You may well have achieved your goal of going heads up against one PokerStars opponent, but you may also be beaten. If two overcards fall on the flop, you ought to assume you are beaten. The good news, scant as it may be, is that you've learned enough about the quality of your opponent's hand to save money by folding as soon as he bets the flop.
This one! You've got a powerhouse hand. Someone bets, there are three callers, and it's your turn to act. What do you do? You raise. Of course! You're holding the probable winner and want more money into the pot, since that pot figures to migrate over to your stack of chips once the hand has been concluded. Getting more money in the pot is the most common reason players raise.
Why Play with Real PokerStars?
- We'll define "Money Management" as that absurd set of ideas promulgated primarily by people who are trying to earn a living selling "systems" that purport enable players to beat craps, roulette, baccarat, or other table games by quitting once some predetermined amount of money has been won, or by stopping the bleeding once a given sum is lost. "Bankroll Management" is a different breed of cat altogether, and has to do with managing your poker-playing stake.
- But Gary caught two perfect running cards, made a straight, and won his table. Not only did this PokerStars hand determine a table winner in the shootout-to-match play format, it was an east coast versus west coast competition, as well as the classic lawyer-doctor showdown. It was clear to me when Gary caught those two perfect cards to skewer Ice, that God, just like everyone else, wants to stick it to the lawyers every time.
- Step one is to make sure the odds against your bluff are equal to the odds your opponent is getting from the pot. Confusing? Not really. Suppose by betting on the river, you create a situation where your opponent will be getting 4:1 from the pot. That's easy to imagine. The pot contains $300, and by wagering $100, your opponent stands to win $400 for his $100 wager. Now, let's say any one of eight available cards would have given you the winning hand.
- These reasons include position, how many PokerStars players have already entered the pot when it's your turn to act, whether the game is passive and characterized by lots of calling but little raising or whether it's aggressive, with frequent raises by players whose hands don't really justify that kind of action.
Well it is clear that the player who complained to me that he lost $1,200 before he won a pot was not born under a bad sign. His short losing streak was not unexpected, given the results of my simulations. In fact, an entire year of play is not enough time to reach that elusive plateau where short-term luck is filtered out, and long-term results can be solely ascribed to skill. I'm still not sure when you reach the long run.
The more PokerStars opponents, the more someone is likely to call "to keep you honest." Suppose you were facing a single opponent and thought that your bluff would succeed one-third of the time. Those aren't bad odds, particularly when the money in the pot exceeds the odds against a successful bluff. Suppose the pot contains $90 and the price of a bet is $30.
These five reasons to raise often act in concert with one another. While it is logical to raise solely to limit the field, it is seldom worth a raise just to define your hand and for no other reason. But by raising to limit the field, you will always gain some information about how your hand stacks up against the competition. If, for example, you've raised with a pair of tens and are reraised, there's bad news and good news in the air.
- What's the most common reason for raising? Others never raise with aces when they're in the blind, for fear of giving away too much information about their hand. Who's right? When should you raise, and why should you do it? To generate a plan of action, we need to explore the reasons players raise. Here are five reasons to raise the pot in hold'em. Let's look at each of them.
- Either we're shouting unheard into the wind, there's a continuing influx of new readers, or the number of readers with short-term memory problems is expanding exponentially. Before we go any further, let's define our terms, since two very different concepts are involved.
- It involved Gary Furness, a physician from Santa Rosa, CA, and Steve "Ice" Eisenstein, an attorney from New Jersey. They were the two remaining players at their table. Furness held a pair of nines in the pocket, while Ice was holding a pair of tens. All of Ice's money was in before the flop, which was 10-8-3 of mixed suits. Steve Eisenstein, having flopped a set of tens was a huge favorite over Gary Furness.
PokerStars, after all, is a game of incomplete information, and that means wrong decisions will be made. Game theory gives one the wherewithal to optimize his play. When you bluff properly not too often and not too infrequently it makes no difference how your opponent responds. Game theory allows you to control the outcome of your actions and optimize your results. Here's how to bluff using game theory.
But whether to play a hand like K-10, A-9, or Q-J, or whether to raise, call, or even fold with a pair of sevens, are often questions without clear answers, even to the best of players. Although each of my two books on hold'em contains a chart depicting playable hands from early, middle, and late position, and despite the fact that most poker theorists, practitioners, and writers have all offered advice on this topic, tactics often have to be adjusted for a variety of reasons.
Because of the difference in PokerStars player characteristics at the table, that expectation is greater than zero, but it cannot be calculated with any precision. However, with a difference of $10.93 between the big and the small winners, each of whom had an identical predictive expectation, the table of players with mixed abilities never reached the long run either. What's the lesson here?
The odds against a bluff succeeding increase exponentially as you add additional opponents to the equation. But betting from first position conveys the image that you really do have a strong hand. After all, you are betting into someone who could have a really powerful hand. Your opponent, of course, will realize that and be more willing to release a marginal hand than he would be if you bet following his check.
