If I were teaching a new player to play no-limit hold’em, and my goal were to get this player up to a professional level of play, how would I do it? What would my lessons look like?
Let’s say I had only three months to do it. With most people, I will admit, it would be a tall order. The learning curve is steep these days, and I don’t think everyone could make it from zero to pro in that short a time.
I’d have to make compromises. I couldn’t try to cover every possible situation. I’d have to find the important bits and skip the rest.
I’d also have to tailor the lessons a bit to a specific type of game. The most important skills in some game types are not as important in others. With this in mind, here are what I think my top five lessons would be for a new player trying to beat the $2-$5 no-limit hold’em games in Las Vegas.
Short-handed: Pre-flop Basics Introduction In this article. Strengths and weaknesses of an open raising chart; When you should deviate from the indicated ranges; When you should be 3-betting yourself and how to play against 3-betting opponents.
Lesson No. 1. Don’t limp into pots ever. And don’t call preflop three-bets unless you are trapping with an ultra-premium hand.
Limping into pots, calling the preflop raise, and then check/folding the flop when you miss is an enormous leak. It’s also one that nearly every player who hasn’t been specifically coached out of it exhibits.
In my opinion, most players would see an immediate improvement in their winrates if they simply refused to limp in with any hand, especially if they chose to instead fold most of these hands.
For most players, refusing ever to limp means playing much tighter, particularly from out of position. Until you’re already an established pro player, tighter is better.
Lesson No. 2. Don’t pay off big turn and river bets.
This lesson might be different in some types of games, but in the Las Vegas $2-$5 games, it’s easily a candidate for the single most important piece of advice. Do not pay anyone off. When someone makes a big turn or river bet or raise, your one pair hand (or whatever other hand you’re thinking about calling with) is a bluff-catcher. That means, in the great majority of cases, your opponent won’t be trying to make a value bet with a worse hand. Either you’re beat or your opponent is bluffing. And players in these $2-$5 games do not bluff often enough to make calling worthwhile.
So you don’t pay off. I know it can be frustrating to feel like you’re getting muscled out of a huge pot, but the fact is, most players in these games do very little muscling. They try to make hands, and then they bet the hands they make. A big bet usually means a big hand. You don’t need to call to find out for certain.
Lesson No. 3. Your opponents will limp into pots, call raises, and check/fold flops. Take advantage of this weakness by raising lots of hands with position, betting the flop, and often also betting the turn.
It’s a simple play, but it’s one that generates a very consistent profit in these games. Players play too loosely preflop, are too willing to call preflop raises after limping in, and are too willing to check/fold the flop or turn if they miss. With many players, you can ignore your cards and raise the limps, bet nearly all flops, and bet most turn cards as well.
Say two typical players limp in a $2-$5 game. You raise to $25 on the button. Both limpers call.
The flop comes 10 8 2. They check, and you bet $50. One player calls.
The turn is the 5. Your opponent checks, you bet $120, and he folds.
In this scenario, and in many like it, it doesn’t matter what you have. Your opponents are beating themselves by playing call/call/fold so often. All you have to do is put the bets out there and let your opponents run repeatedly into the brick wall.
Yes, there is some nuance to this, and some boards are better bets than others. But against many opponents at the $2-$5 level, most flops, turns, and even rivers are good bets. Keep betting until your opponents prove to you that they won’t beat themselves by folding too much.
Lesson No. 4. With value hands, don’t try to blow opponents out of pots. Instead, play most value hands with the goal of keeping a player in through the river.
Value hands — hands like top pair, two pair, or any other hand you think is a favorite to be best — lose their value when all your opponents fold. If you win without a showdown, you might as well have been holding 7-2. (See Lesson No. 3.) With your value hands, you generally want opponents to get to the river.
Most players like to see showdowns if they feel like they can see them without losing too much money. No one likes to fold and think, “What if I was good?” If your opponents get to the river, often it’s an easy sell to get them to call a final value bet (as long as you don’t make it too big).
Calling these value bets is one of the biggest mistakes that $2-$5 players make. (See Lesson No. 2.) Allow your opponents to make this mistake.
Most players try to end hands early when they feel like they have the best hand. “Don’t want to get drawn out on,” they think. But this is backward thinking. End hands early with strong bets when you have nothing but a weak draw. Allow hands to reach showdown when you actually have something to show down! (Makes sense when I put it that way, doesn’t it?)
If I have top pair, I’d much rather get called for $30, $50, and $80 on flop, turn, and river than get called for $30 and then blow my opponent out of the hand with a $100 bet on the turn. The chance to win $160 with the hand instead of $30 outweighs the risk that I’ll get outdrawn.
Lesson No. 5. Think every hand about what strategies your opponents are using and how they’re thinking, and (almost) ignore the two cards in your hand.
I’ll put it bluntly. Most $2-$5 players beat themselves. They tend to play strategies that are extremely transparent, overly simplistic, and inflexible. You can beat some of these players simply by betting every time it’s your action (See Lesson No. 3.) You can beat other of these players simply by waiting for hands that beat top pair/no kicker and then making value bets. (See Lesson No. 4.)
Your job as a poker player is to identify the strategy each opponent is using and deploy a counter strategy. In many cases, the two cards in your hand become irrelevant. My experience is that the players that are always thinking about their hands never figure it out. It’s the players who are thinking on the next level that do. ♠
Ed’s newest book, Playing The Player: Moving Beyond ABC Poker To Dominate Your Opponents, is on sale at notedpokerauthority.com. Find Ed on Facebook at facebook.com/edmillerauthor and on Twitter @EdMillerPoker.
Earlier this year while covering the final day of a tournament, I noticed something I had rarely seen occur at the tables. The field was down to the final 12 players, so those remaining were split into two six-handed tables. Then for more than a full orbit, I witnessed one player absolutely steamroll his opponents.
Short Handed No Limit Poker Strategy Cash Game
I understand that what I just said is a very subjective observation, but the dominance can only be described as such. As a tournament reporter, I sometimes will have to wait for some time for a hand to occur that is truly significant to the story of the tournament. Such hands are usually large pots or preflop all-ins — that is, the importance of the hand is obvious to all, representing a player at risk for his or her tournament life.
In this scenario, however, it was the amount of smaller pots scooped by one player that told a story. And he wasn’t just dragging a lot of pots — but every pot. As in seven in a row!
The pots he won were of various sizes — some just blinds and antes, others including further bets from opponents who folded to him. It’s highly possible this player received several solid starting hands in a row. Whatever the case may be, the sequence resulted in the player taking control of the table and truly dominating the short-handed game. It also demonstrated at least three reasons why ramping up the aggression when a final table becomes short-handed is often a recommended strategy.
First and foremost, it was clear the player was taking advantage of the short stacks tightening up. There were two or three players at the table who had less than 20 big blinds, one of whom was sitting on a 10-BB stack. The aggressive opener took advantage when the short stacks were in the blinds, forcing them to make a decision for all of their chips.
As each short stack was quite wary of the imminent pay jumps — a phenomenon we were discussing last week in “The Ten-to-One Rule in Tournament Poker” — they instinctively tightened up and allowed themselves to be bullied.
On the final hand of the series, the aggressive player opened with a raise from his button and the shortest stack at the table finally fought back, pushing all in from the big blind. Over the course of the previous half-dozen hands, the aggressive player had accumulated enough extra chips to allow him to make a loose call of the reraise — not a huge risk for a chance to bust an opponent.
Fortune favored the bold here, as the aggressive player flopped top two pair with to reduce the field by one.
As I mentioned before, it is very possible that the aggressive player picked up several solid starting hands during the sequence and that’s why he picked up all of these pots. However, the raise and call with in the final hand makes me think otherwise. It is very likely that he adopted the short-handed strategy of opening up his range of playable starting hands.
Since there are fewer players at the table, blinds come around faster and the action tends to speed up. This leads to players participating in a lot more pots than they would at a standard nine-handed table. With this in mind, players should open up their range of playable hands in order to keep up with the changing dynamic of the game. Doing so allows a player not to be blinded out and run over while patiently waiting for premium starting hands.
1 2 No Limit Poker Strategy
Finally, I witnessed that every action this player made could be labeled as aggressive. Each time that he came into a pot he was making an aggressive action, whether it was a raise or a reraise.
Aggressive actions are important in poker because they essentially give you an extra chance to win the pot. As always, you can attempt to win at a showdown, but by being the player to push the action, you are also afforded a win should your opponent decide to fold his or her cards.
Becoming aggressive during short-handed play thus gave this player three clear advantages during the most important part of the tournament, allowing him:
- to benefit from short stacks tightening up;
- to avoid risking blinding out or being run over himself;
- and to give himself multiple ways to win pots (at showdown or by forcing folds).
It will be interesting in a couple of weeks to watch what happens during the 2014 World Series of Poker November Nine after the first few players are eliminated from the final table and play becomes short-handed — in particular whether some players shift gears to become more aggressive and try to take advantage of others who do not.
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