had a decent time. The trick is the not taking it seriously thing I mentioned before. If I would have taken this seriously, I’d be in a miserable mood right now. What’s the point of that?
Oh, 1 other major mistake I have to cure myself of is this: You cannot under any circumstances make some players fold top pair. Straight draw comes in, screw you I have top pair. Flush fills, “screw you I have top pair”. Board pairs middle pair and you check raise, “screw you I have top pair”. LOL - I have to file this under “value bet more and bluff your missed draws less”.
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Adding to the list: Flatting with small pairs in tournaments when short-stacked is another huge error players make here. Just played a 25K MTT where effective stacks were ~17BB. I open to 2.75x with AKo, SB flats and everyone else folds. Flop is TK5 and I continue with a 33% pot bet. Could have sized up as TPTK is effectively the nuts at these depths but needed him to have a piece of it. He jams and I have to call. He shows 55 for a flopped set.
While this worked out this one time, players do not seem to understand the basic math at work here. Set mining with deeper stacks can be very profitable, especially in loose passive games where people will stack off 150BB on top pair for some reason. However, with shallow effective stacks, a flat call is -EV.
You will flop your set say 1 in 8 times. That means you miss 7 of 8 times and are left with a hand that cannot hold up to any continued aggression. As an example, using round numbers for simplicity, if you stack a player with 15BB once and lose your 3BB investment 7 times, that’s a -7/8BB EV every hand. You need implied odds of at least 10:1 in order for set mining to be profitable.
Apparently I am a long way from cured. I can’t help it - a perfect bluff spot comes in for an overbet and I go for it. Any mildly competent player folds top pair with no kicker. Ah, therein lies the rub.
And when you know they only bet top pair and can’t fold it, you still get whacked by the astonishingly horrible play: Hand #438179491 - Replay Poker
Yeah, after a full day of getting every hand in way to the good and winning exactly 0 of them, you have to start wondering. Maybe getting your chips in way behind is a great strategy and I’m too thick to see it? Got to take a break from the silly though because runs like these are soul-crushing. How many times in a row can you get your chips in so far ahead that the calls are outright silly and yet still lose every single one? It wouldn’t even be so bad if the plays were remotely competent but they aren’t.
I have to go back to a real game before this type of thing rubs off on me and I start picking up these horrible habits. If the game is just about who can hit the boards the hardest, its not interesting in the least. Losing the ability to enjoy it, not because of the results but because the games are mindless.
https://www.replaypoker.com/hand/replay/438231139
Of course Karma is a dangerous thing and this was his exit a few hands later: https://www.replaypoker.com/hand/replay/438235660
I started to read these posts and chuckled… One comment was… you will be easy to read… now there’s someone I could bluff out because he thinks he can read me… point being, be consistantly inconsistant… another said… watch the Big Blind and when it gets close, take a risk to maintain chips when it comes your turn… Really??? you are advising players to take bigger risks when they are out of position???.. bad advise… take more riskd when you are in a great position… on button or next to it… The biggest mistake made by novice players is allowing others (with that 4-7 that will sometimes beat your AA, saw that comment as well} allowing those 4-7’s to limp in… if they want to play weak cards or chase losing hands… make they pay more dearly for doing so… also remember, its not what you have that always wins the hand, its what they think you have… I,ve also seen winning hands lose because they try to hide their top hand and lose to a weaker hand on the river… Remember, an A Q plays differently every time, so play it as it unfolds and not only will you be more successful but you will also be unreadable…