PokerTips Blog

I started playing live poker about five years ago. I play a regular $.25/$.50 home game and I would like to share some thoughts about some of my experiences over the last few years in this game.

One thing I’ve noticed is that the players who are not having a ton of fun are usually a consistent winner, though not a big winner. In a live game if you are not having a lot of fun, you are probably playing good poker.

The amount of the money on the table in my game constantly grows. Even at low-stakes like $50 no-limit you will easily see over $1,500 on the table late into the night. Interestingly, as it gets later and the money on the table gets deeper, players actually start to play worse, not better. Players will be tired, drunk, high, emotionally unbalanced or a combination of all of the above. As it gets later the potential for profit becomes considerably larger.

All of the guys at our Friday night game are there to make friends. They love the buddy-buddy horse play that goes on. The 19 year old internet math wonk poker wizard wearing super dark sunglasses isn’t exactly popular when he shows up. He is slow. He is serious. He couldn’t get action if he was a $1 prostitute. The same goes for our regular angry drunk. Similar issues. Way too serious, and not very sociable. If you look like you are having fun, smiling and being a friendly easy to get along with guy, you’re going to get action. Leave your sunglasses at home.

Every week someone goes broke and cannot afford the buy in. It isn’t uncommon for the deep stack to lend off the table. It’s allowed and encouraged to some degree. The superstition about borrowed money being lucky is just that. My observations are that loaning money in a home game is generally a profitable thing to do in the long term as long as you don’t go too deep. By loaning them money when they go broke so that they can continue to play, they are more likely to return the following week. Players who play badly will usually continue to be bad players, and every game needs these guys.

Trying to put people on a hand at a home game can be a bit of a job, especially in our game because people play such a wide range and have fun. In general, players at the game will do similar things week in and week out, and this has a range itself. For example a guy I like a lot for paying off will usually come to the game and play while really tired. He is one hard working guy, and I have a tremendous amount of respect for him, but he works from 6am to 4pm Monday to Friday and our game starts late and runs even later. He is never a good player past 10:00 pm. One week though, he showed up and just destroyed the table. In conversation we learned that he was on vacation all week and can sleep in as late as he wants. The sun will sometimes shine even on a dogs ass once in awhile. People who are terrible might bring an A-game when you least expect it.

New players are the most interesting thing week to week but not for obvious reasons. It is my observation that they consistently have no effect whatsoever on the table dynamic. The same can be said for huge pots. Drastic changes like new players or huge stacks for some reason will not change how the other regulars at the table are playing.

There is an exception to new players. One thing that will instantly effect our game is adding an attractive girl into the mix. Once in a rare blue moon a regular will bring his girlfriend. She will dress like a tramp, and we love it. And it completely throws the game out of whack. No one wants to bust her, everyone plays her soft. It was so bad one week that a player showed his set on the river before betting and said she should fold – a generous offer except for the fact that there were still two people to act after her. Attractive girls throw the profit curve down, not up.

It is not how good you are at poker that determines how much you make, it is how much better you are than the people you play with, so finding poor players to play against is almost as important as being a good player.

The process of locating the most profitable of the currently available tables/tournaments starts with choosing the right poker network. There are many factors to take into consideration when choosing a poker network, but the two most important factors, which dwarf the other ones, are traffic and ease of the competition. Find out which networks have enough traffic in the type of game you play, so that you don’t have to spend a lot of time waiting for players to play with, then choose the one with the softest competition.

For example, Titan Poker has a lot of traffic, but not always the easiest competition. Pacific Poker has incredibly easy competition, but not always much traffic. One site with a very nice blend of somewhat easy competition coupled with a lot of traffic is Party Poker.

If there is a huge difference in traffic, and just a small difference in softness, between some of the alternatives, it might be better to go with the one with the highest traffic. But usually softness rules the land.

Something many players forget is that the ease of competition also changes during the day. At peak traffic hours the competition is easier than at the lowest traffic hours. This is due to the fact that many sharks don’t have jobs or schools to go to, and tend to play whenever they feel like it. Many of them wake up very late and go to bed very late. Fish on the other hand, live their 9 to 5 lives and only have time to play in the evening. This mass entry of fish in the evening drives the traffic upwards. Since the number of sharks don’t increase by as high of a percentage in the evening, this results in a better fish to shark-ratio which means easier games. Weekend afternoons are typically soft too for the same reason.

Be aware that poker is played all around that world, so networks dominated by Europeans will have different peak hours than “American” networks. You can check out how the traffic on your preferred poker network developed the last 24 hours on Poker Scout.

When you have chosen the network and time of the day, you have to choose which table/tournament to join on this network. For cash-games, you have to look at the statistics in the lobby. Bad players are typically loose, so tables showing a high average percentage of people seeing the flop are typically easier to beat. Be aware, though, that the fewer people there are around the table, the more hands you should play. So a table with say 9 players with a 30% figure, has worse players than a table of say 6 players with the same figure.

Not all networks show this figure in the lobby. On these sites you have to open some or all of the tables and see for yourself which table seems most desirable. There are other statistics in the lobby of course, but they aren’t as useful in finding games as the “percentage of players seeing the flop” statistic.

Many think big pot-sizes, which are also shown in the lobby, are a sign of poor players because poor players often call when they should have folded, and this may be the case. But poor players also often call/check when they should have bet/raised. That being said, big pots are more often than not a sign of poor players, it is just a much less reliable sign than flop-percentages.

When you have joined a table, but later find out that it is not soft, or it became harder due to poor players leaving and better players joining, then Run Forrest, Run! to another table.

Tournaments are trickier to game-select because there are no statistics in the lobby to look at, and once the tournament starts, you are stuck with whatever players are in it. There are, however, statistics elsewhere for Single-Table Tournaments. On a site called Sharkscope you can type in the ID number of the tournament you consider joining, and it will show how well/poorly the players who have already joined the tournament have done it in previous STTs. Be aware that some poker networks don’t allow you to use Sharkscope.

People who are new to poker tend to think that reads are about putting the opponent on a particular hand (say a king, which made a pair on the board, and a small kicker), but figuring out what hand the opponent has is very difficult. If you try to put somebody on a particular hand and act accordingly, chances are you will guess wrong and pay the price.

What you should do when an opponent makes a (non-fold) move preflop, is you put him on a range of hands based on the situation and what you know about this player from previous hands. Then you make the move that works best against that range. It would of course have been a lot better if you could pin-point the exact hand he has, but you can’t and so this is the best practical option.

The next move he makes in the hand will help you eliminate some of the holdings from his initial range. This continues for every move he makes. Only very rarely do you get to eliminate so many hands from his hand-range that you are pretty sure that he has a particular hand.

Of course, sometimes unexpected stuff happens in a hand and you have to revaluate the hand-ranges you put him on in previous streets, but this is a good approach to putting people on hands.

Reads are not limited to putting people on hands, it is also about figuring out what type of players you are dealing with. Just like the correct move on your part depends on what hand your opponent has, it also depends on how the opponent would play that hand. In other words, the range you’ll assign a tight player who raises preflop will be a lot smaller than the range you’ll assign a loose player who raises preflop.

I believe this is an opportunity where most profitable poker players could improve their game even further. They might be good at putting people on hand-ranges and figuring out their style of play, but actually using that information to optimize their game is an even further challenge.

The easiest adaptation you need to make is loosening/tightening your preflop hand-range depending on how loose and how aggressive the players at your table are. If you are facing a raise preflop, you will naturally need a stronger hand to stay in the hand if the raiser only raises with good hands. This becomes especially important if there are one or more short-stacked players at the table; you do not want to raise with a marginal hand and face a difficult decision whether or not to call a short-stack’s all-in.

If it folds to you preflop and there are mostly loose players behind you, you need a good hand to raise because you can’t expect to steal the blinds often enough to make raising with a mediocre hand profitable.

These are obvious situations that most profitable players know how to handle, but here is one situation they may not handle well:

It is folded to you, and the players behind you are largely loose and very passive. Many would say you would have to tighten your hand-range in this situation because you won’t be able to steal the blinds often. But what they are forgetting is that since the players would only re-raise with premium hands, they’ll probably just call if they decide to play the hand.

This is great for you in several ways.

1) Since they are loose, there are probably many hands in their hand-range which are so weak that you stand to make more money from them calling with those hands than folding.
2) Since they are so passive, they rarely force you to fold by making a re-raise when they have a strong hand. So you get 3 free cards (the flop) when you have the weakest hand.
3) The rare times they re-raise, you know they have a great hand, and can fold with a sigh of relief that you only lost your raise when you could have lost a lot more if you hadn’t known what you were up against. For this reason, I would much rather meet a loose player who would only re-raise with premium hands, than a loose player who would never re-raise.

When it is folded to you preflop, you should generally be tighter the looser the opponents behind you are, and tighter the more aggressive they are. But a lot of good players (and poor players too of course) ignore or don’t fully take into account the aggression-factor, while everybody and their grandma know to adapt to the loose-factor.

There is a lot of information out there intended to help the aspiring poker shark, and no one has the time to read it all. In this article I will tell you what you should check out and what is basically a waste of time.

The by far most important location for information are poker forums. They let you get the answers to questions you can’t find with a simple Google-search. Perhaps more importantly, you also learn stuff you didn’t know you were looking for by reading threads you aren’t even involved in. Don’t get too carried away, though. Reading every single post, taking part in every hand analysis and taking too much part in non-poker discussions is not optimal for your skill-improvement.

The PokerTips strategy section is very helpful as a starting point for improving your skills, and its free. The Beginner and Intermediate sub-sections teach you the fundamentals of Texas Hold’em and serve as a foundation to build further information upon. You can take a sneak-peak at the Advanced and Expert sub-sections too, but they are called what they are called for a reason.

The strategy section contains a lot of Fixed Limit Holdem articles, but that’s ok because starting out playing FL is an effective way of learning the basics of No Limit. No offense FL-players. Nah, who am I kidding, offense is intended.

There is a sea of poker books out there, but many are crap, and if you have read a couple of books you have read most of the content of all the books because they are so similar. I would recommend “Winning Low Limit Holdem” by Lee Jones for the beginner. It is a book about FL, and the most important thing you will learn from it is which hands to play when and how preflop.

Then I would recommend “Theory of Poker” by David Sklansky. This one will teach you how to think as a good player for all situations in all poker forms.

Those are basically all the books you need. Sure you can buy other books you think will be helpful to you, and they probably will help you in some ways, but not nearly as much as the two books I have mentioned, especially the Lee Jones book.

Magazines are of little help, you can get the information in those for free on poker forums. Blogs are usually of little help as well (this one is an exception of course), even if it is written by great players (this one is an…, nah not even you would buy that one). Players complaining about bad beats (losing hands, which were favorites to win), bragging about how much they made last month or informing you that they got a dog last week is of little use to you.

Learning from professionals on TV is dangerous. The situations they are in are very different from the ones you are in (the skills of their opponents being the most important difference), so their moves for their situation would often be wrong for similar situations you are in. Poker on TV is also almost always edited, so it gives an incorrect image of how the play actually was on that table.

If you are good enough that you have started making some money on poker, you may wanna consider using online poker coaches. The standard rate for coaches is about $50/hour, but the price can vary a lot. Be careful who you give your money to, there is no point paying that kind of money to someone who doesn’t have much to offer you. I think DeucesCracked.com is a good place to search for coaches, although I have never used them myself.

Figuring out when your are ready to move up to the next buy-in is one of many challenges poker players face. The advice on this area can vary a lot, but here is how I think it should be handled.

First of all, you have to believe you would be more profitable at the next buy-in. Some players move up whenever they think they are profitable at their current buy-in, but that strategy will lead to being break-even at best. To move up, your winrate, whether it be ROI (Return On Investment) in tournaments or BB/100 (“Big Bets” per hundred hands) in cash-games, has to be big enough that the inevitable decrease in winrate due to tougher competition on the higher buy-in still results in a higher hourly rate (in terms of dollars). It is, for example, profitable to move up if the buy-in is twice as high, and the ROI or BB/100 is expected to be reduced by less than 50%.

How much of the ROI and BB/100 do you lose from moving up a level? It depends on a lot of things, but I would say the ROI drops on average 2-3 percentage-points in Single-Table Tournaments per buy-in. You would have to ask other people for figures for cash-games and Multi-Table Tournaments, as I don’t have much experience with those.

The problem is knowing how profitable you are at your current buy-in, though, because without knowing that you can’t know how you would do on the next buy-in. Some say you need to have played thousands of STTs or MTTs and tens of thousands of hands in cash-games for the luck to have evened out, and the results to be representative of your true edge in these games. And they are right, but if you were to play that many hours per buy-in you would never get anywhere. You just have to make a qualified guess as to what your winrate is, and this can be hard to do since many players tend to overestimate how good they are.

Then there is the matter of how big of a bankroll (the amount of money you have set aside to play poker with divided by the size of the buy-in) you need to play at a certain buy-in. You can be the best player in the world, but if you move up so many levels that you are playing STTs with a 5 buy-in bankroll, there is a big chance you will lose it all from a little bad luck.

A rule of thumb is that you need 30 buy-ins to play STTs, 100 buy-ins to play MTTs and 20 buy-ins to play NL cash-games. These figures are considered big enough to ride out bad luck spells, so you can keep on playing on that buy-in because the luck will at some time change. A very scary scenario using this bankroll strategy is in cases where you have overestimated your skills, and you are in fact a losing player at this buy-in. If that is the case, you will slowly but steadily lose your entire buy-in.

I think it is wiser to have less strict bankroll-requirements and a more flexible approach. Say buy-ins of 20, 50 and 12, and instead drop down if it sinks below say 12, 30 and 8. This lets you move up in buy-ins faster early in your poker-career where it often is the bankroll and not the skills which limits how high buy-in you can play.

You hear all the time how nice it is to have a large stack in tournaments. Many also say that when you play cash-games you should always buy in for the maximum because then your stack-size isnt as limiting in how big pots you can take part of, and the bigger the pots are, the more you can win.

And to some extent this is true. Most cash-game players should play with a full buy-in, but the reason for this would be that they are good at making the tactical changes you need to make when your stack is big. If the reason for playing with a full buy-in was just in order to make the pots big, you could just have moved up a level, where the pots are much bigger (in terms of dollars) and the competition only slightly tougher.

There is actually a good argument for keeping your stack small as well, but you don´t hear about it much. On a table of only small stacks, the optimal preflop strategy is to play hands which have a high chance of winning on a showdown. Medium and high pairs and high cards do well against other hands on a showdown.

On a table of only big stacks, on the other hand, the chance a hand has of winning on a showdown is still important, but it is also important to consider if that hand could easily be dominated (KT for example could easily be dominated by hands like AT or KQ). KT could be just as easily dominated on a small stack table of course, but on a big stack table you could lose much more because the pot can get bigger. If you hit top pair on the flop, and someone has the same pair with a better kicker, you could easily lose 100 big blinds, as opposed to say 30 big blinds on a small stack table.

Just like you can lose a lot from having a good, but not good enough, hand on a big stack table, you can also win a lot when an opponent has a good hand and yours is better. That´s why players around a big stack table should replace the weakest of the “high chance of winning at showdown” hands with speculative hands. Speculative hands are hands, which don´t win too often on showdown, but make great hands more frequently than other hands. Pocket pairs often become a set or better, connected cards (like 98 or 54) often becomes a straight and suited cards often become a flush. When you hit a set, straight or flush (or better), and an opponent has a good, but not that good hand, it is gonna be more than worth it for the times when those pocket cards didn’t hit the board well.

Now imagine a table where half the players are small stacks and half the players are big stacks. What type of hands should the small stacks play? Their stacks still limit how much they can lose when they get a good, but not good enough hand, even when involved in pots against big stacks. So they should play as if they table was all small stacks.

The big stacks, however, have a problem. A big stack wants to play “showdown-hands” against small stacks, because the pot will be limited against small stacks. And he wants to play speculative hands to a greater extent against big stacks. So what he has to do is play something in between. He has to play some of the risky “showdown-hands” and some of the speculative hands.

Imagine yourself being a small stack playing on a table where some of the players have that strategy. You have a big advantage. Your pure, clean-cut and dare I say a little sadistic “showdown-hands”-strategy is superior to the wishy-washy “neither here nor there”-strategy of those players because your weakest high-cards have a higher chance of winning on a showdown than speculative hands. If your opponents were as good as you, you would still do better because of your strategic decision to play with a small stack.

There are problems with playing with a small stack, though. Whenever your stack gets big, you have to switch to another table in order to buy in with a small stack again. Small stack play is also very boring to play. But some take advantage of this tactical advantage. They are called ratholers or “short-stackers”, and they are unsurprisingly hated among big stack sharks.

It’s an exciting feeling: you’re in a multi-table tournament and you pick up pocket Aces or pocket Kings. A player in front of you raises the pot to 3 big blinds. Now… what do you do?

In this situation, you have two choices, call or re-raise. In this article, I’m going to go over some of the things that should determine your decision. Consider the following to be something of a textual flow chart:

1. How Big is Your Stack?

A. 15 big blinds or less. With this short of a stack, I don’t think you can make much of an argument to flat-call the raise. Since your stack is so short, you’ll get called a pretty large percentage of the time when you re-raise all-in since your opponent will feel he has the pot odds to make the call. Additionally, you completely mask the strength of your hand by re-raising all-in, whereas a flat-call will look really powerful to anyone with a knack for tournaments.

B. 50 big blinds or more. With a larger stack, I like making a re-raise with your big pocket pair. When the stacks are somewhat deep, players will three-bet with a wider range of hands which means the strength of your hand will still be fairly well concealed notwithstanding your raise. An instance where a flat-call might be better than a raise is if your table is really crazy and you’re confident the pot will be re-raised by someone yet to act. However, I would want to be fairly sure this will happen before just smooth calling.

C. 20 to 45 big blinds. If your stack size falls into this range, proceed to the next step.

2. What Position Are You In?

A. Early Position. This is the most favorable scenario in which to consider just flat-calling the raise. Since someone in early position raised the pot, that’s probably going to look fairly strong to most players. By re-raising, you’re effectively announcing that you have a very big hand. After all, who is re-raising an early position raisor from early position with a marginal holding? Flat-call and hope to see something favorable to happen like a shorter stack who moves all-in thinking they might pick up an already nice sized pot before the flop.

B. Middle Position. I believe this is the trickiest position at the table to determine what to do. Proceed to the next step.

C. Late Postion/Blinds. A re-raise is a favorable move from late position or the blinds, but for different reasons. You can re-raise in late position since players typically will do so with a somewhat wider range of hands which thereby conceals your hand strength a little. In the blinds, I like a re-raise to simplify your decision-making for the remainder of the hand. Since you’re out of position, it’s a good idea to take control of the hand and get as many chips into the pot as possible to prevent having to make complicated post-flop decisions. However, a call can be an interesting play from the blinds since your hand strength is concealed incredibly well.

3. What Are Some Table Dynamics?

If you’ve made it past question #1 and question #2 and still don’t have a good idea one way or the other as to whether you should flat-call or re-raise, you’re going to have to examine some more subtle factors to make a confident decision. Here are some things to look for:

What are the stacks like behind you? If everyone yet to act has a lot of chips in front of them, it would make me inclined to re-raise. However, if there are a couple of short-stacks, a flat-call becomes more appealing. The reason is, when a short stack sees a raise and a call in front of them, they might be inclined to gamble and shove all-in with a fairly weak hand hoping both players fold. This move has additional value since the original raisor might call the all-in allowing you to shove over the top and either a.) double-up to a very big stack or b.) induce a fold leaving a ton of dead money in the pot.

What are the players like behind you? What’s your feeling on the players yet to act in the pot? Are there any crazy-aggressive players or is there anyone on tilt? If so, this would make me more likely to flat-call the raise in hopes that the crazy player traps himself by making a re-raise. Conversely, if the players behind you are tight and playing pretty straightforward, it would make me lean towards a re-raise since I’m not expecting to see any action induced from a flat-call.

Of course if you’re still not sure what to do after progressing through these questions, you can always let random chance determine your course of action. Flip a coin or let the second-hand on your timepiece determine your move!

I’ve been playing more and more low stakes live poker lately and have been doing fairly well. I played maybe eight times this month of $1/$2 NL for only maybe two hours at a time and am up about $1000 or so. I can attribute a good portion of it to categorizing my opponents. The way to do this is to play tight the first couple of orbits so you can figure out the few different types of opponents. Usually you don’t even have to wait the first couple of orbits because their playing style is written all over them. Allow me to explain below. Keep in mind this advice will only work on $1-$2 tables and possibly $2-$5. It may work beyond that, but I have little experience at those stakes.

The first type of opponent you may notice is the regular. The regular is easy to spot because (s)he knows the other regulars and also the dealer by name and addresses them as such. These are the players that are probably going to be pretty competent and probably won’t make any glaring mistakes, however it still doesn’t mean they will be all that great. They also generally play pretty lag especially in position with limpers. The best way to deal with them is to stay out of their way with mediocre hands until you are more confident with how they are playing. Also, if you have a monster, make it look like you don’t know what you are doing, by under betting and calling their raises, then hammer the river. This only will work once, but will give you an opportunity to bluff them later on.

Keep in mind, not all regulars are laggy – the older the player, the tighter they tend to play. It’s not too uncommon to see an old man only play a hand every two or three orbits. When he raises, don’t get too involved unless you beat his over pair or TPTK.

Probably the most obvious to spot player is the Asian guy. Asian guys all play crazy and love to gamble. It’s not uncommon for them to go all in preflop on their first hand at the table even with no limpers. The skinnier the Asian, the crazier they will play. Also if they wear glasses, and the thicker the plastic in the frames, the crazier they will play. To deal with these players, simply trap them. If you are UTG and a 6 foot 120 lb Asian with really big plastic glasses just sat down at the table at your table and you look down and see pocket aces, limp in because this guy is pushing all his chips in regardless of what he has as long as the pot wasn’t raised. By limping, you may even get a caller besides the Asian, if other people are familiar with this stereotype.

Related to the Asian guy is the Asian lady. They tend to be older women who always chase flushes. To play against them, all you have to do is over bet the pot on your top pair – make them pay for their draw. If the third suit comes out on the board and she bets, even if it’s small, you better fold because she hit her flush.

You will no doubt see about half of the table doing tricks with their chips. The most common one is shuffling the chips. This doesn’t indicate how well a player plays, however it does show they have table experience and probably won’t give off the most obvious of tells. Your best bet with these people playing with their chips is to just lump them into one of the previous stereotypes. One thing you may be able to extract from their chip playing is by paying attention when they play with their chips. I recall playing against someone who would only shuffle his chips when he was going to bet. Some players may do the opposite, and some may have no pattern, so this is just something to watch for.

The next type of player is the guy with the headphones who isn’t paying much attention. Often times their head phones will be accompanied by an over-sized hoodie. These players are often quite bored because they are used to playing 16 tables simultaneously online. Most poker rooms won’t allow you to play more than one table at a time, if they did, these players would no doubt find a way to do so. Anyway, they will probably be familiar with proper betting sizes and all of those types of fundamentals. Your best bet for beating them is to catch them off guard. To catch them off guard, you have to do the typical things live players do that online players fail to adjust to. Play the 93o in a raised pot and check call until the river on a 245AK board and hammer the river, you will stack their big slick every time.

Finally, the best type of player to have at your table is new guy who hasn’t played much before. The new guy will appear a bit nervous, probably make a few etiquette mistakes like maybe accidentally betting out of turn. This is probably the easiest to play against. They will just about never try to bluff because they are worried about looking foolish. They will call multiple streets with middle pair, so take them to value town. If they raise, they’ve got something good. If they wait until the river to bet and act a bit extra nervous, like maybe being a bit louder when they announce a raise and they are shaking like a Polaroid picture, you better believe they have the stone cold nuts and you could safely fold your Aces on an AsKs2AQs because they have JsTs. Okay, don’t really fold quads! But you should never have to stack off to one of these opponents unless they outdraw you after the money is in.

I know I’m forgetting some of the other common opponents, but for now, these will help you make wise decisions on whether to value bet or fold your trips on a three suited board and other such situations. One final piece of advice unrelated to these stereotypes, (with the possible exception of the headphone guy) live players will rarely bluff a large river bet. Save your money on a mediocre hand and fold to that river bet.

I’ve been playing a fair amount of $1/$2 short-handed pot-limit Omaha recently. After a few weeks of grinding these stakes and talking with other respected players, I’ve come to believe that there’s more money to be made grinding PLO than NLHE. The reason for this is NLHE has become too damn efficient. Open up a six-handed NLHE table and you can be sure five of the players are regular grinders. There’s just not as much money up for grabs at the NLHE tables as their used to be, especially at stakes of $1/$2 and higher. I’m not saying you can’t make money grinding NLHE, I’m just saying I think you can make more grinding PLO.

By my observation, the average player at a six-handed $1/$2 PLO table is pretty bad. In several dozen sessions of two-tabling these stakes, there have only been two instances that I left a table on account of deciding it was too tough. For the most part, there’s always some good spots at the table.

I’ve been winning 1/3rd of the pots at a table with six players. That tells me one thing: people are playing too tight. Omaha starting hands are not nearly as important as Texas hold’em starting hands. In Texas hold’em, the difference between the value of a great starting hand and a mediocre starting hand is huge. In Omaha, it’s not a big difference. For that reason, I open a lot of pots with raises. This has a two-fold benefit of a.) helping me win a lot of small pots and b.) build a really aggressive image to get paid off better when I make a big hand.

Another thing that has made my sessions at these tables profitable is from benefiting from opponents who don’t understand how to value-bet. There have been countless instances where I will check to my opponent on the river thinking, “hmm, I’d probably call a half-pot sized bet with this hand,” only to see my opponent check-behind and turn over like the 5th nuts with a ten-high flush or something. Are they really that afraid of being river check-raised?!?

I save a lot of money thanks to opponents who let me off the hook holding strong two pairs or small flushes because they’re worried I’m going to call or raise with a better hand. In a full-ring Omaha table, this level of paranoia can be good, but in a six-handed game where relative hand strength goes up, they’re just pissing away value by not putting in bets on the river.

One final spot that I’d like to touch on is when a tight player re-raises for the size of the pot before the flop. In my experience, this is almost always some type of Ace-Ace-x-x hand. It seems that a lot of Omaha players have “hold’emitis” and get too attached to Ace-Ace-x-x hands. When I make a raise to $6 and my opponent re-pots it to $21, I will happily call with any hand I was willing to open to $6 in the first place hoping to hit the flop hard and get them to commit their chips drawing very thin with just an overpair of Aces. Even if I miss the flop, it’s usually pretty easy to buy the pot when a scary flop like Eight-Seven-Six two-suited comes.

If you’re finding the edges in NLHE harder and harder to come by, give PLO a try. When it comes to grinding cash games online, PLO is the new NLHE!

5 Card draw is probably the first form of poker you learned as it appears to be the simplest, yet there are still a lot of strategies involved.

Predraw Play

On a 6 handed table a standard opening range would usually be :

UTG : AA and any hands better

UTG+1 : Add KK to previous range

CO : Add QQ and JJ to previous range

BTN : Add TT and 99 to previous range

SB : Any pair 55 or above

BB : Defend with anything that is at least the bottom of what you think the opener range is

Note that this range is fairly tight, and the later your position is, the more creative you can get. There isnt many situation where opening with less than AA UTG would be +ev, but opening any pair in SB vs a tight passive BB is usually a good idea.

Also your kickers (the cards other than your pair) are important. A hand like 77AKQ is much more playable on the button than 88234, the fact that you have an ace, king and queen makes much less likely than one of the blinds holds QQ / KK / AA.

When someone already raised before the action gets to you you should almost never call, fold or 3bet. After all you, 5 card draw is a game where the best hand is a huge favorite (almost every common confrontation 75:25 or better for the best hand ) and you usually don’t have very good implied odds, so if you think your hand is good enough to call then its good enough to raise.

Draw are almost never playable solely for their value, you are a 4:1 dog to hit a flush or open ended straight draw and you hardly ever get odds got enough to justify playing them. However they can be very good semi bluffing hand. You will be drawing 1 card, just like you would with 2 pairs and most trips, so you may play your draw just like you would play those hands and bet them post draw even if you miss.

All the other hands should be folded.

In pot limit games, while the 3bet or fold is still true, the are a few spots where you can flat call a raise. This is because you have better implied odds if you hit and because your opponents may fold his worst hands and so you wont win more if you happen to have the best hand anyway (as opposed to limit where he is always going to call because he knows that even though he doesn’t have the best hand he has the pot odds to try and improve). So when you think its marginal then you can consider flat calling, the ratio 3bet:call should still be at at least 2:1 though.

The Draw

This is usually very straight forward yet I see many people going fancy here.

Always discard 3 to one pair, keeping a kicker is useless, it decreases your chances of making trips and does NOT increases your chances of making 2 pairs.

Do not stand pat on anything worse than a straight, this should go without saying but I see many people standing pat on 2 pairs, unless you have reason to believe that your opponent will call you lighter if you stand pat rather that if you draw 1, always draw 1 to 2 pairs.

Trips are more complex, keeping a kicker divides by 2 your chances of making quads but doesnt help you to make a full house. Nevertheless, I draw 1 card 90% of the time, this is mainly to balance my range with my semi bluff (flush draw for example) and so my opponents cant tell if I have trips or 2 pairs.

Postdraw Play

The post draw play is the more interesting and tricky.

A couple of facts:

Jacks up will beat 50% of the 2 pairs and trips

9TJQK will beat 50% of pat hands

Taking notes is crucial in that game especially for the post draw part as the decision of value betting 2 small pair (Say JJ up and lower) will be based on whether you think your opponent will call with one pair (hoping to catch a bluff) or not.

Lets take a couple of examples:

1. UTG opens and you 3bet in UTG+1 with QQ99x everybody else folds and he calls, draw goes 3:1.

If he checks that is not a very good spot to value bet as your hand already looks very strong and your opponent almost always has AA / KK here so if he improves at all he will beat your hand.

2. You open button with 3322x only bb calls and it goes 3:1.

That is a very good spot to value bet since you opponent will put you on a semi bluff fairly often and will be tempted to call with hands like TTxxx hoping to catch a busted draw

3. CO opens you 3bet KK55x in the bb and vilain just calls, draw goes 1:1.

This one is a lot more tricky, if you think that the CO is aggressive and will cap any trips then you need to value bet. Of course you will sometimes run into aces up and end up value betting his hand but most of the time you will be ahead. Although at small stakes, the typical player is very passive and may not even cap hands like 888xx here, if you know you are up against that kind of player then a check may be better as he will have a lot of hands that beats you even if he didn’t cap.

In pot limit games, you should generally value bet less as the bet will be a bigger fraction of the pot and so your opponent will fold more, in the other hand you should bluff more for the same reasons. For example in the above examples, only #2 may deserve a value bet depending on your table image (if you have been caught semi bluffing with draw before, if villain has called in that spot before etc …)