Free Poker Strategy

Poker Strategy: Continuation bets are bets which follow up a bet made during the previous betting round. These are most likely made after a preflop raise, and are not always a sign of strength.

To play poker online follow the link!

The value of making this continuation bet is partly that unless you are facing a strong pocket pair (which you would expect a reraise from preflop in most cases) your opponent will miss the flop more often than not. Your opponents reaction to your continuation bet will also tell you more about their poker hand than if you simply check and they bet. If you check the flop, you would expect a raise from your opponent on the basis of the weakness you have shown, regardless of what cards they are holding.

Despite checking being a potential sign of weakness, it can be turned into a show of strength if you come over the top of your poker opponents subsequent raise with a reraise of your own. You must be careful if you have missed the flop completely though, as you need to be sure in your judgement that your opponent is only betting pick up the pot uncontested. Continuation bets are often made if a player hits a part of their hand and feels they are in front, or if they pick up a strong draw. Different players will have different tendancies in this regard and so it can be a bonus to know the people you are playing against.

You may sometimes find players who will reraise your continuation bets, especially if you have a loose table image, which gives you a tricky decision to make. If you choose to reraise again to convince your opponent you have the best of it, you are getting a lot of chips into a pot in an uncertain position. As with most aspects of poker, reading a situation and extracting information via your betting will help you a lot.

Poker: I have spent a considerable amount of time playing Texas Holdem in an agressive way throughout the early phases of MTT’s. My reasoning behind this type of play is that you need to take command of a table and try to accumulate chips early to stand the best possible chance of winning.

To play online poker click the link!

It is of course possible that the poker cards will not fall your way and you will find yourself short stacked. In this instance I usually simplify my aggressive play rather than cease it altogether. If you still have enough chips to cause significant damage to an opponents stack, then playing your strong hands very fast preflop, prevents opponents from pressuring you out of pots on a missed flop.It is always easy to say that bluffing is the best way to lose a big pot, but such aggression always has to be calculated carefully. If you have a generally aggressive style of play, you find yourself quickly developing skill with judging post flop situations, and seeing more clearly when a flat call is a trap.

Having said all this, it is important to understand the value of tightening up in certain poker circumstances. When you have accumulated a strong stack, it is sometimes best to sit back for a while. As mentioned previously, when you find yourself getting short on chips, the best form of aggression is infrequent all in betting, preflop, with strong hands and with position in mind. Loose and aggressive play is liable to get you more action when you make a very strong hand too, so be sure not to slow play your big hands when you are playing a loose aggressive game.

You might think that the term ‘tight aggressive’ would seem a contradiction in poker strategy, but this is not necessarily so. When you talk about tight aggressive play, the tightness in play is encompassed by the narrow range of hands such a player chooses to play. When playing a tight game, you should be folding a very high percentage of hands you are dealt, waiting for premium cards before making a move.

To play poker online follow the link!

There is an old saying in poker strategy that ‘tight is right’ and for players who are relatively new to the game and unsure of their post flop judgements, it can help you succeed. One point you should remember if you are playing tight aggressive, is that you need to mix up your poker strategy sometimes and you will become predictable if you play the same way for hours on end. With this tight aggressive poker strategy, the aggressive factor of it is linked to the way in which you play those strong poker hands when you pick them up.

You want to be leading out with a raise preflop, and putting out tester bets when you can to put the pressure on your opponents. You will often find that the fact that you have been playing tight can work in your favour if you choose to bluff. Remember that your opponents will have noticed your tight poker strategy, and will be a little fearful of the potential strength of your hand. Tight aggressive is a good way to play in certain poker situations, and I sometimes like to play this way if I have a nice chip lead, rather than getting involved with more marginal hands.

Stone Cold Bluffing is never a poker situation that is ideal, especially if you are shortstacked, and you should not undertake such a move purely for the enjoyment of making a dangerous move work.

To play online poker follow the links!

If you find yourself raising in late position with a fairly weak hand like (A,2) and your opponent calls a preflop, you can raise on a flop such as (2,4,9). There is a reasonably strong chance your opponent has a hand such as (K,Q) or (A,J) and has missed altogether.

You would expect a poker preflop reraise from hands such as (A,K) and perhaps (A,Q) so I think we could usually count these out. Even if your opponent has a small pocket pair that has missed, they will very likely fold the flop. If they don’t, an (A) or (2) can still give you a probable winning hand. Knowing individual players can help here, as you must beware of players who have the skill to reraise with nothing in this position, and those that wouldn’t even attempt it.

For the above reasons, it is often more beneficial to make probing bets when you have some part of the board cards, but that is not to say there is no place in poker for stone cold bluffs. If you do feel in a position to make these type of bluffs, you have to be very accurate with your reading. Making a big bluff against a strong hand when you are drawing dead is certainly no profitable way to play. So you have to feel very assured your opponent cannot call before making these strong plays.

Sometimes you can make a smaller stone cold bluff on the flop after missing, remember it doesn’t have to be a huge bet. If you think about it, you wouldn’t make a huge bet on the flop if you had flopped a very strong hand for fear of forcing your opponent out, so there is no need to bet big when you are bluffing the flop either. Remember there is a story to tell when bluffing. Try to make controlled bluffs on the flop or turn, as information gathering excersises whilst there are still cards in the deck that will probably win you the hand.

No matter who you are, or how skilled at poker you might be, bad beats are unavoidable.

To play online poker click the link!

Luck spares no player the crushing feeling of having got all your chips in as a huge favourite and lost to a highly unfortunate turn or river card. When it does decide to happen though, you should not let it define how the evenings poker went for you. If you walk out thinking ‘that was an awful nights poker‘ simply because you got terribly unlucky to bust out, you are missing the bigger picture.

The fact of poker, is that luck is simply a variable we cannot control. If we sit down, make almost every decision the correct one, and do not let misfortune influence our mindset, we have won, in a sense. I say we have won in a sense, because we have done everything that it is within our control to do, in order to nurture success. I know it is never easy to concentrate on being pleased with the way you played if you just lost most or all of your stack, but you have to think of the positives firstly.

Once you feel calmer a bit later on, run back through the hands in your mind and look at what you might have done differently in key hands during the poker tournament. No matter how good you might be, there is bound to be at least one hand that might have been better played a different way. In terms of keeping your emotions in check, well some are more susceptible to tilt than others I think, and it’s always more helpful if you are a naturally relaxed and calm person I feel.

Taking a few moments away from the poker table can help with tilting I think, but only if you are thinking about something besides the bad beat you just suffered. If you do not really have a chance to take five minutes away from the table, then simply try to detach yourself from what has just happened by concentrating on where your situation is. By this I mean, relative stack sizes, impending big blinds and their potential damage, and your best course of action.

Protecting your money from tilt can be difficult at times in poker, as there is always an underlying feeling that if you keep on playing, you might be able to turn things around.

To play online poker click the link!

One of the key points to remember about poker, is that it is best played when you are relaxed and in a focussed frame of mind. You will maximise your profits playing this way in my opinion, provided you can recognise when frustration creeps in.

It can often be difficult to recognise when your optimum playing ability is being affected, because although your downward moving funds would seem to be a fairly reliable indicator, it is in our nature as human beings to have self belief and optimism. The problem is that when you couple that with a desire to carry on playing a poker game you enjoy, we sometimes subconciously overlook the obvious facts.  If frustration creeps in because we are losing, we will certainly start making increasing amounts of mistakes if we keep playing.

Often I find a good way of playing, is to sit down at a cash table with a set amount, and if I lose say 20% of it, stop playing immediately. Come back an hour later and try a different table. The theory here is that once you sit down at a table and start making a profit, you will be much more positive with your play, and generally more happy and relaxed whilst you play.

If you continue playing poker for a considerable amount of time while you are winning, and stop at a set point when you are not, you should be having a positive influence on the direction of your bankroll. If you happen to be in a tournament online and you start feeling a little tilted, it is usually best to go and occupy yourself with sometihng different for a while. If you can afford to miss a big and small blind without it having a huge effect on your chipstack, then I would do so in order to preserve a calm frame of mind.

Understanding basic odds is something which will really help your poker play develop. With a deck of playing cards, there will always be odds for each occurence when turning over cards, but you do not need to know the exact odds of every single occurence to be successful.

To play poker online click here!

For poker beginners, I would say that there are a few common scenarios which will arise, and you can memorise the odds for these situations to help get you started. One of the most regularly seen circumstances in poker, is a pocket pair against two overcards. Much can be decided on such hands. (A,K) against (Q,Q) for instance, is around 48% to 52%. That is why these instances are known as coin flips. If you understand the odds of a commonly found situation such as this, it will help you make preflop decisions. You know if there is heavy preflop reraising and you are holding a hand like (10,10), you are probably around 50% at best.

Other common circumstances include flopped Flush and Straight draws. If you are holding (10,J) for instance, and the flop falls (2,8,9), you need a (7) or (Q) to complete your Straight. Four Queens plus four Sevens unaccounted for, makes eight cards to potentially make your hand.  There are 47 unexposed cards out there, and 8 goes into 47 somewhere close to 6 times. This means your chances of making the Straight on the next card are around 1 in 6, or 17%.

As I mentioned earlier, you do not have to be exact to the decimal place, just within one or two percent. With the Flush draw, you have 13 cards to a suit in the deck, so that leaves 9 cards of that suit out there somewhere. You have a 9 in 47 chance on the flop, which equates to about 19% on the next card alone. Remeber you chances of making the hand improve if you are going to the river card too, but if your poker opponent reads the situation well, they won’t let you get that far.

This is a hand which took place in yesterdays live poker tournament, and involved myself in the small blind with (4h,2h). As the action had been folded around, I decided to make a bet to try and pick up the pot. My opponent called, and the flop fell (3x,8x,Jx). At this point, I felt that making a continuation bet would not give me enough information about my opponents hand. If they flat call, the turn falls, and I am left with the same problem of whether to follow through with the bluff or not.

Play online poker now – click here!

I know my table image is aggressive, and so if I bet out first, I know my opponent will think it very likely I am bluffing. You would think that with my lack of position and these obvious problems with trying to steal the pot, I might be best to give up, but we are missing one crucial point. Unless my opponent has caught the Jack, it would seem unlikely they have connected with the flop.

I do feel that if I check the flop in this position, my opponent is likely to make a bet whether they have connected or not, and reraising can then turn being out of position, into an advantageous position.

I did indeed check to my opponent, and they led out with a strong bet. This bet was slightly larger then I would expect from a player who has connected well, and it only served to reinforce my feeling that my opponent was just betting to try and take advantage of my perceived weakness.

My opponent certainly didn’t expect me to make a reraise, and through doing so, I had suddenly made my hand look very strong. I also tied my preflop raise into the story of me slow playing a big hand, in the process. My opponent did indeed fold as I expected, and I added 1,000 more chips to my stack.

To play poker click the link.

Having recently started posting on the PKR forum, I was pleased to find that there is a poker forum league running here, with a friendly contingent of players taking part.

PLAY NOW

102 players took part in the first game, with NL Holdem being the format, and with 3,000 starting stacks each. I had taken a few days off from poker previous to this game, and felt refreshed going into the game. This probably contributed to me playing some of my finest poker, and eventually finishing 2nd place. Several hands during the tournament stood out in particular, one of which involved myself calling a 6,000 bet on the river with ten high. This may seem absurd to many people, and it does a little to me looking back, but I simply trusted my read of the hand without wavering. The board showed (2,6,8,3,2) on the river, with my opponent playing in such a way as to convince me they had a strong draw on the flop. With the rainbow nature of the board cards, my belief was that they had an open ended Straight draw with (5,7) or (7,9) and that the bet on the river was a desperate bid to buy the pot. I was correct and won the pot, but had to make some difficult folds during the game too.

After I had made a preflop raise with (Q,Q) in one of the hands, I found myself heavily reraised, followed by another all in by the next player. I had to fold, and was delighted to see my opponents turn over (J,J) and (K,K). I avoided losing a lot of chips to the (K,K), but later got hurt by an (A,Q) whilst holding pocket Kings myself.

All in all it was a thoroughly enjoyable tournament, but I was more pleased about the fact that I had played to the best of my abilities, than the prize money. Typically, I found myself wondering what I could have done differently heads up to have won it, but I have to be pleased with what was a great result, and the best tournament I have played for a while.

For more poker click the link.

Online poker has become quite a phenomenon over recent years, with numerous rooms opening to aspiring poker players.

Play online poker now!

The reasons so many thousands of people play online poker, are partly based on it’s convenience. In previous years, players had to find a local live game in order to play, and this could be a daunting task, especially for an inexperienced player. These days, if you are unsure of how to play, there is a lengthy guide to poker games on most sites, and you can enjoy a game with players of a similar standard on small stakes tables, or in play money games. This takes away any feeling of insecurity and concern about making mistakes as you learn. The ease with which you can choose your options to raise, call, or fold, mean that you do not have to worry about accidently acting out of turn or making some other etiquette orientated faux pas.

Online poker rooms welcome players however inexperienced, to enjoy the excitement of the game from the comfort of their own home, offering bonuses for cash deposits as well as a vast array of games to cater for everyones individual needs.

To me, these aspects of online play have contributed hugely to the growth of the game in modern times, but I still stand by my belief that nothing can replace the thrill of the live game.

Facing your opponent in person is how the game began, and still holds the most excitement for me. The social aspect of the game is another reason why it is one of the finest games ever invented, and if the whole world played exclusively online, we would be in danger of losing much of that social enjoyment I feel.

For more online poker click the link.