Understanding Useful Information About Poker Strategies And Reads
Friday, January 15th, 2010What do you do when your opponent bets, and you think there is a reasonable chance it’s a bluff? Do you call just to find out he had the expected honest hand, or do you fold to have your opponent show you his bluff with a smile?
This is one the most difficult questions in Poker, particularly in no-limit Poker, where the price to “keep your opponent honest” may be high, and the right decision varies according to the size of the bet. Some players try to solve it by psychological means. Some of these means, such as looking for physical tells and chatting with your opponents, are limited to real live Poker, and we won’t discuss them. Some are common to live and online games, such as creating a table image and acting according (or in contrast to) your image, or taking notice of your opponents’ betting patterns (are they on tilt?). These are fair ways to gain an edge, but they are inconsistent at best. In fact, they are often misleading – since your impression of the opponent is usually based on too few hands. You can get a deeper statistics repository and analysis using some Poker software tools, but we will leave that to another newsletter. Today we will discuss the core of the game – When do you call, assuming you don’t know your opponents, or haven’t identified anything special about them?
I call with the right frequency but lose too much money on the river”. Does that describe your situation? Some students of ours discovered that they were calling with the recommended hands, and indeed occasionally exposing their opponents’ bluffs. Yet, at the end of the day, they were losing more money by calling, than the value of the pots they managed to salvage. The answer to this problem lies in the previous rounds of play. The recommended calling frequency assumes you reach the river with hands as good as your opponents’. In fact, if you apply a sound strategy in the previous rounds, you will win the river on more than your fair share of hands. However, if you play too loose, you won’t have enough value on the river to call your opponent’s bets. Don’t change your river strategy. Tighten your play in the previous rounds.
There is a good book called Caro’s Book of Tells by Mike Caro. If you would like to examine poker tells in more detail,I highly recommend this book.It features many photographs of people and what their demeanor and expressions may mean.
We hope you enjoyed this article.Use the links below where you can also discover more poker strategies and learn about poker tells and reads to gain an extra advantage in your poker game.
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