Poker Boot Camp 101 part four

I see the As-4s in this hand of limit Texas Hold’em the small blind and it is folded around to the button who open raises to $20. I think there are two possible lines here, both of which are playable. One is to re-raise to drive out the big blind and try to create extra dead money in the pot. Creating dead money in limit hold’em is crucial to making certain hands +EV. I think that the button is raising on a fairly wide range although I have no information on him, it is still standard practice to widen your raising range from this position.

But the play of three betting with a suited ace rag is still a marginal play and one of the potential problems with doing something like this is that you can go for several bets when you hit an ace and your opponent has you out kicked. So rather than skate around on wafer thin margins, I decide to batten down the hatches and fold the hand.

My initial observation of this poker table during the opening eight hands is that the players to my left are much tighter than the players on my right. Things literally could not be any better for me. Money in poker generally moves in a clockwise fashion so having aggressive players or good players on my left would not be ideal. Good aggressive poker players will exploit their positional superiority a lot more and this is something that you do not want.

In fact I would take this a step further by saying that if you find yourself in a seat where you feel that certain opponents have advantage over you based purely and simply on where they are sat then I strongly advise that you either leave the table or at the very least change seats. Picking and choosing seats is not always easy in an online game but please remember that you always have the option not to play. Sometimes the best decisions that you will ever make as a poker player will involve picking the correct games to play in.

I realise that many people who will be reading this series will be alarmed at my early estimations of how my opponents are playing based on so little information. But I like to get some sort of estimation on just how my opponents are playing as early as I possibly can. This is where I think an awful lot of users of pokeroffice software go wrong. They sit and wait until they have several hundred hands of data on someone before they act.

Do not get me wrong here. I am not saying that there is anything wrong in this. It is just that I personally feel that if you have seen a player play tightly for eight hands then it falls into one of three categories. They are either tight, seeing poor hands or they have hands that are too weak to call a raise in an aggressive game. As long as there is a possibility that they are tight then I will attempt to exploit that until I see proof to the contrary that dictates otherwise.

Next hand and It is folded to me on the button and I have the Kh-4c. Normally this is a hand that should be mucked and there is every reason to do that here also. This hand has such low EV that folding is the sensible play. But I just want to see what the players on my left will stand for. I have not seen them put up too much resistance as yet in defending their forced blinds so I am going to drastically loosen my range for a while so I open raise with the K-4.

The small blind folds so I have created a little bit of dead money straight away. The big blind calls but I have the initiative in the hand as the pre-flop raiser. The flop comes 10h-7c-5s missing me completely and the big blind checks to me. I bet and get check raised and now I am in a situation where I cannot continue. My four is essentially useless if they have paired and this means that I am essentially drawing to three outs.

So I fold the hand which is probably what I should have done pre-flop but nothing ventured nothing gained and if you don’t test the blinds then how can you be sure what they will stand for?

Carl “The Dean” Sampson
Author – “Winning Cash Game Poker”

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