Big poker strategy leaks: bluffing

Frequent bluffing can be one of the biggest leaks in your game. You may be one of the frequent bluffers and not even know it, and it may be eating away at your otherwise perfect game undetected. Experienced players will often have problems with their bluffs, and rookies are almost guaranteed to grossly overestimate the potential and thus the proper frequency of bluffing.
Just because Hollywood movies insist on depicting successful poker as an endless streak of bluffs, it doesn’t mean it’s like that. Please remember that the same movies will not shy away from having a player’s Quads bested by another player’s straight flush and that in turn topped by the main character’s Royal flush. Firing out blind bluffs mindlessly will work just about as often as the above depicted scenario comes about.

Anyway, by now you got the idea: abusing the bluff is not a good move, and hoping that your opponents are dumb enough to fold to your bluffs just because you’d like them to be that dumb is not going to work either.
Does that mean that successful poker players never bluff then? By no means. Good players bluff pretty much all the time, but they almost never run a completely blind bluff, unless the circumstances force them to (I’m thinking the late stages of a MTT here). Bluffing comes in various shapes and sizes, and in order to become a good bluffer you need to learn and to master all the different variants.
Take the quick bluff for instance. The quick bluff is the most frequently used bluff in poker. Even if you’re a beginner, chances are you’ve already used the quick bluff yourself. Quick bluffs are small-ball bluffs. The expected rate of success is excellent and the amount of chips risked through these bluffs is minimal.
The best way to understand the quick bluff is through an example. Let’s consider the following situation. You’re sitting on the button and three other players check a flop of 6,6,2 around to you. In this situation you need to take a whack at the pot, regardless of what you’re holding. You just have to. Because the amount of money involved in the pot is not yet significant at this stage and because taking a risk on a bluff catcher is not really worth it either, the possibility that the other players will give the pot up to you is good. That one there is a classic quick bluff. Even if someone busts your quick bluff, you won’t lose many chips on this one.
The semi bluff is another frequent type of bluff. As a matter of fact, it has become so popular lately that almost every players semi bluffs on just about any 4-card flush he picks up.

A semi-bluff is a lot less hazardous than a straight one. It offers the bluffer two ways to win. Suppose you have a 4-card flush on the flop and you fire out a semi bluff. Your first objective is always to make the other players fold and to force them to give the pot up without a fight. Of course, your intimidation techniques may not work, in which case you’re going to need a backup plan. In this case, the backup plan is to hit your flush on the turn or the river and thus to win the pot fair and square. As you can see, a semi-bluff is nowhere near the dark tunnel, rookie bluff that’s so good at sucking your bankroll dry.

Straight bluffs (or pure bluffs as they’re also known) are not blind bluffs either. Take the c-bet for instance. The c-bet is a popular way to assert ownership of a pot which people are reluctant to lay claim to, by taking advantage of the psychological capital built up via a preflop raise. The player who made a preflop raise sees an opportunity and fires out a second bet past the flop to let the other players know that he still likes his hand and that he’d like to play for more money. There’s absolutely nothing blind about this move though. In order for it to make sense, several circumstances have to click. The player’s poker skills are called upon to spot the right circumstances and to take advantage of them.
Floating is another type of pure bluff, which is probably the most efficient weapon against the c-bet (it is only fair that one pure bluff be kept in check by another). When a player floats, he calls the c-bettor’s second bet and goes to see the turn with him. If the c-bettor hesitates, the floater swings into action and fires out his bluff to make him fold.

Even though it is considered one of the purest forms of bluffs, not even floating means that you have to hold rags to pull it off. On the contrary, experts recommend that you should have at least a weak drawing hand to make the most of your floating, something like a gutshot straight draw for instance.
As you can see, none of the bluffs are stone cold ones. You will often see professional players pull off huge stone cold bluffs against one another, but that doesn’t mean such moves suit you too.
Just try to keep things simple and if you do decide to fire a bluff out every now and then, make sure the circumstances click, the odds are right and that your hand has at least a remote chance to improve radically.

Face the Ace vs Million Dollar challenge

For us in the online poker industry, it is always nice to watch Poker themed TV shows take to the air as they’re likely to promote our game and by doing so, they can and will attract new players to the live and online tables. This time though, given the fact that the two online poker giants, Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars have taken their rivalry one step further, onto the screen, things have taken an even more interesting turn. PokerStars’ Million Dollar Challenge squares off against Full Tilt Poker’s Face the Ace, to bring the battle for online poker supremacy in front of millions of TV viewers all over the nation. Is PokerStars once again a step ahead of the competition? Will Full Tilt have to settle for second place yet again? By the looks of things, the well established status quo in which PokerStars dominates is here to stay. The Million Dollar Challenge appears to be on the path to a knockout win on this battle of the TV shows.
Let’s take a closer look at why PokerStars’ TV show is currently mopping the floor with Full Tilt’s brainchild.

The TV ratings are pretty much the most accurate way to measure success in this vert. Well, The Million dollar challenge has pretty much broken all rating records for poker related shows, while Full Tilt’s Face The Ace has already been pulled from it’s prime time slot, due to the low figures it generated.
The differences between the two shows are obvious in their time slots too. Because The Million Dollar Challenge comes up right after NFL football on Fox, the adrenaline junkie sports public is highly likely to stick around for another shot of rush. The timing is great here. Face the Ace on the other hand ignores the fact that NBC had seen great ratings with its Heads-up Poker Championship on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. 1-0 for Pokerstars.
The production value of the two shows is where PokerStars lands another painful punch. Don’t get me wrong here, both shows are well-put together professional looking game shows, but The Million Dollar Challenge just looks bigger, more exciting and at the end of the day just plain better than Face the Ace. The size of the stage is impressive, the audience is numerous and the PokerStars pros are in plain sight: everything clicks for these guys.
Face the Ace on the other hand looks much smaller. For one thing, I’m pretty sure the audience is made up only of the contestants’ friends and family, and while they are indeed as enthusiastic as can be, the volume is just not there. The set of Face the Ace is also reminiscent of other poker shows of the past and that takes away from its authenticity. PokerStars 2, Full Tilt nil.

As far as the hosting goes, I’ll have to call it a draw. Chris Rose, the host of The Million Dollar Challenge and the duo of Steve Schirripa and Ali Nejad represent two radically different approaches. Rose is not set on becoming a character on the show himself, he’s content just relaying the action, and Nejad – who has a much better understanding of the game than his co-host – does a good job at that too. Schirripa on the other hand is good at bringing color into the show through his goofy (albeit sometimes borderline embarrassing) interaction with the protagonists.

The personalities enlisted by the two camps are equally impressive. You have Phil Ivey, Howard Lederer and Chris Ferguson in one corner, and any poker connoisseur could tell you that there’s a formidable lineup. Unfortunately for Full Tilt though, PokerStars has a huge ace in the hole in this respect too: Daniel Negreanu, who has to be by far the most charismatic poker personality alive today. The producers of PokerStars’ show are fully aware of the value the Canadian player represents when it comes to connecting with and appealing to the public and they use that advantage to the max by giving Negreanu as much screen time as possible. That, combined with Negreanu’s personality is the knock-out punch delivered to Face the Ace.
The formats featured by the two shows are different too. While in Face the Ace, players have to beat three professional players to win $40k, $200k and $1 million, in The Million Dollar Challenge, the first player contestants need to tackle is a celebrity and the contestants are aided by Daniel Negreanu.
In the Million Dollar challenge, the contestant who gets past the first hurdle wins a trip to the Bahamas which he will not lose if he fails to beat the second opponent.
The bottom line: the Million Dollar Challenge delivers better from just about every perspective. Sorry Full Tilt Poker, you guys lose again…

Clean up your poker cash-game act

Making money at the cash tables is by no means a simple challenge. There are countless aspects of your game that you can chisel, improve and take to a higher level, and there is no set cash game strategy that guarantees you results under all circumstances. Therefore, in addition to knowing your strategy, your goals and your capabilities properly, you need to be extremely flexible and able to adjust on the fly to radically different situations.
According to poker experts, each cash player has an A game, a B game and a C game. You’re A-game is the one that makes you the most money. Everyone who’s put in significant time at the green felt has experienced spells during which everything seems to click. Your semi bluff on the 4-card flush gets called and you proceed to fill your flush several times in a row. You pick up good starting hands, the table begins to fear you and you’re able to make money on your beer hands too. You’re in the zone, you’re playing your A-game.
Since this is by far the most enjoyable part of playing poker, most people focus solely on their A-play. They devise schemes to maximize their profits and the time that they spend “in the zone”.
Your C-play is the exact opposite of your A-play. Nothing clicks for you, your opponents roughshod all over you and you lose money. Because it is something most people would rather forget about, the C-play gets extremely little attention from most average cash players. You B-play is somewhere between you C-play and A-play. You spend most of your time playing your B-game and therefore it is extremely important. What I’ll discuss in this article though is the C-game which is by far the most neglected of all, for the above named reasons.
Paying attention to your C-game is extremely important and believe it or not, that’s where you can improve the most, since that’s where the most room for improvement is. Improving your C-game is all about damage control, so I’ll warn you: it’s not going to be pretty or enjoyable, but it’s going to make a huge difference.

Make a conscious effort to identify the worst of your C-game. Always focus on the worst part, then isolate it in your mind. Once you’ve done that, eliminate it from your play. Do whatever it takes to get rid of it: stop playing if that’s what it takes. Once you’ve successfully eliminated the worst of the worst, your whole profit equation will be rearranged. Suppose you generally win $10 on your A-game and then lose $10 on your C-game. By getting rid of the worst of the worst, maybe you’ll lose only $8 on your C-game and voila: you’re in the black.
Once you’ve gone through this process, repeat it. Soon, what used to be your B game is what you’ll consider your C-game and your profit margins will rise.
Again: the very first step is to identify the nasty leaks in your game. Here are a few pointers to help you achieve that.
Tilting is one of the biggest leaks in every player’s strategy setup, and no I’m not talking about wild, swearing, close to fist-fight tilts here. Some forms of tilting can creep up on you almost unnoticed, so you need to pay keen attention to identify your tilts. The best way to tell whether or not you’re on a tilt is to check how big a part emotion plays in your decisions.
The best way to eliminate the tilt from your game is to just stop playing and leave the table when you’ve positively identified one of these little buggers.
If there’s a sneakier leak in your game than the tilt, it has to be exhaustion. Exhaustion has a super-subtle way of creeping up on you and before you realize, your decisions are influenced by the long hours spent at the green felt. Once you realize that catching some Zs becomes a returning fantasy for you, exhaustion is probably all over you already. Fortunately, combating exhaustion is relatively simple. Get up, take a walk or simply turn your computer off and hit the sack.
Distraction is the lesser of the evils of the C-game. Most people don’t have particular difficulties staying focused, at least for a limited amount of time. Once you notice that you start losing interest in what happens at the table, it’s probably time for you to get moving. The object of poker is to make money and not to watch TV or to stare at a cocktail waitress, so if you’re in the mood to do that, do it but not while playing poker.

Be honest to yourself and know when you’re outgunned. Humans will naturally avoid confrontations in which they stand a poor chance for success. If your opponent is simply a better poker player than you, admit it to yourself and leave. Again: the object of poker is to make money and not to prove some sort of macho point or whatever.

Playing on scared money is extremely detrimental to your poker performance. Nearly every decision you make will be guided by emotion and by considerations that just make it impossible for you to hit your A-game. This is why you need a healthy bankroll and you need to be willing to lose money in order to make money.

Being a TAG fish: the worst sort of predicament

What’s worse than being a clueless rookie in poker? Being a TAG fish, obviously. If you’re a TAG fish, it means you’re stuck in a rut and despite having been around for a while and being a relatively experienced player who believes he does everything well, you just can’t seem to creep out of the red zone and fulfill your foremost poker goal: to make money.
After all, that’s what poker comes down to: making money. Even if you only play if for fun, you still need to make money in order to experience success since nobody likes to play a game in which he loses all the time. Making money at the poker table however is exactly what a TAG fish is utterly incapable of. This guy thinks he plays solid poker and the worst thing is, if you take a look at his stats they seem to prove him right. He reads poker articles and knows a lot about strategy, various subtle moves and deals like rakeback and cashback. He probably follows poker news closely too and gets continuous feedback on how well he really knows his poker.
With all that though, come the end of the month, he’s always in the red.
How do you recognize that you have become such a TAG fish yourself? Well, obviously, you’re a losing player despite having already spent hours upon hours studying the game. That’s the very first symptom, although that alone may not yet be indicative of your TAG Fish condition.

A TAG fish learns plenty of skills, but he only learns them half-way through. He knows what he’s supposed to do but he doesn’t know when and against whom a given move is called for. You might as well say that despite possessing the skills, he fails to apply them correctly.
Here are a few examples: a TAG fish knows that continuation betting and then mucking is not the way to success, so he’ll pursue every continuation bet way too far into the hand, and he’ll c-bet way too often.
He knows that he can bust other players’ continuation bets by floating, but he floats on nothing but rags time and time again and gets fried as a result. The TAG fish is aware that three betting is supposed to yield a profit, but he doesn’t pay attention to who he three bets against. All these may seem like minor mistakes, but all of them tend to compound and at the end of the day, they will produce a major leak in one’s game.

Another problem with TAG fish is that they just haven’t reached a high enough level of poker thought yet. They think about their hand and they do put their opponents on a range as well. After all, that’s what any decent poker player does. They fail to consider their own perceived range though, that is their own range viewed with their opponents’ eyes.
The interesting thing is that putting someone on a range and putting yourself on a perceived range go hand in hand, yet Tag Fish manage to ignore one half of the equation completely.

TAG fish will often consider the cut off to be just as good a position as the button is. Therefore, they fail to adjust their betting and calling range accordingly when they’re in one of the above mentioned positions. One of the most obvious examples would be a player calling an early position bet from the cut-off, being convinced that he’ll proceed to play that hand from position. That’s just not the case there. There’s still one player to act, and that player does indeed have the best possible position at the table, so chances are, our TAG fish will not play that hand from position after all. The guy who is in the button on the other hand, will be perfectly positioned to take advantage of just this type of mistakes. The good TAG player harasses the button successfully. The TAG fish gets abused by the button.

The TAG fish has way too much faith in the implied odds. When set-mining for instance, he takes a simplistic approach and builds his strategy on the assumption that every time he lands his set, he will take an opponent’s entire stack. That however, is just not the case. Set mining is much more complicated than that, so if you spend a truckload of chips chasing those sets for your pocket pairs, and then your opponent folds leaving your set high and dry, you’re probably a TAG fish.

Tilting is something a TAG fish excels at. Because he’s not your clueless rookie, he doesn’t tilt in the purest sense of the word. He just drops his guard and before he knows it, he’s playing his C-game. Because he fails to detect the problem, he spends a lot of time playing his worst game and fails to optimize his A-game.

If you exhibit several of these symptoms yourself, chances are you are indeed one of the TAG fish in urgent need of treatment. Try to tackle all these issues and see where it lands you.

Poker tournament structures: the new trend of deep stacks

A live or an online poker tourney is basically defined by its structure. The structure is what determines how long the tourney will last, how many tables will be used and whether the real action will take place early, in middle stages or at the end of it. Without a proper structure, no poker event can ever be successful.
Tournament directors are perpetually confronted with striking a balance between what the poker players want and how the tournament management sees things going down. In order for all parties to be satisfied, the director often needs to find a compromise between contradicting expectations.

Management requirements usually concern table numbers and tournament length. Players are constantly asking for bigger and bigger starting stacks. If you follow the live and online poker scene closely, you may have noticed that lately starting stack sizes have sky-rocketed in most major and minor live and online tournaments. The goal of the move was supposedly to deal the luck factor a blow and to once again allow skilled professionals to dominate events. A mild drop in live poker popularity had initially been attributed to the fact that tourney winners were much too random, and that the luck factor played a much too big role in determining the eventual winners. Since the poker public wanted to see well-known celebrities do battle at the green felt event after event and poker tour after poker tour, the decision to increase starting stack sizes was made.

This course of action didn’t quite take it into consideration though that the apparent drop in the number of participants on various poker tours may also be attributed to the proliferation of such events way beyond what anybody would’ve thought possible a mere few years ago. With that in mind, I wouldn’t be surprised if the overall player numbers were actually still on the rise despite all the negative news drummed up by the various poker tour officials.

Another question is, does the poker public really want to see only accomplished professionals at the final tables? I mean the big poker boom of 2003-2004 was due to the very fact that two no name online qualifiers were able to take down pokers most coveted prize.

Sure, players always want bigger starting stacks because it gives them the impression that they’re given more gunpowder to wage war with, but most poker tournaments cannot last for weeks and the bigger stacks need to be compensated somehow. Tourney directors most often achieve this compensation by doubling up the blinds (which in itself will negate most of the benefits of a larger starting stack) and by eliminating blinds levels which are often crucial in the big scheme of things. In response, players demand even larger starting stacks, and thus the perpetual tug of war goes on, neither party able to tip things his way.
The real question here is: does giving players bigger starting stacks make any sense at all, especially in light of the arguments brought up above? Do larger stacks really mean that the luck factor will be restrained?

Deep stacked tournaments may give players the ability to weather a bad beat or two in the early stages of the tourney (although with opponents equally well stacked, that too is somewhat doubtful), but in the later stages, the whole thing degenerates into a crapshoot.
The larger stacks offer players a safety cushion in the early stages but that doesn’t mean players won’t bleed chips away, and thus, by the middle stages of the tournament the majority of survivors will be short-stacked. This is where the crapshoot begins and it lasts pretty much to the end of the event.
Tournament experts say (and I happen to agree with that) that play belongs to the middle and late stages of a tourney. Large stacked events tend to yield extremely short final tables while regular ones produce well disputed, longer final tables. I rest my case on that.

Experienced tournament players generally agree that fish like more chips at the table. Fish are the ones who like the early action which most good tourney players consider meaningless. If we look at it from that angle, it’s obvious that deep stacked events are designed for fish. Is that necessarily a bad thing though? After all, the majority of poker players (online a well as offline) are fish, no reason to lie to ourselves about that.

At the end of the day, whether or not deep stacked is the way to go depends on several factors, among which the most important is: where in the tournament do you want the skill factor to dominate?
Keep in mind though that deep stacked events cost more for the organizers (the more intense early action does) and that fact is likely to translate in higher entry fees.

Poker rookie mistakes – Phil Ivey mucks winner

There’s no doubt about it whatsoever. Rookies make countless mistakes at the poker table. Starting from playing too many hands, and continuing with taking their losing hands way too far and firing out dark tunnel bluffs, they do it all. One of the most frustrating mistakes they make though is that they simply fail to read their hands. That’s right: they make a hand that’s pretty good, sometimes even the best hand at the table and then they fold it when pressured by someone with top pair, or even worse: they muck the winner. Of course, misreading the board or their hand and then shoving all-in on what they think is a straight/flush is also a relatively common mistake, one that’s probably even more frustrating than mucking the winner.
When it comes to mucking the winner, Phil Ivey is probably the person to go to for advice. Why is he the one? Take a look at this video and you’ll understand:

Believe it or not, Ivey himself has some experience in the matter, and top level one at that. During the 2009 WSOP Main Event, he misread a hand (in which he had actually hit a flush) and mucked the winner, offering his opponent the undeserved (and may I mention rather large) pot as a gift. As you can see, it happens to the best of them, so it will definitely happen with rookies.
Here’s my take on what might’ve happened with Ivey. Professional players do not re-check their starting hands, or at least they try not to. They take an initial look at it and that’s well enough for them. The reason why they try to avoid re-checking is that it will offer a huge read to their opponents. Consider the following example: you’re playing with a professional player and you check your starting hand. Because of the way your brain is built though, you’ll only memorize the face value of your cards and maybe whether you’re holding red/black ones. The suit itself is highly likely to elude your short term memory. Four spades land on the table and you’re thinking: the 8 I had in my pocket was a black card… Was it a spade or a club? At that point, you re-check your starting hand and see that you do indeed have a flush. Your skilled opponent however knows the exact reason why you’ve re-checked your starting hand, and he’ll draw his conclusions based on the move you make next, conclusions which have a very good chance of being the right ones at that point. The same goes for various other card combinations too. Most high level professional players are so good at getting into your head that a simple gesture like that will completely blow your cover.

This may be – in my opinion – the reason why Ivey didn’t re-check his starting hand and why he failed to read the flush he’d made. Pocket pairs are highly likely to be misread suit-wise. The player takes a look at them and sees that he has a pair of 8s. The very fact that he already has a made hand takes up his focus and he begins to root for landing a set. He’ll generally look at the board from the perspective is his pocket pair, thus missing other possibilities. Straights are not missed as easily as flushes are because the face value of the cards is involved there, rather than the suits.

Apparently, regardless of his high level of poker thought, Ivey got caught up in the pocket pair trap and completely failed to take the flush possibility into account. Not wanting his opponent to see his pocket hands, he mocked them convinced that the other guy made a pair of As over his pocket 8s.
How do you avoid misreading hands and especially misreading your hand like that? If you’re playing online, it’s relatively easy to avoid such mistakes. Use the 4-color deck to make it easier on your eyes and brain to pay attention to the board. Most online poker rooms warn you if you make a hand, so all you really need to do is to take a look at the ticker or the message across the screen to realize what you’re holding.

Obviously, it’s much more difficult to keep track of the situation at a live table. One thing that may be helpful there is to adopt the 10-second rule. Do not make a move for 10 seconds, rather just contemplate the board a little and think about the various combinations your pocket hand might’ve hit. Don’t rush the decision, even if you’re fairly certain it is indeed the correct one.

Of course, some people say Ivey didn’t misread in the above video. He may have thought the other guy had a higher spade, but that logic just doesn’t seem to hold water because Ivey wasn’t actually faced with a raise to make a fold. They both went to showdown unchallenged and Ivey didn’t show. I say it was a misread, and even though one may well strain a “brain-muscle” trying to think on Ivey’s level, he too is only human as this here mistake proves beyond doubt. Bottom line: I’m pretty sure Ivey thought his pocket 8s were facing down a pair of As or a bigger pair, that’s why he mucked it.

« Previous Page