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ONE WAY NOT TO FOLD
Warning :
This article could be dangerous for the average player. Typically, such a player not only plays too many poker hands, but goes too far with them. Where he probably needs the most help is in learning when to fold.
Yet this essay is more about how not to fold. I am going to discuss one way to take a hand of little obvious worth and win a pot on the worth of that hand. It’s a kind of play, well known to advanced players, which I hope will stimulate thought and further learning for ambitious intermediate players; for it illustrates some important considerations which come up all the time in poker:
1.A fundamental principle of poker is that hand values are always relative. You need only enough to win. A pair with a king kicker beats the same pair with a queen kicker as surely as a straight flush beats a ten-high no pair.
2.All players can benefit from honing the kind of flexibly quick thinking which, if you have developed it through practice and thinking about poker away from the game, can help you seize profitable opportunities that other players might miss.
3.Positional betting tactics are often a key to maximizing your expectation in a hand.
Studious readers will recognize that the play I will discuss is similar to one involving the play of top pair with a small kicker which is described in the chapter on the free card in Sklansky and Malmuth’s Holdem Poker for Advanced Players: 21st Century Edition. Pit may, in fact, be that the first edition of that book provided my first exposure to the logical basis for the play. This illustrates how most plays and concepts in poker can be extended illustrates how most plays and concepts in poker can be extended to new situations, and can be adjusted to create new plays. If you do enough thinking about poker, you can even use ideas you learn as springboards to uncover new concept of which you were previously unaware. As a thinking player, you should strive in this way to use newly acquired ideas and concepts as stimuli for further learning.
The Situation
Consider this scenario: You are in the bigs blind in a $20- $40 holdem game with a weak hand:
A loose player of average ability limps in under the gun. A weak-tight player, and a loose, passive type call in middle positions. Finally, the button, a loose, aggressive player calls, followed by an average player in the small blind. (As an aside, this is a good time to feel fortunate. In my games, a free play in the big blind is as a rare as good television ). There is $120 in the pot as you take the flop six-handed. Now the flop comes:
Despite your pair, given the looseness of your opponents, you can’t like this flop very much. If you bet and are not raised you will almost surely be called, probably in two or three places. It will be difficult to narrow down the callers’ hands, and the fourth poker street card may well negate your already modest winning possibilities. Against fewer opponents or a different lineup of players a bet could make more sense. Here, though perhaps close, it is likely to be unprofitable. Checking and folding most of the time in this spot is hard to criticize.
The Strategic Moment in Holdem
Beating the Berserko: Preflop Against a Maniac /
On Into the Storm: Playing the maniac After the Flop
One Reason to Reraise a Maniac / A Simple Read / Countering a Good Reader
Thinking About What They’re Thinking / Out On the Edge
Considerations in Two Blind Stealing Defense situations
Easing the Transition to the middle Limits: Part I
Easing the Transition to the middle Limits: Part II / Multiple Changing Images