Mad Man Poker

Today, I’d like to go over a very powerful move in NLHE: the check raise. Originally an alternative way to play your draws, the check raise has become widely popular as a tool to bluff. Some people do tend to check raise at the wrong time though, costing them a lot of money. I’d like to cover the basics of finding the right spot to check raise for you. If you want an example of a player who uses the power of the check raise a lot, please take a look to the left.

For starters, lets go over why you would want to check raise. Simply put, it’s an excellent move to take control of a pot when out of position. Secondly, if you check raised with a draw and made it, you’ve just gotten yourself way more value. Especially if you tend to check raise with air a lot, you may with enormous pots. Also, if your opponent likes to Cbet a lot, it’s a great opportunist to re-steal a pot from him. But let’s go over the principals.

First of all, you need to look around how many players are in the hand and what your position is. If you are first and your opponent to your direct left bets into 2 other people, don’t check raise with air after those other two fold or call. However, if it’s check around to the player last to act and he makes a weak Cbet, you’ll be able to pick up a pretty nice pot if you do a check raise. Multiway pots are more lucrative, but also more dangerous. Therefore, I like to check/raise in these spots with open-ended straight r flush draws primarily. It’s important that you wont vomit if you get three bet, so it’s nice to have something to go with your bet.

When you are heads up, more weapons get added to your arsenal and you will be able to check raise a lot with complete air. Don’t make the mistake to only check raise with air or draws though! Your opponent will likely pick up on that and you will be in a world of hurt. What are most important are your opponent Cbetting frequenties and the board texture. Take for example a 2 7 K board, as dray as a board can be. IF you know your opponent will Cbet 100% on that flop, check to him and make the check raise no matter what hand you have. Your opponent will have a hard time to continue without a king in his hand. I also like to do this move with AK, and show my hand when I don’t get any action, because I do not want my opponent to think I’ll bluff of every hand when they lead out on dry flops. If the board reads 9 10 J, don’t ever try to check raise, because if your opponent leads out in to you, he’s hit it, period.

A little about my week now. Multitabling 12 tables has proven to be doable, but no fun at all. You sort of play like a robot and you can’t play all the hands you’d like to play. After some sessions I’ve concluded that my main goal while playing online is to have fun and not to make money. I’ve gone back to playing 6 tables and have been doing pretty good. Even though I took some huge hits last week, I’m back to nearly $200 after lending some money to friendly players. My games of choice at the moment are $0.10/$0.20 limit holdem and $0.02/0.05 PLO8. I just love to play PLO8, but sadly there isn’t always that much action to be found in the games. In two weeks, I’m having a week off, in which I will try to do some big online tournaments. Wish me luck!

Any regular poker player knows the amount of variance involved in poker. The best way to deal with this is making sure you’ve got an edge in the games you are playing. There are a few ways to make sure you’ve got an edge, like playing against weaker opponents, but there is one aspect that many players forget: table selection

If you are a solid tight player, you may want to avoid the super tight tables with a very low average pot amount. On the other side, if you like to be the table captain, don’t go sit at a table that already has 2 players fighting for domination. You can take this further. If during a session you run into a complete fish, make sure you write down his r her screen name! That way, you can look those players up later to make sure you’re in a juicy game. So first of all, make sure you are playing at the right table.

Secondly, you’ve got to pick your seat at the table. There is one important line to go by: you will be making most money from the player at your direct right. If you found your fish and you are able to sit to his direct left, you’re golden. You will have position on him in all of one hand, that’s fantastic! If you can accomplish this, consider to be sitting at a good table. But what makes the difference between a good and a great table?

It’s the same concept, reversed. You want a super tight nit to your left, as you want to steal position in as many pots as possible. In the global picture, you want 2 players with a VPIP of less than 20 at your left, a fish to your immediate right and a loose player to his right. You may get unlucky a few times and have to rebuy some, but I guarantee you, you will be making lots of money!

So that wraps it up for my little strategy part, more on my poker week now. Last Thursday actually was a good example of this concept put into practice. We were playing a very loose 9 handed NLHE table. To my right I had a TAG who was playing even more tight than usual, to my left another TAG but to my second left a very loose LAG: Jeroen. With this in mind, I decided to play some tight, solid poker and I was doing it well. But after about an hour, I got bored. I agreed to go all in in the dark with Jonas Drieghe and when turning up the cards I was in front with my 10 4 to Jonas’ 5 2. Eventually Stijn ended up with the money, taking a piece of our action with his KJ. I had to rebuy.

After that, I kept being as dead as can be, so I decided to loosen up my range. I did a couple of fourbets from late position, but always found a caller in Jeroen from the big blind. By this time, the pots were so massive, Jeroen too advantage of his big stack by actually Cbetting half of my stack. If I had as much as A high on these dry boards I would have snap pushed all-in, but Q10 or similar just didn’t feel right as I know how much Jeroen likes to call with as little as bottom pair, just to be right every now and then. Normally, this is pretty lucrative for me, but not that night. I ended up losing more than a maximum buy-in.

That all turned around on Saturday though, with our third HSOP event: 2-7 lowball. 6 players registered for the event, but only 4 showed up, which meant we had 2 dead stacks at our table. The effect this brought was that the game became much more tactical, with lots of manoeuvring. I loved it. Even though this was the first time I ever played 2 to 7, I found it to be an entertaining game and after a few early hiccups (after me and my opponent stood pat, I threw open my cards, forgetting there was another betting round) I caught on and think I played a pretty good game.

This week, I’m going to play a bit less poker, but I will try out how it is to play 16 tables. 8 tables feels slow by now, so I wonder if I can step up. I just need to wait for the full tilt support to upgrade my account. If that can happen soonish, I hope to log 5K hands by next week! See you then!

I have been getting some questions lately about some of the terms that have become widely popular due to online poker. In this post, I will summarize some of the basics you need to know when reading blogs or playing yourself. I’ll start from the screenshot to the left.

The first number you see is the VP$IP or voluntarily put money in the pot. I won’t go over the mathematical basis of this, but what this basically does is tell you how tight/loose a player is. I’ll give you some guidelines: a good TAG (tight aggressive) player normally has a VPIP between 18 and 25. Less than this is considered to be too tight. If you are a LAG, this number can probably run up, but if you see players with VPIP’s of 30+, you just know they are playing too many hands.

Next up is PFR, or pre flop raise. This number tells you, out of the VPIP, how many times the player has raised pre flop. For example, if you are a 19/19 player, you only raise your hands preflop, and never called a raise. If you are a 19/0, you are a player that only limps preflop and never raises yourself. Obviously, these aren’t realistic numbers, but you get the point. The “Agg” stands for aggression. If this number is very low, you are facing a very passive player. If this number goes above 80, you are facing a player who will fire at anything. Though I wouldn’t cling that much at this number, rather use it as an indication.

The last three numbers are # hands played (if you have 1000 hands of someone, obviously your numbers will be more accurate) and fold to cbets (continuation bets) and making cbets yourself. As you can see, I fold half of the time to cbets and make them about 73% of the time. I’m pretty happy with that last number, as I think an ideal percentage is around 70%. Please note that all of these numbers are nothing but indicators, super tight players can get creative and throw a little suited connector in your face whenever they please. But I do think it’s a really helpful tool to identify your opponents when you are multitabling.

About multitabling, apparently you can run more than 8 tables at the same time on full tilt! Boo! For sure I will be sending them an email. Normally I do not like to play more than 4 tables at once (actually, most of the time I only play 2 tables and watch a movie on my other screen), but if I’m in the mood and want to earn some rake fast, I’ll add a few tables. I felt like I could add a few tables when I was 8-tabling, so if my account gets updated, we’ll see what we can do. I haven’t been able to log that many hands the past few days because I have been sick, but at the moment my bankroll is at $170, so if I run good maybe my ambitious goal of $200 by next Monday will be met!

To conclude, I’ll quickly explain EV and what it means to have +EV or –EV. Basically, EV is your expected value. For example: you are playing HU (heads up) and your opponent goes all in. If you are holding two aces, you have +EV because you expect to win a lot of the time and should you run it 5 million times, you will have profit. If you are holding 6-5 off, you will have –EV, because if you run it 5 million times, you will have lost a lot of money. That basically sums it up!

Next time, I will talk about table selection and seats at the table!