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Holdem Strategies

Learn the winning Texas Holdem poker strategy articles and improve your poker skills with the advanced poker strategies. Daily Poker Strategies offers free online Texas Holdem poker articles to become a solid poker player. Read Texas Holdem poker strategy!

Open Limping

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To open limp means you are the first to voluntary enter a hand preflop and do so by simply calling the big blind instead of raising. Among good cash game players, this is a bit of a faux pas. The normal recommendation is to raise when you are the first to enter a pot. There are good reasons for this. You give yourself the chance to simply take the blind money. And, while NLHE is a big bet game, do not underestimate the value of winning lots of small pots.

Yet another benefit of opening for a raise is it increases your steal equity postflop. You gain what players call "the initiative" in the hand. This means players are responding to you. You're controlling the hand and dictating the action.

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Small Ball Poker

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Most good tournament players believe that the ideal strategy is only to play a big pot when having much the best of it. The strategy of keeping pots small until a player has the nuts, or close to it, is known as small ball. Small-ball tactics work best when blinds are small compared to stack size (if the cost of the blinds, or blinds plus antes, per round is less than 10% of the average player’s stack, it’s small-ball time). In the latter stages of a tournament when blinds and antes become a significant portion of players’ stacks, small ball becomes a less significant factor. While small ball is a general concept, it means different things to different types of players.

Old-school players employ small ball as a method of extracting chips through pot-size manipulation. They use opening bets and raises to narrow the possible range of hands their opponents could have. Then, based on those determinations, they proceed accordingly. Their goal is to build their stack gradually through repeated small bets at favorable odds. At the earliest limits, their main chance to get a big stack is through trapping an opponent in a big pot when they have the nuts. For the most part, however, they view the early limits of a tournament as something to get through with their bankrolls intact. Small ball is a means to increase their chances of survival.

Blind Stealing in Online Poker

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Stealing is a very basic way to improve our winrate, and utilize our positional advantage to the fullest. Stealing is very beneficial because we give ourselves the chance of picking up the blinds preflop, and also being in position in the event that we are called. If we can focus on picking good spots to put free money in our pockets, we can effectively freeroll bigger pots later down the line.

The big question to ask ourselves is “who are we stealing against?” Let’s take this spot where we have T6s on the button. It folds to us and it is our option. If we look to our left, we might consider stealing if the players are tight and fold a lot. So if we have a 13/10 (VPIP/PFR) and a 11/6 (VPIP/PFR) in the blinds, there is a good chance we can steal here. We also want to check some other things:

Short Handed Online Poker


See also In short handed no limit hold’em, the pots can get big in a hurry. All it takes is a pot size preflop raise and call, a two-thirds pot CB and a call on the flop and there’s a serious chunk of chips in play. If you’re involved in these situations, it will be either as the bettor or the caller, and as you know, “It’s better the bettor to be”. To make sure that you’re driving most of the hands you’re involved in, loosen up your raising requirements and, at the same time, tighten up your calling requirements. This will ensure that, on balance, if you’re in the pot, you got there first and you got there biggest.
Let me not mince words: It’s bad to be just calling. You surrender initiative. You’re back on your heels. That’s a bad place to be with inferior cards, though not so bad if your hand is strong. Therefore, let the quality of your cards make up the loss of command in the hand. In other words, it’s okay not to be driving if you’ve got hidden strength. It’s a disaster not to be driving and also not to have good cards.
This boils down, weirdly, to a “passive/aggressive” strategy for short handed no limit play. You’re passive about getting involved when someone else wants you to, but extremely aggressive about inviting them to tangle with you.

Post-Flop Play with Weak Players in NLHE

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There is not one type of fish. Each and every one of them has own strong and weak characteristics, and it's not possible to have one solid poker strategy that exploits them all. So we need to look at different types of fish to know to specifically beat their weaknesses. Here are the categories we'll examine:

  • Bet sizing
  • Willingness to fold
  • Aggression
  • Hand reading

Bet sizing.

Some players have no feeling for correct bet sizing. They make min-bets, min-raises, over-bet in the wrong situations, or call bets that are too large with draws. Some other players, especially those who mass-multi table, use scripts automatically enter a certain bet size (as a percentage of the pot) for them and do not bother to adjust for specific situations.

These mistakes can be exploited in two ways:

  1. Exploit their tendency to bet the wrong amount by being able to draw more, or get more value from made hands.
  2. Make unusual bet sizes yourself.

Betting Before the Flop in Hold'em Games

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There are three purposes to betting before the flop:

  1. Betting allows you to see the flop and possibly continue in the hand.
  2. Betting allows you to send a message to other players. The message you are able to send depends upon how receptive your audience is. For instance, it is always easier to bluff a good player than a poor player. A poor player will not be able to evaluate the possibilities inherent in the cards and will not appreciate your message.
  3. You can use the pre-flop bet to reduce the size of the field. Reducing the number of players you face is immensely important because your odds of winning a hand decrease significantly with each additional player who sees the flop. Getting just one more person to fold pre-flop will help you increase your average winnings significantly.

Postflop Play in the Early Stages of Sitngos

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When you get to a flop the pot will either be heads-up or multiway, and either you will have the initiative from being the preflop raiser, someone rise will, or no-one will if it is a limped pot. You will also be in position or out of position (or perhaps somewhere in the middle in a multiway pot), which will be key in determining the extent to which you can control the hand.

Generally on the flop you should bet around 2/3 to 3/4 of the pot as a continuation bet when you are heads-up and have the initiative whether you make a hand or not, unless your opponent is very loose, the board is very draw heavy or you have flopped a monster and think trapping is the best play. When someone else has the initiative in a heads-up pot, you should generally check to them and then play accordingly. In multiway pots with the initiative, you should continuation bet far less with no hand, although betting dry flops like Kclubs-7spades-2hearts against two tight players is usually profitable.

On the turn and river you will need to reassess according to the cards that have come and how they affect your hand, the number of players remaining, the amount of chips left and your position. Thinking about the size of pot you wish to play is always key and for this reason position is crucial and you should think early in a hand about whether you are prepared to commit all your chips with it.

Holdem Pre-Flop Play in the Blinds Against a Raise

If you are in the big blind in Texas Holdem, assuming your opponents are raising by reasonable amounts, you should be playing a lot of hands. First, you already have one bet in the pot, so you don't have to call the full raise. Second, unless there have been limpers or it has been reraised, your call will close the betting round. Third, you want it to be unprofitable for late-position players to steal your big blind with any two cards.

So forget about playing half the hands your opponent would raise with. You should play every hand that the raiser could have in that position and maybe a few more. Say you have 8-7s. In the worst case, you are way behind an early-position raiser. But your implied odds are great: there are about six big blinds already in the pot (with antes). The raiser will almost always, if you check, bet 50-100 percent of the pot, which would be another four to eight big blinds. If you check-raise the times after you catch flops like two pair, a straight, a flush, top pair and a flush draw, and straight and flush draws, you will win enough to pay the two big blinds you spend on the times when you check-fold. Many times, when you hit your hand, you can bust the raiser.

The Significant Aspects of Texas Hold'em Poker

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1. Changing your starting-hand selection.
The power and value of effective starting-hand selection is something that must be learned at the very beginning of every poker journey. Starting with card combinations that are appropriate to your table position (relative to the dealer button) and your risk profile is an absolutely essential requirement to winning in Hold'em.

Every time you start a hand of poker, you're confronted with the same decision: Given all the variables I can measure or estimate, do the cards I hold create a positive expectation? If the answer is yes, play on. If the answer is no, you must wait for the next hand. There are 169 possible unique combinations of two cards for a standard 52-card deck. Every time you are dealt pocket cards in Hold'em you will receive one of these 169 combinations. Depending on your playing style and table position, only about 25 to 35 percent of these combinations should be playable. That means you should sit out about 70 percent of the hands played.

Decision risk analysis for business, career, wealth, power, and relationship situations can be much more complex. There are always a startlingly large number of possibilities available and seemingly too little information and time to evaluate them all, or even a significant portion. Under these conditions, a sensible set of preconditions for selecting the types of deals and partners you will consider should serve as a buffer to personal involvement at levels of risk that are unnecessary or uncomfortable.

Adjusting to a Loose-Aggressive Poker Player. No-Limit Hold'em.

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It you're a tight player and you're facing an opponent who's playing a loose-aggressive style, you'll need to adjust your basic approach. At a tight table, you need good values to enter a pot after it's been opened in front of you. If you're sitting behind a loose player and you keep those same standards, he'll chase you out of too many hands. When you do get involved, he'll know you started with a premium hand, and let his hand go unless he hits a strong flop.

Playing your natural style will leave you playing too few hands and conceding too many pots to an opponent holding weaker cards. Here are some of the adjustments you'll need to adopt to accommodate the loose player at the table.

Adjustment № 1: Calling or raising with medium-strength hands. When you're in a heads-up hand with a loose-aggressive player, many of your hands increase in value. The hands which show the greatest increase in strength are the hands which we call the "trouble hands" those with two high cards. Against tight players, hands like AJ, AT, KQ, KJ, and QJ are trouble to play because they can be easily dominated. But against players who will cheerfully raise with queen-ten or jack-nine, these hands are now more likely to be dominating than to be dominated.

Other hands are affected to a lesser degree. Middle pairs do slightly better because a loose player's distribution contains fewer premium pairs on a percentage basis than a tight player's distribution. (Loose players get exactly as many high pairs as tight players, but their effect is diluted by the number of marginal hands that a loose player is playing.) Plus the middle pair is a little more likely to be higher than one of the loose player's cards. Small pairs play about the same. They mostly still need to hit a set to be playable post-flop. Suited connectors also don't change in value much.

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