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Small Ball Poker

Small ball poker has become an increasingly popular style of tournament play, thanks to its primary adherent, Daniel Negreanu! Although Negreanu did not invent it and certainly isn’t poker’s only small ball player, he’s generally credited with coming up with the small ball name.

While requiring a good deal of skill to play well, small ball represents a set of tactics belonging in every good player’s poker tool kit. Since there’s nothing really mysterious about it, the time has come to explore and demystify small ball, and learn to play it well.

Small ball players get involved in a wider range of starting hands and play them more aggressively than traditional players, but their game is based on the occasional check, small bets and small raises, so they do not lose too much money when their play bears no fruit and they have to fold.

Small ball poker works best in the earlier stages of multi-table tournaments – before the blinds become large compared to most players’ chip stacks.
The Elements of Small Ball Poker

A number of elements comprise small ball poker. Let’s look at all of them.
Discount Shopping

One of small ball poker’s key concepts is to find a playable hand on the cheap. You’re hoping to make a very big hand – one that your opponent won’t suspect you have. This usually means making big hands with small pairs, connectors, or one-gap hands. If you get lucky with holdings like these and your opponent is holding a big pair or two, you might be able to take his entire stack.

If you turn over a big hand when the board is quirky and doesn’t appear to support much of anything, you’ve also bought yourself a license to bluff. Your savvier opponents – those who take note of the kinds of hands you play – are likely to give you credit for a big hand when the board is otherwise benign, even in situations where they might be likely to look up other players.

The flip side of this coin is that you must play hands like these inexpensively. You won’t last long in a poker tournament, or in your poker career for that matter, if you persist in playing small pairs, small connectors, and gapped hands in raised pots, or from early position in the betting order when you might face a raise.
Pot Control

Controlling the size of the pot and limiting the amount you might lose on a hand is a major part of small ball poker. When you’re playing small ball and hoping to see more flops than many of your opponents, you have to keep the pot small to minimize your investment in it. After all, no one who fancies himself as a good poker player is eager to call a raise and see a flop out of position with a hand like 7-5.

Pot control frequently involves checking on at least one of the hand’s betting rounds, especially when you think you’re either way ahead or far behind. Here’s an example: Suppose you have pocket Kings and an ace flops on an uncoordinated board. You are a big favorite if your opponent holds a smaller pair and can afford to run the risk of giving a free card by checking the turn. If you’re not way ahead, you’re way behind and are drawing to catch one of the deck’s two remaining Kings if your opponent holds an ace.

A small baller who fires out a continuation bet into that flop and is called will usually check the turn. This keeps the pot small while minimizing the small baller’s risk and perhaps even inducing a bluff on the river from an adversary with a weaker hand.
Looking Loose

When you play small ball poker, you’ll engage in more hands than your by-the-book opponents. In fact, they’ll think you’re a weak, loose, aggressive player because you frequently open for a raise with weak-looking hands. But in the long run, you’ll ultimately get the same number of big hands they do. It’s all a matter of probability because your opponents will probably call more frequently with weaker hands, they leave themselves open to exploitation whenever you have a strong hand.

There’s a dichotomy of sorts here. Some opponents will figure you as a weak, aggressive player and look you up every chance they get. Others will see the hands you turn over, think that you’re a luck box, and stay out of your way. When you’re up against the former, you can bet for value but you shouldn’t bluff. On the other hand, if your opponent thinks that you make every hand you play and steps aside whenever you bet, you have a license to steal.
Where Does the Money Come From?

When you play small ball poker correctly you figure to win money from opponents who call with weak hands because they won’t read you for a strong one. This is almost diametrically opposed to those who play only “good” cards, and bet large enough to drive their opponents away when they hold hands like top pair-top kicker, or top pair with a draw. You’ll also make big money when you hit one of your improbable hands and are able to take most or all of your opponent’s chips if he’s prone to call you with hands that are good-but-not-great.
Image is (Almost) Everything

Your table image is critical to success at small ball poker, and two factors come into play here. First, you have to project a loose image so that opponents are willing, if not eager, to call with hands that are weaker than yours. To some extent, all those small bets and raises made earlier were just part of the set-up for bigger hands you hope to play.

Second, regardless of how well you project yourself as loose and weak, it won’t matter if your opponents are brain dead and aren’t tuned in to the message you’re broadcasting. If your opponents are as loose as the image you’re trying to represent and eager to call you with almost anything, you’re probably better off forgetting about small ball and playing tight aggressive poker instead.
Playing After the Flop

If you’re going to employ small ball tactics, the ability to play well after the flop is critically important. After all, if you see a lot of flops, you must play well after the flop to make small ball work for you. If after-the-flop play is not your cup of tea, you’d be better served resorting to power poker: Play big hands aggressively and try to end the confrontation without seeing a flop.

Small ball poker also gives you more than one opportunity to read your opponent. Rather than making a big bet only to find yourself facing a big re-raise – one that covers most or all of your chips – betting smaller amounts gives you additional betting rounds to assess your opponent’s probable hand based on his actions before the flop, on the flop, and maybe even on the turn.

One of small ball’s major benefits is that it provides an opportunity to deconstruct your opponent’s play without going broke in the process. But it also provides the same opportunity to your opponent. By learning to play well after the flop, small ball provides a huge edge over opponents who are not as adept at post-flop play as you are – because, among other things, it affords an opportunity to read and deduce their hand over several betting rounds.
Starting Hands for Small Ballers

While small ball poker conveys a loose image, and small ballers play more hands than their opponents, starting hand selection is still important. When you’re planning to raise with a dicey hand, it needs to be one with potential. Trash hands with little or no potential for growth just won’t get it done.

Because a small ballers’ raises are smallish, there’s a good chance they will be called and and that’s another reason it pays to have a hand with growth potential. That’s where small pocket pairs, connectors, one-gapped hands, and suited cards come into play. You’re hoping to make a very big hand, one that you can use to crush your opponent. But like every strategic ploy in poker, it’s a two-edged sword. When small ballers only catch part of the flop they need to be able to release their hand when it appears they are beaten – and small ballers are far more likely to be beaten than opponents who play power poker. When a small baller flops top pair it’s probably going to be top pair with a lousy kicker. When power poker playing opponents flop top pair, it’s usually going to be accompanied by the top kicker too.

That’s another reason for managing the size of the pot: You don’t want to lose too much money when you have a hand that could easily be dominated. In these circumstances, folding can even be a better course of action. But when it isn’t, keeping the pot small helps avoid losing too many hard won chips.
When Should You Use Small Ball Tactics?

Small ball poker is more effective at the beginning of tournaments and in situations when the blinds are small compared to most players’ stack sizes. At the end of most tournaments, and often during the late middle stages, blinds can be high in relation to stack sizes. Small ball is ineffective here because the cost is too high to warrant taking a chance on speculative hands. In addition, because so many players are short stacked or getting close to that point, there’s not much room for play after the flop. In a tournament’s latter stages, the last thing most players want to see is a flop. If they have a hand, or even if they don’t but are representing one, they want to bet and take the pot right there.

When it might cost a quarter to a third of your stack to see the flop, there’s not much sense in looking at one with a marginal, long-shot, bargain basement hand.

Small ball is also highly position-dependent. You just can’t continue to raise from early position on a regular basis. If you’re re-raised you will usually have to fold, and even if your opponent only calls, you’ll be out of position for the entire hand’s duration.

Play small ball when you’re on or near the button, and no one else – well, perhaps just one other player – is in the pot. Because successful small ball requires a great deal of skill after the flop, that task is eased immeasurably when you have position on your opponents. It’s easier to outplay one goose than an entire gaggle of them, and it’s easier still when you’re the guy who acts last.
How to Defend Against Small Ball Players

Because you won’t be the only small baller in a poker tournament, it’s as important to learn how to defend against them as it is to employ small ball strategies yourself. Every small baller wants to accumulate chips without risking his entire stack, and you’ll frequently have to confront other small ballers who, like you, want to see flops and bet opponents off their hands when no one shows any strength and fold when others appear to have bigger hands.

Good small ballers are tough to play against because they read hands well and can decipher what your checks, bets, and raises really mean. If your opponents are better at this phase of the game than you are, they have a tactical edge on you, and you’ll probably be better off changing your tactics against them.

Because small ballers don’t want to commit all of their chips in a single hand, one defensive ploy is to go all-in if you believe your opponent will fold. This, however, is poker’s ultimate two-edged sword. You will get many good small ballers to fold better hands but you also run the risk of trapping yourself for all your chips when your small balling opponent wakes up with a really good hand.

Because small ballers love to have position in order to see what you do before they are required to act on their own hand, another defensive tactic – and one that’s significantly less risky than pushing all-in – is to play pots against small ballers only with position on them. This prevents them from acquiring information about your hand before they have to act on theirs.

You can also make larger raises earlier in the hand, signalling to your opponent that you won’t mind if the pot grows quite large by the river, and that you might be very willing to risk all your chips with the hand you have.

Small ball poker players are usually looking to reduce variance and play more hands so their skill becomes the game’s determining factor. If you are the less skilled poker player, your best tactic is often to increase the variance by making bigger bets and raises – and this includes pushing when you believe your opponent will fold – than to play small ball against an opponent whose skill differential means he is likely to grind you down over time, as long as the luck of the draw can be bled out of the equation.

By Lou Krieger

Playing Marginal Poker Hands

Back in the day when new poker players were trying to grasp the intricacies of the game, ‘marginal hands’ was a bad phrase. They were to be avoided at all costs. The very first rule players learned about poker was to not play too many hands. The number two critical rule was to study poker starting hand charts to gain an understanding of how hand values worked based upon position. Coupling these two rules produced the mantra of the day – Play only quality holdings and play them aggressively. While rather simplistic, it was (and still is) good advice to keep new poker players out of trouble.

However, mixing it up so that opponents don’t become too familiar with your playing style is a fairly rudimentary part of playing poker. To become predictable is not the poker strategy of winning players. In poker you have to play different hands the same way. If you fail to do so, opponents will glom onto your hands simply by virtue of how much you bet or raise with your holdings. Therefore you have to play some non-premium hands the same way you play your best hands, simply to give those good hands some cover and disguise.
Marginal Hands Have Potential

Marginal poker hands come in all sizes and shapes but are mostly good drawing hands such as connectors, suited cards, smaller pairs, and even two gapped cards like J9, T8, 53, etc. These are the hands that don’t figure to win without improvement but with improvement they have lots of potential. This is because no-limit hold’em is a game of implied odds and a marginal hand can become a monster – and can take all of an opponent’s chips in one fell swoop, if played correctly.

There is a big difference between playing marginal hands and playing junk hands. Generally speaking, marginal hands have the potential to become strong hands while with junk hands you need your opponent to abandon their holding to take down the pot uncontested. Most junk is normally played out of the big blind for free. If you find yourself playing junk from other positions then you’ve probably wandered too far.
The Management of Deception

Playing solid hand values from appropriate position is still the cornerstone of winning hold’em play. The key part of that dictum is appropriate position. In order for you to maximize your winnings on good holdings you need to give the table the illusion of action. As the old western sage said, “Ya gotta give action to get action”. In no-limit hold’em we amend that slightly and say; “Ya gotta appear to give action to get action”.

Much of poker is the management of deception. Playing marginal hands cheaply from late position and when appropriate from earlier position, gives you the inexpensive illusion you desire – while giving you the potential to connecting to a big hand and make a lot of money.

If you show down a marginal starting hand once in a while, it will do wonders for your ability to gain action on your top quality hands. Notice I said “once in a while”, because if you do it too often it won’t serve you well. If you start playing too many marginal hands it will deplete your poker bankroll instead of enhancing it.
Outplaying Your Opponents

If all you play are good cards then you’re really just playing ABC poker and hoping you’ll get more good hands than your opponents. You know that isn’t going to happen in the long run so at best, unless you resign yourself to playing break even poker, you need to be thinking about how to outplay your opponents so you can win pots without good cards. How would one do that? One way would be to seek out profitable situations to play marginal holdings. The two critical elements to consider are your opponents’ playing styles and your position.

There is another element that I believe deserves a note of caution. Winning pots by your wiles alone can become quite intoxicating – so much so that many on that slippery slope succumb to the urge of overusing this tactic of playing poker without solid hand values. I don’t need to tell you what happens when everyone around the table realizes how you have been winning so many pots. Pick your spots combining adversary knowledge and position and you’ll do just fine.

There is a caveat to the above advice, and that’s if you regularly play against losing players that seldom pay attention to your playing style. In such cases you have no need to mix-up your play in an attempt to confuse them. After all, they are not thinking about what hands you might be playing – so you’d be far better off by sticking to “ABC poker” and exploiting their weaknesses rather than deviating into the realms of fancy play syndrome. Remember that most of the money you’ll win at poker comes not from the brilliance of your own play, but by the ineptitude of your opponents.
From Marginal to Junk

Don’t fall in love with your starting hands. Starting hands change their value as they progress. Let’s examine a poker hand that would qualify as marginal and worth playing but may lose some of its luster as the hand progresses.

Imagine holding 8h9h in middle position. Two players limp and the next player min raises. Since it was only a min raise and you’re feeling frisky, you call as do the first two limpers. Now the flop nails your holding making you a straight with tcjdqs. Your flush draw just became history but a made straight on the flop is nothing to sneeze at. Now the first limper bets out half the pot, the second limper calls and the original raiser re-raises:

Figure 1

Wow – what just happened and what should you do now? This is the moment that you come to grips with the fact that you’re holding the proverbial idiot end of a straight, also known as the sucker straight, and could be in real trouble. Your suited connectors were a good, marginal hand that just turned into junk. Try not to go to war with the bottom end of a straight. Many a stack has been sacrificed in that manner.
Domination

Marginal poker hands that are easily dominated will be your biggest long-term money losers, if you lack the discipline to get away from them. If you decide to enter the fray with a suited Ace-rag then remember the reasons for playing the hand in the first place. Your objective with such a hand should be to try and see a cheap flop in hopes of making a flush. Don’t get too frisky if an Ace falls on the flop – someone could easily have a better Ace.

A hand like Ace-Jack is also marginal, in that it can be easily dominated. The same holds true for hands like K-Q, K-J, K-T, etc. When viewing an early raise while holding a marginal hand, I have found the old poker axiom of “When in doubt, get out” to be very wise advice. That wisdom can save you a whole bunch of chips. Instead of viewing these marginal hands as playable, think about how much you enjoy others playing those hands against your Ace-King.

You might flop something spectacular with a marginal hand, but the sad truth is that the best hand going in is usually the best hand coming out. So when you start second best, it’s all too easy to seduce yourself into sticking around with something that’s second best and figures to stay that way. Avoiding domination is one of the best bankroll preservers in my view. Try and be the Dominator not the Dominatee – it’s a great deal more profitable.
Conclusion

The evolution of how to play no-limit hold’em, fuelled by the expanded literature, televised poker and the internet, now includes the value of playing marginal hands. With the changing poker landscape, the play of marginal hands evolved from perceived weak, undisciplined play to a brilliant, profitable strategy. Playing marginal hands is a critical part of playing poker well. If you aren’t playing any marginal hands then you are playing too tight and that is not the most profitable way to play.

The main keys to successfully playing marginal hands are pretty much the same keys for all elements of winning poker play. They include knowledge of your opponents’ tendencies, position, an awareness of the image you have been projecting, and the possession of a certain degree of discipline. Possessing discipline is critical to bankroll preservation so when you just catch a little piece of the flop you don’t wind up married to the hand which many times will lead to getting divorced from your chips. There are no prenuptial agreements in poker.

By Tom "TIME" Leonard

The Importance of Stack Sizes

In no-limit hold’em the size of your stack of chips and those of your opponents should have a significant impact on how you play a hand. If you’re playing in a $1-$2 no-limit game and have $250 in front of you, but you have just one opponent who has only $25 left to wager, the effective stack size is $25. That’s all you can win from him and all he can win from you. The maximum potential leverage of a wager either of you might make is only $25.

That’s all you can win—and all you can lose. Let’s assume you’ve been dealt QcQs and come out betting $6, which is a typical raise of three times the big blind. We’ll assume you are called by one opponent and both blinds fold. Now the flop is JsTc6d. You think your pair of queens is the best hand and come out betting.

Let’s say you bet $8, a wager of slightly more than half the pot. Your opponent, who began the hand with $25 and called your initial wager of $6, now has $19 remaining. What do you think he’ll do? He’s not likely to call your bet. With only $19 left, he will either fold or raise all-in, because an all-in wager stands some chance of inducing you to fold. Your bet on the flop means your opponent would only have $11 remaining if he called, and if he does call, he’ll probably face a call for the remainder of his chips on the turn. He’s much better off raising and getting all his chips in right now, rather than calling his money off in dribs and drabs throughout the hand.

Your opponent’s big advantage to raising all-in, rather than calling now and then having to call for the remainder of his chips on the next betting round, is that raising gives him what players refer to as fold equity. That’s another way of saying that as long as there’s some chance that your opponent’s raise will convince you to fold, in the long run he’s better off moving all-in than he would be by simply calling your bet and then calling another wager on the next betting round.

Suppose he does raise all-in. You’re probably going to call because he can’t hurt you all that much even if his hand is better than yours. In fact, it’s tough to think of why you would fold under these circumstances. After all, if your opponent was fortunate enough to flop a set, you still have an opportunity to improve and win the pot, and the cost to call is reasonable because he doesn’t have many chips remaining. Moreover, he might have a hand like K-J and thinks his pair of jacks is the top dog, when in fact, you’re still ahead of him. When you think of the hands your opponent might be holding that would motivate him to raise under these circumstances, the majority of them are currently running behind your pair of queens.

Now let’s assume the same hands, but this time you each have $500 in front of you. The effective stack size is now $500 instead of $25, and that’s a big difference. You could win $500, but you could lose that much too. It’s a far cry from the $25 effective stack size in the previous example. Your risk is precisely 20 times greater than it was before—$500 as compared to $25—and that increased level of risk should point you in the direction of increased prudence.

Suppose you make a slightly-more-than-half-the-pot $8 wager and your opponent raises $150. You have an overpair to the board, but realize that even if you call his $150 wager, you can expect to see bets on the turn and the river designed to put your entire $500 stack at risk. Unless your opponent is a complete maniac—someone who bets and raises huge amounts with nothing at all in his hand more often than not—discretion is usually the better part of valor and folding is the best play.

Even though your pair of queens figures to be at the top end of the hands he would raise with, it is certainly not better than all of the hands he might hold. So there’s some room for doubt that didn’t exist in the earlier example. Well, to be very precise, the level of doubt might be the same in both examples, but the cost is really quite different. If your opponent was fortunate enough to flop a set in the example where he only had $25 remaining, you couldn’t get hurt very much if he raised with a hand that happened to reside at the top of his potential holdings. But in a situation where the stacks are big and each of you had $500 potentially at risk, folding an overpair is usually a better decision than calling off all your chips.
Putting All Your Chips at Risk

You will find some opponents who will go all-in regardless of the cost with a big pocket pair, particularly pocket aces, and that’s a major leak in their game. Big and pretty as they are, aces are only one pair, and if his opponent flops two pair or a set, he’s looking to take every chip from the guy willing to go to his grave with aces.

While you’re not going to crack an opponent’s pocket rockets all that often, you don’t really have to. If you have an opponent who is willing to play top pair or an overpair for all his chips, all you need do is have this confrontation once a day or so to ensure that you have a healthy return on your investment at the poker table.

Many poker players make it a point never to go broke with one pair, except for situations where they are short-stacked in a tournament and have to make a stand in an attempt to double up or go home. But under normal circumstances, many of your opponents will not put themselves in a position where they have to confront the possibility of going broke with a single pair—even if it’s aces.

But some players are willing to put all their chips at risk with one pair. Players who were reared on fixed-limit hold’em seem to really suffer from this problem. To limit hold’em players, pocket aces are generally a through-ticket to the river, barring some odd board like four of a single suit that doesn’t match yours, or a four-straight on board with a bet and a raise before the action gets around to you. But those are rare birds and limit hold’em players generally play a pocket pair of aces fast and strong regardless of the board.

This affliction also bedevils very tight players too. They play so snugly that when they finally pick up a premium hand they are unwilling to release it, since they fold so many other hands with regularity. These players are often smart enough to understand they can be in trouble with one pair—even when that pair is aces—but are often emotionally unwilling to release the kind of hand their tight, rocky play has been waiting for all session.
Playing Through Multiple Streets

One of the expensive lessons learned when taking up no-limit poker is that decisions made on one betting round impact those made subsequently. In a fixed-limit game, a bet on the flop or the turn is sort of independent of what might transpire on subsequent rounds. Sure, your opponent might bet the turn if he bet the flop, but the amount of his bet is a known quantity and can easily be factored into a play-or-fold decision on that earlier betting round.

But whenever an opponent bets or raises on the flop or the turn in a no-limit game, there’s a good chance he’s going to make an even bigger wager on the next betting round. When all of your chips might be at risk on subsequent betting rounds, you have to consider the potential cost of impending bets when considering a decision to call now.

This has the effect of implied odds being leveraged against you. A call made at the price of a few chips when you have a drawing hand must be made with a considered awareness of what you intend to do if you miss your draw on the current wagering round and your opponent fires a very big bet at you subsequently. If that happens the cost to take a card off and see the river will have gone up dramatically, and the odds against completing your hand with only one card to come—as compared with the odds against making your hand with two cards to come when you’ve just seen the flop—have just gotten significantly longer.
The Short Stack Specialists

You’ll find many poker players – particularly those who play online – actively seek out no-limit games where they can buy in for a short stack. There they employ tactics designed to double up whenever they can while minimizing big losses specifically because they do not play a big enough stack to put their bankrolls at risk.

A short-stacker might look to buy-in to a cash game from between 15 and 30 big blinds. That’s a big difference from the maximum buy-in, which can range from 100 big blinds to an unlimited amount. Because of the difference in stack sizes, short stacked and deep stacked players are essentially playing different games for different stakes at the same table, and whenever there are two deep stacked and one short stacked player contesting a pot, the side pot is likely to be much larger than the main pot.

Because a short stacked player has little leverage over the actions of his more deeply stacked opponents, he has to play tight poker, while the deep stacked players can employ a looser style, using their stack size to pressure other players while manipulating the pot odds offered to them.

A tight-but-aggressive short stack strategy works best with a minimum of seven others at the table. If the table is short-handed, a short stacked specialist will be hard pressed to keep up with the cost of the blinds paid while waiting for big, playable hands. In addition, short stack strategy works better against loose opponents. Our short stacked specialist is looking for opportunities to go all-in for his short buy-in, and hoping for two or more callers when he does.
Conclusion

Determining the effective stack size is critically important in every hand you play. Without an awareness of how much potential risk exists based on the stack sizes, a player can easily get into more trouble than he’s looking for. It’s been said that poker is a game of money played with cards, and without being cognizant of stack size and the amount of money at risk on any given hand, a player can be in grave danger and not even realize it.

The traps of stack size are easy to avoid. Just estimate your opponent’s stack size—and always be aware of how many chips you have too—at the beginning of a hand. You needn’t be precise about it. A good estimate is all that’s needed to help you avoid the dangers of playing too small a hand for too much money, or playing too weak a hand to survive as a short stack specialist.

By Lou Krieger

Avoiding and Dealing with Tilt

Where poker tilt is concerned, prevention is always better than cure. You’ll save yourself a lot of wasted time, squandered money, and unnecessary grief if you can spot the warning signs ahead of time. To do this, you must learn to recognize your triggers – those things in the game that, for whatever reason, are so upsetting and offensive to you that they have the power to put you on tilt.

Tilt triggers generally fall into one of two categories: things that happen within the game itself, and external factors that are technically not part of a poker game, but which make you more vulnerable to tilt.
External Factors (Pre-Triggers)

Let’s look at the latter category first. Think of them as pre-triggers. Any number of outside influences – stress at home, financial worries, lack of adequate sleep, alcohol, drugs, etc – can leave you much more susceptible to tilt than you would be otherwise. While these outside factors won’t be the final catalyst that actually kicks off your tilt, pre-triggers still share a large part of the blame. If you come to the poker table already feeling out of sorts over problems at work or a fight with your spouse, and then you decide to unwind by having a few drinks while you play, you are setting yourself up to go on tilt the moment something goes wrong in the game.

Think of pre-triggers as creating a kind of “perfect storm” for tilt to occur. When you combine stress and alcohol in a poker game, it’s like you’ve got a cold high-pressure system moving in from the north, colliding with a tropical low-pressure system from the south. Now all it takes one nasty gust of wind – one bad beat – and you’ll have a full-blown nor’easter on your hands. Without those pre-triggers, the bad beat might have blown over harmlessly.
Now for the Actual Triggers

You’re in the game, playing well, perhaps having to work a bit at managing your emotions when the cards go against you, but you’re doing it. You’re in control. Then something goes wrong. Tilt triggers are different for everybody but the common denominator for all triggers is that they run deeply contrary to your notions of how the game is supposed to be. The end result is that the rational, thinking part of your brain takes a powder, leaving your pride and emotions in charge of the decision-making.
Bad Beats

The usual culprit for this ugly transformation is a bad beat. From the lowliest fish to the loftiest pros, from the mundane “that’s poker” beats to the soul-crushing, two-outer suckouts, bad beats are an inescapable part of the game. Which is precisely why they are such a common tilt trigger and why you must be able to deal with them emotionally.
Bad Cards

The second-most common tilt trigger is being card-dead for a long time. After an endless procession of lousy starting hands, missed flops, and draws that never come in, even the most patient of poker players would be tempted to snap. This is a straw-that-broke-the-camel’s-back type of trigger, as the frustration just keeps piling on higher and higher with each successive fold, until it’s finally too much to bear.

Online, where games moves at the speed of light and multi-tabling is commonplace, tilt-by-cold-cards is rare. But that’s more than compensated for by the excessive number of bad beats you’ll encounter in the online games. Between the sheer volume of hands and the fact that online opponents tend to play looser, it’s not a question of if you will take bad beats, but when and how many. Add in the fact that your entire online bankroll is only a few mouse-clicks away and the ability to cope with suckouts becomes more crucial than ever.

Anything that gets your emotions flowing in as poker game has the potential to cause tilt. Excessive winning can do it. If you’re playing poker online and you lose a big pot because of a poor connection or an accidental mis-click, that can do it too. Offensive opponents also deserve an honorable mention as potential tilt triggers. But as a rule, obnoxious trash-talking opponents won’t really get under your skin unless they’re winning and you’re losing. Which brings us back to bad beats and bad cards. In one form or another, those are main triggers you need to watch out for.
Part Two: Prevention

By far, the most effective way to combat tilt is to never go on it in the first place. Easier said than done of course, but it all goes back to that old axiom: knowledge is power. To protect yourself against tilt, you must know yourself and know the game.
Self-Knowledge

This can be difficult and slippery, if only because we humans have an incredible gift for deceiving ourselves. That’s why it’s so vital to know your triggers. Of all the things that can go wrong during a poker game, what do you find the most disturbing? So disturbing that it can prompt you to fling all your hard-earned poker knowledge out the window? Only you can truly answer that, although a coach or a poker-playing friend might be able to help you find some tilt-weaknesses from observing your play. Once you know your tilt triggers, this will put you in a much stronger position to side-step tilt before it has a chance to overtake you.
Know the Game

The more you know correct poker strategy, the harder it will be for you to stray away from it. The more you get in the habit of reviewing the hand and considering all angles – position, stack sizes, pot size, pot odds, betting patterns, playing styles, etc – before making any important decision, the more it becomes second nature for you to think this way, even during times of stress. By no means will this knowledge give you any kind of foolproof protection against tilt, but it does act as a very effective buffer.
Know the Probabilities

Remember, the number one tilt trigger is a bad beat. But what’s really sick about bad-beat-induced tilt is that many if not most of those beats were never all that bad to begin with. Poker players have a natural tendency to over-estimate the chances of their good hands holding up, which in turn makes it feel more “unfair” when another player draws out and rakes in the pot.

But realistically, good hands get sucked out on all the time and oftentimes the “favorite” hand is favored only by a small margin. An awareness of common poker probabilities certainly helps.  For example: against four random hands preflop, pocket Aces will hold up to win the pot about 56 percent of the time. Roughly translated, that means the best starting hand in hold’em is slated to lose about two out of every five hands when facing off against four opponents. Even if you reduce the number of opponents to two, pocket aces will still lose about a fourth of the time. Upsetting yes, but hardly cause for a tilt-provoking, god-I’m-so-unlucky pity party.

As senseless and wasteful as tilt can be, the sheer stupidity of tilt increases exponentially if the trigger that caused it in the first place is a run-of-the-mill loss the player should have seen coming. Worse still, some of these bad beats are self-inflicted hurts brought about by poor play, typically when the player is not aggressive enough and gives his opponents free/cheap cards to outdraw him.

But you can avoid this ignominious trap by educating yourself. If you know ahead of time that your hand will fall victim to a suckout every so often, you won’t be surprised or upset when it happens – let alone have a meltdown. If you realize that you made a mistake in the way you played the hand, you can acknowledge the mistake and learn from it, instead of railing against the poker gods because one of your opponents walked right through an opening that you yourself created.
How to Avoid Tilt

And so finally, how do you combat against tilt when it has already sunk its toxic little claws into you? If you have the insight and presence of mind to realize that you’re playing on tilt, that in itself puts you far ahead of most tilt victims. But you’re still left with the problem of what to do about it at that moment.
Two Words: Stop Playing

That’s it, really. The moment you become aware that you’re on tilt, get up and walk away from the table or turn off the computer. Your only defence is to stop the train from derailing. You need to regain your composure and that takes time. If you have extraordinary discipline, you might be able to cool down after a break of five or ten minutes away from the poker table.

What you do at this point will determine the overall outcome of your poker session and it is critical that you do not lose control. If you do have the discipline to take a short break then the following are helpful tactics for controlling your emotions:

    First, get up from the poker table (or computer) and take a walk or go to the bathroom to cool off.
    Don’t use your break to call someone to discuss a bad beat – this will further tilt you, not calm you down.
    Don’t try to chat with your opponent and open the door for defensive comments that may fuel an argument.
    If you cannot get in the right frame of mind, cash in and do not keep playing – you may need a long break in order to get back to your best game state.

Much depends on your individual personality and the severity of the tilt. If you have a mild case of frustration tilt – say, you caught yourself making a loose call or two – ten minutes might be enough time to get your head screwed back on straight. But if you’ve got a full-blown case of berserker tilt, no way is a ten-minute break going to do the trick. You’ll need at least a day away from the game, preferably longer.

Again it comes down to self-knowledge. This is a judgment call, made by you and about you. When you do return to the game, you must be brutally honest with yourself in assessing that you’re indeed ready to play again. If you’re not 100 percent sure, wait awhile longer. The game isn’t going anywhere.
Your Table Image

Another reason you should get up and stop playing is that your table image is almost certainly compromised. When you’re on tilt, any halfway-decent opponent is going to recognize your lopsided playing style and exploit it. Even if you do manage to un-tilt yourself with a short break, you’ll have a table-image problem to contend with when you return to the game. If you’re playing online, you might want to consider changing tables.
When a Long Break Isn’t An Option

Of course if you’re in the middle of playing a poker tournament, anything more than a short break isn’t really an option. But as long as you can afford to lose a few blinds, go ahead and take a break. Getting off tilt and back to your A-game is more important than playing your blinds. Take a walk. Get your mind off of whatever it was that was upsetting you so. Give yourself a pep talk, remind yourself that the players who sucked out on you were putting their money in with the worst of it. Whatever works to clear your mind and restore your sense of poker equilibrium.
A Stop-Loss Can be a Useful Tool

For some poker players, a stop-loss can be a useful tool in the fight against tilt. In theory, stop-losses shouldn’t be necessary since poker players aren’t supposed to be results-oriented. But realistically, if you’ve lost three buy-ins in a row you probably are on tilt at least a little bit – or tilt is lurking right around the corner, just waiting for one more loss. So until and unless you have the discipline to recognize the signs of tilt and stop playing on your own, a stop-loss can provide at least a modicum of protection.

What you don’t want to do is chase your losses. Ever. The poker graveyard is littered with bones of players who went broke trying to “get back even.” Even more foolhardy is the idea of temporarily moving up in limits to win your money back faster. This is exactly how a moderate loss turns into a bankroll-busting catastrophe.
Final Thoughts

You’ve heard it before and you’ll hear it again: It’s all one long session. This bit of poker wisdom is key to overcoming tilt. If you can keep your focus on the big picture – the long term – it will be much easier to let the short-term misfortunes of the game roll off your back. It will be much easier to take a break from poker when you’re tilting, confident that you’ll win your money back later after you’ve gotten your head screwed back on straight, instead of getting trapped in the desperate compulsion to get even again right now. Keeping good records and even graphing your long-term results is one effective way to accomplish this. Because if you don’t learn to control tilt, it’s only a matter of time before tilt will control you.

By Barbara Connors

Implied Odds and Poker

Even first-time players knows that poker is a game of odds, and while newbies might not be able to figure them, at least they realize that there’s a relationship between the chances of making a winning hand and how much money is in the pot. But they probably don’t know much about the concept of implied odds (and reverse implied odds) – which sounds complex and foreboding but is really nothing more than the opposite side of a slightly more sophisticated way of thinking about risk and reward at the poker table.
Estimating What You Think You’ll Win

Implied odds offer a comparison of what you think you’ll win – including all the money in the pot right now along with any additional money that figures to come into the pot through bets and calls on future wagering rounds – compared to the cost of a current bet. If this sounds somewhat less than a precise measure, you’re right. Unlike mathematical odds, implied odds involves estimating – or guessing – about the future action of your opponents. When you base a bet or a call on implied odds, you’re wagering not only on the odds related to making your hand, but also on your ability to forecast your opponents’ behavior when your hand comes in.

Let’s look at some examples to clarify this. Suppose you flopped a flush draw, and with two cards to come, the odds against completing it are 1.86-to-1 against you. But without knowing how much money you figure to win if you have to call a bet to draw to your flush, you can’t tell whether it pays to stick around or not. After all, with the odds at nearly 2-to-1 against you, if the all the pot offered was even money – you’d win as much as you contributed – it wouldn’t pay to keep drawing.

In poker, whenever the pot odds exceed the odds against making your hand, it pays to keep playing. When the odds against your hand coming in exceed the reward associated with it, it’s usually a bad deal. A simple way to think about this is that whenever the prize exceeds the cost of the game, keep playing. When the cost to play is more than the money you figure to win, you should fold.

But implied odds can change that equation, and here’s why. While the current size of the pot might not be sufficient to make it worthwhile to take another card or two, if you reckon that the pot will grow substantially on future wagering rounds, your decision might be a different one.
Implied Odds are Best with Hidden Hands

If you’re going to use implied odds as justification to call an opponent, then be aware that some draws have greater implied odds than others. Flush draws are pretty obvious, and most opponents will at least stop and ponder when an opponent who has been calling all along comes out betting when a third suited card hits the board. In other words, unless your opponent is very loose or figures you for a bluff, implied odds with flush draws tend to be smallish, because that third suited card can put a serious damper on any forthcoming action.

Things are different when your hand is hidden. Because hidden hands are more deceptive, your opponent might not realize the strength of it and pay you off with a second-best hand. The best implied odds draw is a double belly buster straight because of its stealth nature.

An example of this type of hand would be a flop of AJ8 while holding QT. While the board looks somewhat disjointed you have eight outs (four Kings and four nines) to hit your straight.

The odds of hitting your straight on the turn are just over 4-to-1 against. The pot odds in this example are just over 3-to-1, so you are not getting the right price to call based only on pot odds. However, the implied odds are favourable with such a hidden hand. An additional upside to a hand like this is that an opponent may have a hand like AK and if a King hits the board he will give you plenty of action and many times never see your stealth nut straight coming.
Betting Structures and Playing Styles

Pot-limit and no-limit games offer larger implied odds than fixed-limit games because of the potential for bigger wagers on subsequent betting rounds. But structure alone is meaningless without an understanding the playing style of your opponents. Passive opponents – the kind of players who call but rarely raise – increase your implied odds because you can draw inexpensively against them and count on getting paid off handsomely whenever you make your hand.

Players have to guard against self-deception when figuring implied odds. Because there’s a certain amount of subjectivity associated with them, some players get into trouble when they use implied odds to justify weak calls. Here’s what we mean.

Suppose you have a flush draw on the turn and with $20 in the pot your opponent bets $10 (as shown in figure 2). Your immediate odds are 3-to-1 plus whatever implied odds you assign to the final betting round on the river.

But unless your adversary is completely transparent or you have a terrific read on him, it’s all too easy to be overly optimistic – and therefore self-deceptive – about how much more money your opponent will be willing to invest in the pot if you make your hand. You might complete your hand on the river and try for a check raise only to have your opponent check behind you. You’ll probably win the showdown, but you would have won more if you wagered an amount your opponent would call.

So the check raise failed. Next time you’re in this situation suppose you bet a large amount instead of trying for a check raise. You’re hoping your opponent thinks you’re bluffing and will call. But instead, he ponders for a moment and then releases his hand. Would a smaller bet – presumably one sized to easily attract a call – have worked better? Or would this have been the time to try for a check raise? You just can’t be certain, and this is the part of poker that’s an art, not a science.
Predicting What Your Opponent Will Do

Let’s back this up a bit. Before you decide to play your draw on those earlier betting rounds, you need to have some idea about what your opponent will do when you complete your hand.

If your opponent is willing to call big bets on the river, you can take a short price on the turn because you know that when you make your hand, the payoff will more than exceed all those times you drew, failed to get there, and either folded or bluffed the river only to have your opponent call and win the pot. But if your opponent is the kind who hunkers down whenever a scare card hits the board, a better play might be to eschew the draw, and bet for value against him whenever you have what you believe to be a better hand.
Warning: The Fast Path to Self-Deception

For some players, the idea of implied odds is a fast path to self-deception at the poker table. You’ll see players calling bets with far the worst of it and if you asked them why, they’ll tell you that implied odds made it a worthwhile bet. While implied odds are a bit of a guess, those guesses need to be fairly accurate to pay off in the long run. Otherwise it’s just self deception – a way of talking oneself into playing hands that really should be folded.

Players who do this are savvy enough to know they shouldn’t play hunches at the poker table, but they still lack the requisite self-discipline to ensure they’ll beat the game. In order to sound like they are smarter than hunch players and any-two-cards-can-win maniacs, they’ll cloak their desire for action – even when the price is clearly wrong – in the mantle of implied odds.

By Lou Krieger

Poker and Playing Position

This lesson assumes that you have a solid grasp of all the fundamental concepts involved in poker. Of these concepts, understanding position is arguably the most important because you are able to make decisions after you’ve gathered information from your opponent(s). As you progress and develop as a poker player, some of the largest gains in improving your game will come from increasing confidence playing position. It’s easy to play your strong hands, but it’s the ability to use position and play poker regardless of the strength of your hand which separates the good poker players from the great ones.

Keep in mind that in any poker game, you must play the tendencies of your opponents first. Making a move in position is irrelevant if the person you are playing with isn’t capable of putting you on a hand. Having said that, the concepts addressed in this lesson assume your opponent is at least capable of second level thinking – which is to say that in addition to his own cards, he’s also thinking about what you were dealt.
Pre-Flop Concepts

We’ll start by looking at some poker strategies and tactics that can be employed pre-flop by using the power of position. Be aware that one or two of the strategies that follow are more focused on tournament poker than cash games due to the increased emphasis on pre-flop action.
Buying Position

Irrespective of the poker variant or format, it’s common knowledge that leaning toward the side of aggression is more profitable in the long-run. One way to use aggression is to buy position. Let’s say one or two players have limped in ahead of you and you hold a hand like AJ, KQ or 77 in middle position. Depending on stack sizes and your reads you can certainly make an argument for calling, folding or raising. However, by calling you will often induce others to limp behind you, giving up position, and now you are forced to play based solely on whether you connect on the flop or not. By raising, you can force the players behind you to fold and you have now bought position after the flop.
Re-Stealing in Position

Many players re-steal from the blinds after someone in late position raises. This is most common in tournament poker. Players frequently re-steal from the blinds because they assume the late position player is stealing and cannot stand a re-raise. However, re-stealing has become more common from the blinds and people’s games are adjusting to steal from earlier positions such as the hi-jack and middle position so they give the appearance of having a bigger hand. This is where having position comes in. By re-raising from the button or cut-off position, it looks like a very strong hand. It puts significant pressure on the blinds and they will often fold a hand as strong as AQ and mid pocket-pairs. In addition, it also tells the original raiser that you have a real hand. Again, this goes back to reading your opponents. Don’t re-steal against the tightest player at the table or someone whose raise has committed them to the hand. Pick your spots versus opponents who are aggressive, have a wide range pre-flop and are capable of folding to a re-raise.
Implied Odds + Outplaying Your Opponent

Another benefit of having position is being able to get into pots with hands that have heavy implied odds against a pre-flop raiser. These might be suited middle connectors, small pocket pairs or low suited connectors like 5d6d. In these cases, you are calling a raise in position because it gives you multiple ways to win the pot. If you hit your hand, it will likely be well disguised and you can win a big pot. But more importantly, it also gives you the chance to outplay your opponent if you do miss your hand because you can make your play based on observing their actions first.
Freezing

Freezing isn’t necessarily a poker play; it is simply another benefit of having position. By calling your opponents raise when you are in position it can freeze them in the hand. Their intention was to steal the blinds and now that you’ve called, they are going to proceed with caution. Calling the raise from an opponent who often raises in middle or late position can have both short term and long term benefits. In the short-term, they may put the brakes on and allow you to take down the pot post-flop. The long-term implication of this is that it sets a tone at the table that if they come in raising, they will have a fight on their hands, thus deterring them from stealing.
Squeeze Play

A squeeze play occurs when an aggressive player opens the pot, someone calls them in position and another player (often in the blinds) re-raises. A squeeze play is most effective when the original raiser has a loose range, the caller tends to be passive and the stack sizes involved do not commit the other players. The re-raise puts pressure on the original raiser because he’s not sure what the middle player is going to do and you are effectively “squeezing” the middle player. If the middle player had a very strong hand, he would have re-raised in the first place. Caution: squeeze plays should be used sparingly and rarely at low buy-ins. In low buy-in poker games, the middle player will call very often because they feel committed to the hand and feel the need to “look you up”. Make sure you have a good read on both players to maximize the effectiveness of this poker play.
Inducing a Squeeze Play

In certain situations, you can use position pre-flop to trap your opponents into thinking you are not strong. Ever since “Harrington on Hold’em” described the squeeze play people have added this into their poker arsenal. Because of this, you can use position to trap aggressive players in the blinds by calling a raise with a big pair such as KK or AA, inducing the player to re-raise over top. Use this play with caution, however, as the big blind will be getting good odds to enter the pot.
Post-Flop Concepts

We’ll now look at some of the key concepts of using position post-flop. These strategies and tactis are suitable for both tournament poker and cash games.
Floating

Floating refers to calling a flop or turn bet when in position in order to take the pot down on the next street, and is used in three primary situations:

    Pot Control
    Bluffing
    Trapping

Let’s start with pot control. Suppose you call a raise in position with a mid-pocket pair such as 88 and the flop comes A64. Your opponent may or may not have an Ace, but they are betting the flop regardless. By calling here, many opponents will shut down on the turn for fear that you have an Ace. You can certainly raise here to see where you stand, but depending on your stack size, calling may be better so that you control the size of the pot.

Using the float play to bluff can be effective when you know that you are up against an aggressive player who almost always makes a continuation bet. You can call the flop with a wide variety of hands in order to read how your opponent reacts on the turn. Floating for this purpose becomes even more powerful if there is an obvious draw on the board, since you can represent the hand if it hits.

This same tactic can also be used to set a trap. Let’s say you flop a set or some other strong hand and you are up against an aggressive player who is capable of firing on the turn. While raising the flop might sometimes be the better play depending on your opponent; just calling the flop can make your opponent think you are weak (i.e. floating with a mid pocket pair) and cause them to bet the turn strongly.
Raising Continuation Bets

Just as you might float versus an opponent who you think might be making a continuation bet, you can also mix up your game and raise the flop as well. In this case, the assumption is that we have also missed the flop and are bluffing in hopes of getting our opponent to fold. Having position affords you the ability to read if your opponent is making a continuation bet based on his bet sizing and the texture of the flop.
Raising Probe Bets

You can also use the power of position against a player who bets out from the blinds. A player will often catch a piece of the flop or have called a raise from the blinds with a pocket pair and will place a small bet on the flop to “see where they are at”. Position affords you the ability to tell them exactly where they are – behind (or at least this is what we want them to think). This play is most effective if you originally raised pre-flop because you are continuing to represent a strong hand.
Conclusion

There are many ways to use position to your advantage. Poker players, for the most part, are acutely aware of the value of position but many squander it unless they believe they have a worthy hand to play. Position should be used as a weapon and only squandered when it appears hopeless to become involved. Position is a strong factor and when you possess it, all things become easier.

The concepts explained in this lesson are really just the tip of the iceberg. The only way to improve at poker is to trust your instincts and put yourself in situations where you can use position to your advantage. Once you have successfully made plays by using your position (and not relying on the strength of your cards) your confidence will grow and your ability to outplay your opponents will skyrocket.

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