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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

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

How Not to Suck at Poker Play in Position

Position is simply the single most important and valuable commodity to have at the poker table.

If you're unfamiliar with the term, position simply means you are the last to act in the hand (meaning you have the dealer button, or the players acting after you have folded).

The worst places, position-wise, are typically the blinds, as after the first round of betting the whole table acts after you for the rest of the hand.

Regardless of your skill level, the situation, or the hand you're playing, being in position will always give you more information in the hand than any of your opponents.

And in the world of Texas Hold'em, information is the most valuable commodity there is. Read more…

Playing Big Stacks in Poker Tournaments

Having a big stack in a poker tournament is not the solution to your problems, despite the confidence that it (quite naturally) fills you with. When you get a larger stack, your playing style needs to change accordingly and move from being a tight aggressive player to working with more hands and loosening up your game. Then, later in the tournament, your stack is the single best asset you have.

Early On: Looser Calls, Play Aggressive

To keep your lead in a no limit tournament (or, indeed, any tournament,) you have to keep putting more chips in your bankroll. If you've established a lead early on in the tournament (and indeed, as you are playing in the middle stages), don't be afraid to start making make looser calls from the flop, limping in hoping to hit a nut hand. Later in the tournament, you may leave hands like 67 or 78 to the side, but if you can afford to gamble a bit with your chips and be more aggressive, don't be timid.
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Winning Small Stakes Games

Pretty much every online poker player starts at the low-stakes tables when they decide to move into real-money games, and the reasons are pretty obvious. A lot of players will tell you that low-stakes games aren't profitable, but that's generally because low-stakes players find themselves in on way more hands than the should be. It's possible and in fact practical to play low-stakes poker for profit if you are comfortable with a longer, slower burn at the table with less action. Think Tight Aggressive and crank it up to about 10% past your usual play.

Preflop Strategies

As with any hold ‘em game, position plays a huge factor in low-stakes online poker games. Early position preflop players want to restrict their play to only the absolute best hands: AA, KK, QQ, JJ, AQ and AK. Limp in with a pocket pair of TT or lower and AJ is always more tempting than it should be. You're better off folding everything else when playing from the blinds or immediately after.
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