poker reviews

Raising middle pairs over limpers in the early stages (regardless of buy-in) is somewhat risky.Set mining can be a profitable play for you when you can keep your entry costs low. Most of these calls in early stages are correct for implied odds strategy. A five times raise is not a big hit to their stack and you mostly just don’t narrow the field enough. You end up most times trying to decide whether to continuation bet into an overly large pot with over cards on the board and it all gets a bit too much like hard decisions for me.Sure you can open raise, but if there are multiple limpers I would just avoid attacking them when everyone is comfortable stacks and mzones.

You also can’t forget about the 2:1 odds. If the pot is 1.5BBs pre flop, there is 1 limper, that makes it 2.5BBs. You raise to 3BB, making the pot 5.5BBs and the limper (assuming everyone else folds) has to call 2BBs to see a flop with 5.five big blinds in it. So he is getting nearly 3:1 on his call.

If you think about it, you’re probably never too far behind pre-flop if you decide to play. But there is a problem. Or rather a couple of problems.

The main problem is betting ability of a weak hand. You could end up with three gapped connectors versus big slick. The flop comes down 5 J Q. You are in front by quite a long way, but can you put much money into this pot? Can you even call a standard Cbet with bottom pair out of position? But what if you just bet into the pot? Then what are you going to do when he smooth calls? Now do you bet once more here? How deep a hole are you going to dig for yourself with your bottom pair hoping that it is good?

But what if you have something like pocket threes pre-flop? With a board full of over cards,it’s still tough to bet even though statistically your opponent will have missed as well?

So yes, you had correct odds pre flop, if you could get to showdown for something approximating that pre flop investment. However, in big stack scenarios you really shouldn’t. You still have 3 betting rounds before you get to fifth street.

However there is another problem as a result. You are out of position and that’s not good poker tournament strategy. What this also means is that when you do actually hit the flop, the pots will be smaller. It also means when you don’t make a big hand, you will lose more than your fair share because the player in position will bet you off marginal hands with a worse hand himself.

So really, for these deep stack situations, pot odds are completely irrelevant IMHO. I am only ever looking at implied odds.. i.e. what is the size of my stack and my opponents stack. If we are talking about five percent or less of my stack, I am calling with a LOT of cards. If they have AA, and I have 53s, all the better. I want them to have AA when I am playing 53s for a raise. But if the raise is getting up to around 10% of my stack, then I fold all the weired stuff, except PPs. Still, I am only concerend about the size of the bet compared to my effective tournament stack.

My cards may be 56s and be up against big slick. I have to be rather much httin a huge draw or two pair though, otherwise you will be faced with giving up the hand after the flop out of position. Once in a while you might just want to check here if you hit a low pair, especially if you can put your opponent on a hand.

Even in Every Hand Revealed, Gus Hansen regrets a lot of his calls from players who raise early position. Partly because, such calls often become more difficult place post flop. Gus can look at his opponent for tells, and after all his is The Great Dane. We don’t have physical tells and we are not Gus. Importantly also, our opponents are not Gus’ opponents. Whether you are up against people who are capable of folding strong hands or whether they just can’t surrender TPGK is an important distinction.

To sum it up, pre-flop pot odds are less important than post flop implied odds. Hey, you may play the hand anyway, but look at it from an implied stand point, not just pot odds. You have to know how to calculate poker odds when getting into hands like this becuase it may very well determine your long term success in tournaments. Just knowing Poker rules are not enough to win, you need strategy too.

Tags: online poker, playing out of positiion, poker tournament strategy

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 at 1:11 am and is filed under Casino Gambling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.