Often in poker you come across situations where although you think you may have the best hand, you want to try and check and make your opponent bluff. These situations often occur when you have a medium strength hand that you do not want to fold, and where you think that your opponent has either a monster hand or nothing.

Always remember that poker is a game where you have to think about the best route of action considering the most likely holdings of your opponent

Imagine that you call a raise from a loose aggressive player with ace ten from the big blind. The flop comes 10c9c2s. You bet around two thirds of the pot and your opponent calls. The turn is the 4h and you bet again, a bet which your opponent calls. The river is the 3d. What should you do now?

In this situation it is likely that either your opponent has you crushed, with an over pair or a set, or that you are very far ahead, in the case where they have been chasing a draw. As a result of this, often in this spot you want to check and try and induce your opponent into bluffing at the pot. As you have no intention of folding, by check calling you save money when you are crushed (due to your opponent shoving over the top on the river with any big hand), but make money when they have nothing, as many players will fire here in a desperate attempt to win the pot after they have missed.

This style of play works particularly well against bad loose aggressive players, as they vastly under estimate the strength of their opponents holdings when they check, seeing any check as a sign to put in that big, aggressive bet and take the pot away. Because bad LAG players don’t have the necessary skills to carefully think through situations like the one above, they can easily be taken advantage of with well timed bluff catching moves.

Always remember that poker is a game where you have to think about the best route of action considering the most likely holdings of your opponent. In situations where you feel an opponent has either got a monster or has missed, it is usually correct to check call and try and extract extra bets when your opponent fires out a bluff, and over the long run this can add up to a great deal of money.

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The high hand is usually seen as the weaker of the possible hands in hi/lo split games – simply because it cannot win the low as well, where as low hands can frequently develop into high hands which can win both the high and the low end of the pot (lows can easily become nut flushes or straights as well as lows).

“Although this was a good solid style in the old games, if everyone is playing in this way it ceases to be effective.”

In fact this point has become so widely written about and understood, that many players seem to now actually try and totally avoid high hands.

I was recently playing in a low stakes Omaha hi/lo game that illustrated this point perfectly. Had I been in this game even five years ago, most players would be over valuing high hands, not playing enough lows, giving too many free cards and would generally be pretty easy to beat. In the modern era though, these games have now become full of players who basically only play hands with ace two and ace three in them. Although this was a good solid style in the old games, if everyone is playing in this way it ceases to be effective.

In fact in this game, I was doing much better trying to push my high hands as much as possible, simply because you would frequently be involved in multi way pots where two or three other players were either drawing to a low of had already hit one and were going to split their half amongst themselves. It is quite obvious that if you have the high covered then it is a great result for you to have a few players all chopping the low – they are simply paying extra money into your half of the pot.

Always remember that in all forms of poker balance and reacting to your opponent’s style is critical. Although there are general guiding principles that should be roughly adhered to, mostly you should just be focusing on how your opponents play and to adjust your style accordingly. Although the low is usually a stronger hand than the high in hi/lo games, it has the Achillies heal of being easy to counterfeit and to chop with other lows, which means that if many players are chasing lows the high actually becomes significantly stronger – and this radically changes how you should approach the game.

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With the ever expanding popularity of heads up games, many of the best spots to play in are now one on one games. Weak players seem to be attracted to these games because the variance is extremely high, which means it gives them a realistic shot at making a big score through that massive double up.

“Mr. Moss, I have to let you go.” – Nick the Greek, after playing a five month long poker match against the legendary Johnny Moss where he reputably lost close to one million dollars.

The reality is that these players will always lose over the long run, because they are not only weak in the actual game, but also because they do not adhere to adequate bankroll management standards and the variance will bust them over and over again. As a result, some of the best tables to sit at are heads up tables – you only need to encounter one or two of these players to expect a large profit over a session.

However, there are still a great many very skilled heads up specialists. These players are usually extremely easy to spot after a short period, as they will be playing a pretty optimum number of hands and really using position to maximum effect. It is extremely easy to let your ego take over in these sort of situations, and to sit having a long and grueling match against someone who is obviously extremely skilled.

This is hardly ever a good idea though, and mostly you will be wasting your time paying any other skilled heads up player as you simply have a substantially smaller edge than you would if you just sat in a few other games and waited for a fish.

Sometimes in poker the best move is to just wait for a better game. No matter how confident you feel about your playing ability, the reality is that on any particular day there are probably quite a few players who will be playing better than you, and avoiding them is as much a skill as learning to spot and take advantage of weakness.

Always remember that letting someone go can often be as infuriating to them as making a big fold or great call. If they feel they have an an edge over you and you quit, you will not only probably save yourself a lot of money, but you will also torment your opponent no end.

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When I first started playing poker it was predominantly in a medium sized club run by a local bookmaker.

The crowd all knew each other pretty well, and there was a decent mix of recreational gamblers, solid amateurs and a few pros. There were also a couple of extremely high risk gamblers, who basically would play any stake available to them for as long as possible.

One of these people was a character I will refer to as ‘Mark’, and his behavior on one particular day can teach us a lot about why and how certain things have to be adhered to in order to win at poker long term.

Mark was a very good poker player at nearly any variant. He was fearless in big bet games, methodical and clever in limit games, and understood high level tournament strategy well. Despite this, he always seemed to be broke, and one particular day of his life shows very well why.

One day when I was sitting in my regular cash game, Mark comes up and starts hassling players to back him in a fifty pound tournament that is being set up. Knowing his skill ability I was more than happy to back him, and five hours later he wins it, netting us around twelve hundred pounds to split. Mark then sits in the 5/10 cash game that I am in, terrorizes the table and runs his stack up to over two thousand.

He then takes this two thousand and sits in the biggest game spread available at the club that night – a 10/20 pot limit Omaha game. After four hours he has over twelve thousand in front of him. I go home at this point and go to sleep. The next day I sit back down in my regular game and soon Mark is through the door, asking me to stake him in the days tournament as he lost his whole stack in a few bad beat pots and was broke again.

The moral of this story to any poker player aiming for long term success is that constantly putting all your bankroll on the line will basically always end in tears. Despite the fact that it is possible to go on massive winning streaks in poker, it is just as easy to go on big losing ones, and you simply have to have enough capital in reserve to whether these losses.

If you have everything on the line all the time in poker you will go broke every day no matter how good you are – it is simply not a game where skill is rewarded every time, and you forget this at your peril.

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Small ball and long ball poker fundamentally rely on the analysis and knowledge of different types of odds in poker. Long ball simply relies on the odds of the hands of poker.

If you need a brief introduction to exactly what the term ‘small ball’ refers to an introduction can be found here.

Long ball simply relies on the odds of the hands of poker. Long ball just requires you to understand that if you hold aces or kings then you will nearly always have a sizable edge over any hand at the table, and that if you hold any of the other very strong hands (ace jack+ and ten ten+) that you will most likely have at least a 50/50 chance against most hands. As a result you want to build big pots with these hands, and occasionally make a big bluff that trades on your very tight reputation. This is why long ball is by far the easiest style to play when you first begin – as it is not complicated, is pretty mathematically sound, and will yield good results in low buy in tournaments.

The problem with long ball is that it fails to take into account the other key odds principle in playing no limit poker – implied odds. The mathematics of specific hands is largely irrelevant when playing in very deep stacked events, as players can see flops so cheaply relative to their stacks that it gives players a chance to win a huge pot with a marginal hand (and thus cracking the long ball players long awaited aces or kings). As a result, in the higher stakes, deeper stacked events, small ball becomes a much more successful strategy in the right hands.

This is because small ball effectively relies on implied odds for it to work. A good small ball player is trying to get involved in lots of the small pots, hoping to either hit the nuts and win a big pot with the best possible hand (no risk here), or to pick up small pots when they flop marginal hands, either through small bets which win the pot uncontested, or in utilizing pot control techniques to get to showdown as cheaply as possible (relatively little risk here).

Small ball also relies on the basic fact that most flops miss most players in hold’em, and that constant small bets will pick up lots of the pots where all of the players miss. As a result, much higher levels of observation and skill are required to play small ball – you have to be able to spot as many of the situations where you can pick up a pot through stealing, as well as closely focusing on which players will give good implied odds for when you make big hands (other good players will hardly ever pay off small ball players when their big bets come out – simply because they know this type of player is basically never bluffing in such situations).

One of the other hard aspects of playing small ball is closely following how the tournament structure is set up and how quickly the stacks will become short relative to the blinds. Small ball as style breaks down quite quickly when stacks get short, as you can’t pick up lots of small pots when most players only move is all in or fold. Time and time again I see small ball players continue to make many small raises only to have other good players behind them constantly re-steal from them – if the wrong stack sizes are behind you the style you were using when you were sitting one hundred big blinds deep will severely back fire on you.

This point is yet another example of why small ball is a much tougher intellectual challenge to play than long ball. So many factors contribute to each choice you have to make when playing small ball that small mistakes can cost a huge amount. This is not always a bad thing though. I personally much prefer small ball as a style, simply because it gives you a lot to think about and helps to stave off the boredom that can accompany just waiting for big hands – even if at points I am leaking money away in some spots I shouldn’t.

Small ball is probably not the best style in low stakes, short stacked tournaments. Here you are much better off just using the basic and fundamental mathematical mistakes of your opponents to gift you the chips. However, as you start to move up the stakes to deeper stacked, tougher games, small ball becomes a much more profitable style to play, simply because it gives you a much greater chance of getting deep and having a shot at the big money places. Remember that two of the most successful tournament players in history – Phil Hellmuth and Daniel Negreanu both play this style, and although it may make them have to think much more deeply about each hand, it certainly pays off in much larger cash rewards in the long run.

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‘You gotta have two things to succeed kid – you gotta have brains and you gotta have balls. Now you got too much of one and not enough of the other’ – Paul Newman to Tom Cruise in The Color of Money.

“Being able to show players that you are willing to three barrel bluff, or call them down with a small pair, pays massive dividends in the long run as it makes your game much harder to exploit.”

Although taken from a film about pool hustling, this comment really applies to poker very well. From how you approach the game hand by hand at the table, all the way to the obvious divide between the new generation of hyper aggressive online players and the wily old school pros, poker is a game where balancing courage and intelligence is critical to long term success.

Another good analogy for this concept is in military tactics. Just as the SAS or other elite army unit do not just go tearing in to every combat situation, but instead exercise controlled, well thought out aggression, good poker players tend to use their brain to work out where they stand, then use their courage to make the most of that position.

Intelligence is largely useless in poker without the courage to act upon it, as you will always just be regretting that you did not make a particular play, and courage without intellect is also just as doomed as your constant reckless plays will soon bust you. A classic example of when these two concepts become incredibly critical to be balanced is when making very thin calls or extremely risky bluffs.

At the high levels, or even at the low levels if playing with the same players constantly, you have to balance your actions in the very marginal spots. Being able to show players that you are willing to three barrel bluff, or call them down with a small pair, pays massive dividends in the long run as it makes your game much harder to exploit.

However, because these actions are so risky, you have to use both your brain to carefully pick the spots where you think these plays have the maximum chance of working, as well as have the courage to make a play that will sometimes make you look like an idiot and lose you a big pot.

Having courage in your convictions only means anything in poker if your convictions are usually correct. Use your brain to try and work out where you are, then use your heart to try and push any edge you feel you have as hard as you can…

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This is quite a complex principle to understand to most players, as it seems to go against the intuitive logic of how poker works. I have the best hand, surely getting my money in the pot in any way is the right way to play?

This is actually not true in many situations, as often in poker you face choices that make the strength of your hand largely irrelevant.

As an example of this, I want to look at a hand I once played deep in a large ten dollar rebuy online. We were down to 27 players out of a starting group of over a thousand. I had been playing extremely loose and aggressive, running over a table of stacks that basically ranged from twenty to thirty big blinds, with one stack that had around a hundred blinds on my left. This big stacked player had been causing me problems during the last few orbits, regularly re-raising my opens and forcing me to fold.

With this background, I raised UTG 1 with jack eight suited. The big stack player re-raised and it was folded back around to me. Due to our history and stack sizes, I put in a re-re-raise, and left the player with the choice of calling a bet which would have left him with basically one pot sized bet remaining, folding, or shoving over my raise (which I clearly would have folded to). I fully expected this player to either shove all in or fold, but instead they elected to call.

The flop came out Qc8d4h. I shoved and the player thought for a long time before calling with ace queen off suit. I rivered an eight and eliminated him. The important part of this hand (apart from me winning a big pot by sucking out), is that they actually played the hand very badly, even though they got their money in good on all streets. The reason that they played this hand badly is that ace queen off suit is an awful hand against my range of hands, especially to flat call with.

Really this player should only be considering the pre flop likelihood of me re-raise bluffing them. This is simply because ace queen plays terribly against all my possible hands (it would only be 60/40 against a total bluff from me). If they think I am bluffing, they should be shoving all in pre flop and forcing me to fold, if they think I’m not bluffing, then they should be folding.

If we think of all the possible flops that can come, none of them are good for their hand against my very strong looking range (which is either a total bluff or a monster). If they flop a queen, they will often go broke against aces or kings, if they flop an ace they will often go broke against my ace king or top set, or enable me to possibly get away from kings or queens. Any time they miss the flop I will always win the pot with my flop shove.

The point of this is that even though this player looked like they did everything right, and will no doubt go back and tell everyone about how unlucky they got and what a fish I was, they actually played this hand horribly, and if we ran it over and over again they would lose far more than they would make over the long run against my range of holdings.

Always try and think about the hands you play in totality after a bad beat – it may be that luck is not the only problem you had with the hand.

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Weak aces tend to be the hand that you see bad players get in the most trouble with at the table. This is because weak aces are usually very far behind most good hands in hold’em, and weak players seem to misunderstand the mathematics of weak aces and habitually over play them.

“Although looking down at any hand with an ace instinctively feels like a good in hand, the reality of hold’em is that basically any hand below Ace-10 that is not suited can be extremely problematic to play.”

In terms of pre flop all in odds, a hand like ace seven only has a 25% chance of winning against a better ace, and 25% chance against any pair bigger than sevens, and is basically dead against aces. It is also only about 60/40 against any two cards between aces and sevens, so even when you are ahead of a hand like king jack, it is not by much. Against all pairs lower than sevens it is a classic 50/50 race, with the pair holding a slim edge.

So we can clearly see that in terms of pre flop all ins, weak aces tend to do pretty badly against most of a player’s calling range, either being a little ahead or behind, or massively behind. This is not the only problem with weak aces though. The real difficulty with them is that even if you flop your ace, it can be very difficult to ever know where you are.

As good players tend to play only the bigger aces, even if you flop top pair with these hands you will often lose a big pot to someone with a bigger kicker. In fact, about the only flop you ever want to see with weak aces is when you flop two pair, and hopefully get action from someone with a big ace. Calling with a hand that can only flop two pair for you to feel comfortable with is never a good idea in hold’em – you simply miss far too often to make such calls justified.

Although looking down at any hand with an ace instinctively feels like a good in hand, the reality of hold’em is that basically any hand below ace ten that is not suited can be extremely problematic to play – unless you have the necessary post flop skills to deal with the very tricky situations that can come up. If you don’t feel you have these skills it is best just to let these hands go – they will usually lose far more money than they will win.

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Frequently in tournament poker you will encounter players who are re-raising your opens at an inappropriate frequency.

At the lower stakes they tend to re-raise too little, either trying to fold to cash or just call and play passive pots without the momentum of a raise or a strong hand. As you rise up the stakes though, you will start to encounter players who re-raise too much, and against these players you must be prepared to make one of the boldest plays in poker – the re-re-steal.

“If pulled off correctly it can help someone hugely chip up and push on for the win, if it goes wrong it can just look like a massive spew as someone loses a massive pot with a weak hand”

This play can only ever be effective if both players have enough chips that fold equity can be created, as there is no point making a big bluff like this if your opponent is pot committed by the bet; and should only be made against a player whom you know is capable of re-raising you with a lot less than premium hands.

In my earlier article about re-stealing from loose players, I mentioned that this is a very high risk/reward strategy, which is often crucial to success in the later stages of tournaments, where your priority is to win big occasionally rather than get in the money constantly (due to the extremely top heavy prize structures). The re-re-steal is perhaps the most high risk/rewards strategy possible, and it can win you massive pots without showdown if timed correctly – which is always a huge asset in tournament poker, where every all in could see you exit.

One of the best situations to execute this play is when playing deep stacked and raising a hand like a suited connector in early position. Say a loose and observant player makes a re-raise and they have seen you open a lot of pots. This is often a great situation to make a big re-re-steal if the flow of the game feels right – it is unlikely that your opponent can ever justify calling without an absolute monster in this type of situation, as all the signs are that you are sitting on aces, kings or at worst ace king.

So thats the good news, the bad news is that this play can easily go spectacularly wrong when your opponent either has the goods or makes a marginal call against you because they have a read that you might be up to something. This is why it can often help to make these sort of plays with hands like suited connectors, that although behind, give you the best possible chance of cracking big pairs or big aces.

The re-re-steal is a play that really can make or break a tournament for a player. If pulled off correctly it can help someone hugely chip up and push on for the win, if it goes wrong it can just look like a massive spew as someone loses a massive pot with a weak hand. Try and look for spots where this super high risk play can be executed successfully and give your self every chance for that big first place cash.

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Pot limit Omaha is one of the only games where you can ever consider folding the ace flush on a non paired board.

This is especially true if playing deep stacked and the action has been very suspicious in front of you. Say you raise a hand like Ac7c8h9h and get three callers. The flop comes out 9c10cQc and it is checked around to you. You bet pot and get one call from a very tight player. The turn is a blank 2s and it is checked to you again, where you bet pot and get minimum check raised. You call and the river is another blank card – say the 5h. Your opponent thinks for a while and bets pot into you.

“Good Omaha players know that basically any hand that is not the nuts is always foldable in the right situation…”

This is a classic situation where you often want to be considering folding the ace flush if you know the player is solid (obviously against complete fish you should be usually be calling here). Omaha is a game that is usually played around nut hands – and regardless of what that nut hand is, whether it is a straight flush or a back door straight, when the big bets come out late in a hand it usually indicates the stone cold nuts.

Like all of poker, each hand is very player dependent, and although there are some players who take this line with a set or smaller flush, there are hundreds more tight Omaha players who play the straight flush like this a very large percentage of the time, and if you can pick just a few spots like this to fold you will show a lot of extra profits over the long run.

A huge amount of the skill in Omaha is avoiding what many hold’em players consider ‘setup’, or ‘cooler’ hands, where they feel that neither player can avoid going all in. Good Omaha players know that basically any hand that is not the nuts is always foldable in the right situation, and although against lots of different player types you should probably be calling here, against many of the tight ‘nut hunters’ that occupy the low and middle limit Omaha games these days this is quite an easy fold.

Always remember that in Omaha the hands are nearly always out there when the big money goes in from tight players, and not paying them off is just as crucial as attacking their tightness.

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This is simply because the odds a player faces in limit hold’em are nearly always very good – and as a result folding too much is a much bigger mistake than calling too much (if you are getting ten to one odds you do not have to be right very often to show a profit making thin calls); this is the exact opposite of big bet poker, where calling too much will quickly bust you (you have to be much more confident about your hands strength when getting two to one or worse odds – as you have to be right a much higher percentage of the time).

“Always remember that limit is a game about extracting as much value from your hand as possible, and saving as many bets as you can when it looks like you are behind.”

As a result of this, many players brought up on big bet poker find limit an extraordinarily boring game when they first start learning the mechanics of it – the scope for advanced play making (and therefore a lot of the creative thought) is just much less in limit simply because it is so much harder to bluff. With most players now being brought up on big bet poker, many of the limit games (particularly the now popular mixed games) have become rather juicy in recent times, full of big bet players who try and bluff far too much.

This is not to say that bluffing should never be attempted in limit games, more that the style of bluffing has to be changed. In no limit hold’em it is usually possible to push people off middle and bottom pairs quite easily if you have the nerve – in limit hold’em this is much harder due to the vastly better odds you are forced to offer them. As a result of this it is important to try and size up which players will: a) regularly call bets with marginal hands (just only bet into them with strong hands and let their curiosity pay you off), or b) are folding in spots where they are clearly getting the correct odds to call with even a very weak hand.

The latter are by far the most profitable to play with in limit games – by failing to understand how much more they should be calling in limit they leave themselves wide open to attack from better players. Always remember that limit is a game about extracting as much value from your hand as possible, and saving as many bets as you can when it looks like you are behind. You have to be extremely sure that you are best if you are going to fold when being offered ten to one or greater odds – and as a result both your bluffs and your calls have to be adjusted considerably.

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Heads up sit and goes provide a great opportunity for spinning up a bankroll to the beginner or play money player. The variance is very low in these games, as they combine many features which allow skill to shine through over the short term.

” …it is important to understand that heads up games will not give you that monster score of multi table tournaments, they will just give you a steady profit over the long run.”

The first point about these games is that heads up games require much more skill due to the massively increased number of decisions a player has to make. You can’t simply sit back and wait for big hands in this format – you have to be playing lots of hands in order to stop the blinds from eating you up, and this means that any edge you have is made significant much faster than in any other games, and your profits are made in a much more steady manner.

The second point about these games is that they are very quick (especially if you play the turbo structured ones), which means that you can play a huge number of these games in very short periods of time, which allows you to quickly overcome the variance. As an example of this, when I play a schedule of around thirty to forty of these games every day for a week, I hardly ever have more than one or two losing days, and this is very useful to someone who is just trying to grind out consistent money from poker.

So that’s the good news. The bad news about heads up sit and goes is that the profit margins in them are very slim. Even the very best players at these tournaments struggle to hold on to a return on investment, or ‘roi’, of above 5% over thousands of games. Obviously slim margins like this can soon add up to huge sums of money , but it is important to understand that heads up games will not give you that monster score of multi table tournaments, they will just give you a steady profit over the long run.

These games are definitely some of the most fun and intellectually challenging games on the Internet, and over the next few days I want to outline a basic low limit strategy that yields good dividends in the low stakes games.

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A ‘random walk’ is a mathematical term to describe looking at sequences of consecutive random events and observing the patterns.

A simple random walk can be built using just the flip of a coin. If we assign heads the number +1 and tails the number -1 and flip a coin 6 times we will have a number of possible results, ranging from the extreme results of +6 after five heads in a row, and -6 after five tails in a row; and including every other possible result in between, with the true odds lying at the number 0 (indicating an equal number of heads and tails). Mathematicians have done these sort of tests over hundreds, thousands and even millions of throws, and the results they give tell us an awful lot about poker strategy.

The key result to think about when looking at random walks is that it takes a large number of flips for the result to actually represent the true odds. In the random walk scenario mentioned above, it often takes over 100 hundred flips before the ‘walk’ finally crosses the 0 line (which is where any genuine fifty fifty proposition belongs). As a result, we can see that the variance of the random walk is such that the true odds in such situations only actually come out over the very long term – in the short run the odds are nearly always skewed well away from their true line.

So we can see that random walks give a good answer to why poker is such a psychologically taxing game. When you are running good and playing well you feel unstoppable (walking above the 0 line), and when running badly – even if playing well – you feel like nothing can go right for you (walking below the 0 line). Only after hundreds or thousands of hands will your actual ability make itself clear. Random walks thus show not only why most players have a love/hate relationship with poker, but the importance of keeping your head during the downswings – as it is a fact that you will never have to stop dealing with during your play.

By understanding that the very nature of probability is that it is completely unpredictable over all but the very long run, you can give yourself a sizable psychological edge over opponents who take every bad beat to heart and start spewing chips off accordingly. Keep your head, understand the true nature of how luck moves and use it as another piece of the puzzle in building an edge over other players.

Tomorrow we will look at another key lesson we get from random walks – that of bold play.

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