A Look Inside

Poker Strategy
21

Some factors to consider, in no particular order:

  • Number of opponents in the pot (ideally you’re heads up or at most 2 other players in the pot)
  • Opponent’s tendencies (no bluffing necessary against a calling station, lots of bluffing if opponent is nitty, etc)
  • Your table image (have you been folding a lot recently? or splashing around? are the other players even paying attention?)
  • Stack size of all players involved (if you’re deep stacked you have more room to fire multi-street bluffs, or at least threaten to)
  • Current pot size compared to stack size (if the stack sizes are much less than the pot then a bluff is less likely to succeed)
  • Board texture and opponent’s range (what hands that currently beat you could they have that would fold to a bet/raise?)
  • Cards in your hand (do you have draws? do you have blockers? do you have showdown value?)
  • If in a tournament, are you close to the bubble or a significant payout jump?
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22

More important (at least at higher levels) than just about all of these factors is balance. The goal isn’t just to get players to fold when you bluff, but also to convince them to call when you have value.

How often are you betting for value in that spot, and how often are you bluffing? If you’re value-betting light, or betting big, you can work in more bluffs. However, you can’t go too crazy with bluffs, or you won’t have enough value hands in your betting range. Also, if you value-bet too light, and aren’t all in, your opponent can put you in a really uncomfortable spot by raising or jamming on you.

Whenever you’re betting, it’s helpful to think through which hands you would bet with. Focus on the absolute top and bottom of your range. On early streets, made hands (overpairs, sets, top or middle pairs with good kickers) are good for value, while draws (flushes, straights) make good bluffs. By the river, filter your bluff range down to missed draws, with VERY few, if any, “random hands.”

Keep in mind that a pot-sized bet on the river - which is quite large - requires a 2:1 ratio of value hands to bluffs in order to be balanced, with smaller bets requiring even fewer bluffs.

One last comment on this topic. Be REALLY careful about making large bets early in a hand when you have low equity. If an observant player sees you regularly betting the pot or bigger on the flop to “buy it” and close down the action, they’re going to start calling you down pretty light, and/or raising you aggressively when you do so. That’s going to force you to either fold or over-commit your equity in a lot of situations. Don’t put yourself in that situation. Maintain balance.

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23

I agree overall that balance is a very important concept - you generally need a mixture of value bets and bluffs. My thinking about balance has changed a bit over the last few months. In the past my default style was to try to play in a balanced way and then adjust once I have specific reads on a player. More recently, I am instead defaulting to a more unbalanced style that is designed to exploit the population’s tendencies at this site. Balance is important when most players you’re facing are themselves balanced and they’re paying close attention to what you’re doing - but that’s simply not true of the majority of players here.

To give one specific example, a tendency here is to call too much preflop with any Ax hand (suited or unsuited). As a result I have dialed my default bluffing frequency way down on A-high flops since those will disproportionately hit Villain’s range. On the other hand if the flop is say J63 I can bet 100% of my range and have a profitable bluff.

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24

Another element to the psychological warfare side of the equation is fear. I want people to understand that if they play a pot with me, it can very well cost them their entire stack. I’m not going to play passive small-ball with under 30BB if I’m the initial aggressor. If you want to splash around with a garbage hand against me, you’re risking your tournament life. Sure, you’ll win my stack 1 in 4 times but those other 3 are sending you out of the game. This gets me a good amount of folds to my raises. It also prevents people from limping/attacking my BB with impunity. Getting a few free passes late in a game is extremely helpful.

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25

I’ve noticed that as well. If you’re going to c-bet with a large portion of your range on certain boards (disconnected, rainbow, and/or paired flops that don’t contain an ace, for example), you’ll want to keep your bet size low to avoid becoming unbalanced. This comment on another thread touches on how to exploit that tendency.

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26

Another reason to bluff is to rattle your opponent…

https://www.replaypoker.com/hand/replay/479831316

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27

The thing is, I am deliberately becoming unbalanced myself in order to exploit an already unbalanced opponent. I want them to fold all their A-high (and worse) hands so need to pick a bet size that will do that.

Take that J63 rainbow flop as an example. If I bet 2/3 pot, they have to defend with at least 60% of their hands to prevent me getting an auto-profit. However, if you plug a typical wide/weak preflop calling range from here into Flopzilla you find that even if they call that flop with all of their single paired hands and straight draws they are only calling 40-something % of the time. A 2/3 pot bet is likely to fold out quite a few of the 6x and 3x hands so the situation is likely even better.

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28

LOL - how do you get away with this stuff? You are repping the Kc - or more accurately him not having it. It doesn’t make any sense for you to be raising with the nuts but you can almost be sure he doesn’t have it because he didn’t continue on the flop. I assume most people would continue with the draw to the nuts. I like situations like this where it doesn’t matter if everyone knows you don’t have a damn thing because there’s nothing they can do about it.

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29

I dunno. Sometimes it’s just a feeling. It helps that I don’t fret over my losses. This guy was out of line so many times, I just wanted to push back a little. Seems I was right that time.

I did go on to win that one. They called me light more than once because they were rattled!

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30

The math-jocks are finally realizing the power and beauty of the dark-side of low stakes poker :slight_smile:

The money-move in low stakes is folding out A-high hands on the flop. The 2/3rd pot size is horribly exploitable but it also does the trick most of the time. People are so used to seeing the 50% pot c-bet that they continue with almost everything. Going up from 50% to 66% gets a ton of extra folds so it becomes a profitable play with any 2 cards vs the typical low-stakes player. The only thing to add in to the mix is that its best if you don’t hold an ace yourself. You want your opponent to have A-high and having one yourself reduces that likelihood.

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31

I’ll throw out one more from the evil side of the game - You can auto profit with a 1/3rd pot c-bet on any A-high uncoordinated flop as well. You can’t believe how much equity you’ll fold out to that bet. The 1/3rd pot size only needs to work 1/4 of the time and they won’t have an ace or a hand they’ll continue with far more often than that (around 36% if they are calling with any Ax if I remember correctly). The real beauty is if they catch on and start calling your c-bet instead of folding all the time because you now get an extra value bet in when you do have Ax.

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32

Sometimes you can’t catch any cards, and you just have to do something. In this hand I was in the Big Blind with 2 of Hearts and 9 of Spades, and had three limpers. I slammed in a raise to 5BB to try to steal the pot, and was surprised to get 2 callers.

https://www.replaypoker.com/hand/replay/479910741

Flop comes very raggedy, and it looks like it missed both opponents, who probably had Aces, and so I slapped in a big bet on the river and stole the pot with nothing. This hand doubled my stack and put me in an excellent position. I had a bit of luck in the tournament after this and ended up taking home 400,000 play chips.

However the hand that caused my downfall and exit in third place was an excruciatingly bad bluff. My only excuse was that this tournament had been going on for hours and I had other things that I wanted to do, and had already exceeded my expectations for the tournament. If you want a good cringe, here it is,

https://www.replaypoker.com/hand/replay/479928507

I probably should have shoved on the turn, and might have taken the hand, but opponent slow played his ace on the flop and then made a great call to my shove on the river when I might have had trip 2 or a flush. However I had already reached a new high on my overall chip count, so I was happy enough with the end result, though not as happy as if I had won the whole thing.

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33

Great list, and valuable information, thanks!

Going back to the hand where I bluff raised with 4 clubs on the board and 2 red cards in my hand…

You might be thinking only a complete moron would even try a bluff there. Well, this might be true, but that’s what he was thinking too. Obvious bluffing situations don’t work as often as impossible bluffing situations. I mean, really, who in their right mind would bluff there with no draws, no hand, no showdown value, no anything?

Still, I did have a solid read on this guy. He had been min raising hand after hand preflop. I played back at him several times, mostly from my BB, and he folded to my raises almost every time.

More telling though was his betting patterns. He was making the mistake of betting small when he had nothing or just a draw, and betting much more (including quite a few shoves) when he had a decent hand. I’m like one of Pavlov’s dogs: I see something like that, I drool and have to bark at it. So yeah, this was almost entirely your point 2: opponent’s tendencies.

This was a 9 seat, 25k SnG, so I was already in the money. That was a factor, but not a huge one. I play to win, not to come in 3rd. I felt I risked the minimum amount needed to get the job done, and the small-ish raise size also looked like I wanted a call. He had shown he would fold to any raise before, so it was worth a shot.

And it did rattle him too. What I mean is that it forced him to make adjustments, and these adjustments were to my benefit and entirely predictable. He stopped picking on my blinds, and eventually called my allin with 2nd best hand, giving me the win.

Like most things, there is more to bluffing than one might think. It’s not about splashing chips around with random cards at random times, for random reasons.

I really believe that bluffing is the piece of the game that gets the least attention, and the one that less experienced players need to work on in order to take their game to the next level. I think a lot of good info has come out in this thread, and I hope more will follow.

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34

I would not play 2 4 in most any situation. I would even more rarely raise with it, and would definitely not raise with it in the small blind. You still have plenty of chips after a fold and you had time to wait for a better time to push. You got very lucky to hit trips and you were behind when you got your money in. I would have folded and waited for a better spot. I also hate acting first, and try to avoid playing big pots from the blinds, acting first is not an advantage IMO. thanks for the post

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35

I think that was the Solar-Svengali’s point - he’s trying to craft an image of being able to attack with any 2 cards. I didn’t like this particular play but I really like the devious thought process behind it.

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36

I think its more of the person who called your bet,im assuming you did check his rank…as frankly on a sng table its very tight poker compared to a regular tourney on this site…With that raise im not calling on a k7 to begin with but most players ranked 10k and above will dive into that hand…Right now lets say in the last few months you should see the type of hands calling preflop with over 500 chips bets being made in the 50k and 100k buyins…its a total joke…and more so when you went all in any good player would consider a kicker factor even if you both were holding kings…but I saw the hand it was insta call with k7 hes not even thinking that you have a higher kicker or AA…he saw the king he got married to the pot instantly he was not going anywhere…any good player is going to think you got KK or AK basically a K with a high kicker and hes going to consider the kicker assuming he called your bet with a K7 suited preflop (an outide chance if hes stacked he may call heads up).you tried to steal the hand and got caught with a 2 and reply did the rest as their dealers normally are fine tune to do…suck out…yes the perks of being a wild flower…ill still take my chances with these players and I do it every day…

37

In order for bluffing to be effective, it needs to happen rarely. You’re going to have “any two cards” WAY more often than you’ll have the nuts, or even a strong value hand. Winnowing down your list of bluffs to a fraction of your value range (half or less, assuming you’re betting pot or smaller) is HARD - see this thread as an example.

When you throw random hands into your bluff range, you rapidly become unbalanced. Since - again - you’re going to have way more random hands in your range than value, you give your opponents a huge incentive to call you down. Your loose reputation will make it easier for you to get value on the rare hands when you are strong, but the lack of balance will cost you more money/chips than it gains you, particularly among the call-happy stations that dominate all but the most elite stakes on Replay.

If anything, I’d rather build a nittier reputation than I actually play, missing out on some value when I do have a solid hand, but reaping pots more frequently when I do bluff.

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38

Yes, this. Most of the SnGs I have played play more like an MTT right before the bubble, at least when we get down to 5 players or so.

If your run Kd7d v 4c2d through an odds calculator, you will see 42o has about a 32% chance of winning, but this is far from the whole picture. Calculators don’t include fold equity.

I thought he would fold there most of the time, which he should have. Let’s say that, out of 100 times, he folds 50 of them. I win all those, plus I win 32% of the times he calls, which is 16 times. If I win 66 out of 100, I have a 2-1 advantage, which is well worth the shot.

His calling range probably includes quite a few kings, but how many of them can call a shove on the flop? How many times will the flop miss him totally? Again, I pick up a lot of pots in that situation without having to hit anything. Even if he does call, I have outs, as we saw.

39

Great points, and I mostly agree.

However, I have found it useful to very rarely run a play like this and show. As I said earlier, I consider this to be “range distortion” and isn’t really designed to win that particular hand.

But it does make it very possible that I hit ANY flop, at least in the minds of my opponents. I think this perception makes me more chips than it loses by a wide margin. I think this is one of the reasons that players like Phil Ivey, Tom Dwan, and Gus Hanson are so feared.

I don’t play anywhere near their level, but neither do the people I typically face. Both of these make it less effective for me than it is for them, but one does what one can.

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40

Thank you gents and ladies for this outstanding discussion. I will admit I am rather a hopeless poker player from Australia, but I really enjoy this site (apart from the occasional idiot). I will also admit that I have purchased chips (the aussie dollar sucks against the greenback) but happy to pay for my entertainment. I have had a few wins over the past couple of years (most notoriously when I mistakenly entered a 1 mill S&G and ended up winning!. One thing I cannot fathom is why some players do the old “slow play” trick. What are they wanting me to think? I seem to often be dealt a hand of 2,8o, so I recently decided to play and see what the flop gave me. I won the hand with trip 8s and one of the other players (very highly ranked) got stuck into me. Two final things: what is the significance of the BBs in betting, and what would you guys do if you are dealt AA? Thanks for your friendship.

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