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Poker Strategies

Learn the best poker strategy articles and improve your online poker skills with the winning poker strategies. Daily Poker Strategies gives you free online poker articles to become a solid poker player. Read poker strategy!

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.

LAG Play in PLO: Playing After the Flop

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Post-flop play is essentially identical regardless of preflop playing approach; the only real difference between post-flop play using a LAG-heavy pre-flop playing approach (opening fire on the blinds, attacking limpers in position, and 3-betting in position) vs. a small ball-heavy approach (flat-calling and limping more often in position and playing a pot-control game) is that you will be playing with the preflop initiative more often when you take a more LAG-heavy approach. This, in turn, means that you will probably be checking behind more often when taking a LAG-heavy approach than a small ball-heavy approach.

Here’s the basic situation: You open with a raise before the flop from the button, and only the big blind calls. The stack to pot ratio (SPR) > 8, so this is a deep-stack scenario where there are three legitimate bets left to play.

At this point, there are two basic possibilities on the flop: Your opponent will either (a) Check, or (b) Bet.

Playing the river in short-handed PLO

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Despite all these “representing more strength than you actually have” tactics, sometimes your flop or turn bets will get called, and you reach the river with a hand that is not as strong as you had portrayed it to be. Many weak players would bet big in this spot with their bad hands or missed draws to represent a monster, and to make the opponent lay down the better hand. With their mediocre made hands like two pair, they would tend to check to induce a bluff bet from an opponent who might have a busted draw.

With a busted draw or weak hand
Assuming I have been lead-betting all the way, and the possible draws don’t seem to have gotten there, I am not that fond of the “betting big” option that many players will use. “Why is that?” you may ask. Well, it’s because in this situation, these same players will often bet much less or try to sell their hand if they really have a big hand, while betting big if they are bluffing. For that reason, I like to turn this pattern around, especially against players who expect you to bluff big if you miss yet milk a little if you really have a hand. To them, a small, even-sized bet of about one-quarter or one-third of the pot will often look like a milking bet: many good players would fold their one-pair and even two-pair holdings in that spot, not wanting to reward your obvious value bet. So, against players like this, a relatively small bet may get almost as many folds as a big bet would - with this difference, that you now lose a lot less money if your bluff attempt fails. However, you don’t want to bet too small, as your opponent may be induced to start bluff-raising you, or just get curious to see what you have now that calling is so cheap.

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:

Check-Raising in Pot Limit Omaha

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As a general rule, giving free cards is a big no-no in PLO. As such, you should tend to bet your own hands and employ the check-raise sparingly, particularly in multi-way pots. However, in short-handed pots - and especially in heads-up pots - there are more good opportunities to check-raise as a bluff or semi-bluff, simply because it is far more likely that your opponents will bet light in a short-handed pot than a multi-way pot. That said, check-raises tend to fall into one of two basic categories:

  1. Standard (planned)
  2. Non-Standard (improvised)

Standard (Planned)

A standard (planned) check-raise is when you check with the intention of raising. Because we are not in the practice of giving free cards, this means that you must have some reason to expect someone else to bet: that reason is usually because there was a raise before the flop.

In fact, raised pots account for the vast majority of check-raising opportunities in PLO.

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.

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