In the previous post, we talked about not showing your cards when you don’t have to. Your conclusion was that you should only show your cards if you will gain some advantage on the other players. So when does that happen.

1. Showing a Bluff: You should not show all your bluffs because you want players to be unsure about your hand selection. But sometimes it pays to show the bluff; remember you are not turning over the bluff to show up the guy you bluffed, save that for TV. You show a bluff, so your opponents see that you are capable of bluffing, this is often a good idea when they think you are very tight and not capable of the big bluff. Remember you want to keep them guessing and showing some variation in your play that will make them wonder about you.

2. Show the big losing hand. Either to let them see how badly you played the hand or how big the hand was that you lost with and therefore you might go on tilt and play badly. This last one helps if you really can look upset or angry or flustered after you show the big loser.

3. Show the Monster. The appearance of a big hand like full house or better can have a psychological effect on other players. I mean you won the hand because the other players folded and then you flash them the quads or the straight flush. Now they know how close they were to being trapped by you and they will remember how close you were to taking all their chips and they will remember what you almost did to them. The image will stick and you will get more respect based on a hand that is over and done with.

-this is Beginner’s Poker Blog Post #211

One “rule” you will often hear in poker is: Never show your cards when you don’t have to. Now generally that is a great rule and anytime you are not sure if you should show your cards–don’t! Yes, there are times when you can gain an advantage by showing your hole cards but first and foremost, if you don’t have to show don’t.

Here is an example to illustrate our point: You watch as a aggressive strong player plays a hand against a tight perhaps weak player. The action is (pre-flop) strong player bets, weak player calls; the on the flop, strong player bets, weak player calls; on the turn strong player bets, weak player calls; finally, on the river the strong player bets and the weak player raises. The strong player thinks and says: “Well I have top pair and top kicker, so you must have me beat, I fold.” The weak player shows his flopped set and rakes in the pot.

Imagine if you will the weak player not showing his hand. Now the strong player (and everyone else at the table) is wondering. Is that guy really weak? Did he have top pair beat? By showing his hand the weak player did nothing but let everyone know that he is indeed playing only premium hands; oh and… he will weakly call you down and give you a chance to beat him. He gave away valuable information on his own play and gained nothing. In fact, he made the strong player stronger by confirming that he had made a good read on the end.

The rule should read: Do not show your cards when you don’t have to, unless showing them will gain you an edge on your opponents. Next post will talk about some situations where you can gain from showing your hand. But first remember the “almost” poker rule: Don’t show when you don’t have to.

-this is Beginner’s Poker Blog Post #210

Yes pocket aces can and do lose. You will hear players in every card room in the world complaining: “My pocket aces got cracked!” But you know that players talk more about big losses than big wins, right? No one every says: “I won with my pocket aces.” Well, of course you did.

We talked about the percentages in our last post but what is probably more important is how you feel when your aces get beat. Nothing can set you on tilt like a run of big hands that all go down in blazing defeat. But you simply cannot play big pairs afraid of the chance you might lose with them. In fact, a timid approach to aces or kings will increase the odds of them losing. Particularly beginning players should raise with pocket aces; don’t get cute and try to slow play those big pairs. What you want is a limited field and you want to punish them with a bet on the flop.

Not only does betting and raising with aces mean you will drive out long-shot drawing hands but you will also be charging those players a premium to out-draw you if they choose to call. You will win more than you lose with pocket aces, so you should also win more by playing them strong.

Let us repeat: You will win more often with pocket aces than you lose with them. No really, it’s true!

-this is Beginner’s Poker Blog Post #209

You wait and wait to get those big aces dealt to you in hold’em. There is no better starting hand than pocket aces. So they should be easy to play, right? Well not always. You are ahead with those aces but by how much.

AA vs. KK 81% to 19% (win percentage)

AA vs. AK 92% to  7%

AA vs. 78s 77% to 23%

AA vs. 72o 88% to 12%

Yes, you are ahead but you will not always win with those aces. The best you can hope for is 9 out out 10 against AK. Play against middle suited connectors and you will lose almost 1/4 of the time. Even the lowly seven deuce offsuit will win 12% of the time when you are loaded up with pocket rockets.

So when you do get those aces (approximately 1 in every 212 hands) what to do?

First, you need to win some chips with those big pairs; don’t scare away the fish by over betting them. On the other hand, all big pairs play better heads up or against at most two opponents. So, you need to make them pay to outdraw your monster aces. Aces don’t come around any more or any less often than any other pair but when they do, it certainly is better to be raking a pot of any size than seeing a big pot pushed the the other guy and your aces going into the muck.

The key to playing pocket aces is how you bet. You want to maximize profit and to do that you often need to minimize opponents in the hand. Good luck and may the flop be with you.

-this is Beginner’s Poker Blog Post #208

#1 Poker Do: Play Fewer Hands

Probably the biggest mistake beginning poker players make is that they play too many hands. When you’re just starting out playing poker, you want to play, folding is no fun. This often means you will stay in hands when you cards just aren’t very good. You want action!

But playing more doesn’t mean winning more, just the opposite is usually the case. What you need to do to fill your time is to work on reading your opponents, that is what you do when you are not in a hand and that will make you a winning player a lot more quickly than playing that Q10 offsuit from under the gun.

Now if you really are an action junkie, what do you do? Well in a live game you can just try out the “maniac” style. Play nearly any hand, raise almost all the flops. You may find you are a naturally uber aggresive player, on the other hand you may just lose and lose. But fear not there is another solution.  Get yourself an online account and play four tables at a time but only at micro-limits. You will nearly always be in a hand with halfway decent cards and you can’t lose a lot of money. Eventually you will get over the need for action and decide to learn to play some good solid poker.

-this is Beginner’s Poker Blog Post #207

When you are playing in a cash game, you may bet the chips you have on the table at the beginning of each hand. In some card rooms, cash also plays, if you have it on the table at the beginning of a hand. But follow this scenario: a hand ends and while the dealer is shuffling a player tosses out and bill and says to the dealer: “Chips please.” Now sometimes the dealer will change the bill from the chips the dealer has in the table tray, but more often the dealer calls the chip runner, who takes the bill and goes to the cage for chips. But the game does not stop and wait on those chips. The dealer will say: “The player is playing behind.” and the dealer will call out the amount. “The player is playing behind 100.”

This means that the player may bet those chips even though they are not physically on the table at the start of the hand. It is assumed the other players were paying attention and heard or saw the chip transaction and know that the player has more chips to play that hand. Any disputes will be in favor of the “behind” players increased stack, as long as the other players were made aware of the behind status.

The assumption that players at the table are paying attention to such actions or other floor rulings is always to be assumed. If a player misses such a call and in this case assumes the “behind” player is short stacked, the floor will always support the announcement if it was clearly made to the table. The bottom line is pay attention or potentially lose more than you intended to a player who is “playing behind.”

-this is Beginner’s Poker Blog Post #206

This is not a trick question: How many community cards are there in Texas Hold’em or Omaha?

Yes, five is the right answer, but to be absolutely correct, the answer should be “usually” five. Because there are times when you can have more than five community cards. This situation is called Running It Twice. In a cash game, never a tournament, when two players get involved in a large pot and one of them is all in, the may agree to run it twice. This means that whatever community cards still remain to flopped, turned or rivered; they will be put out twice. So if the “run twice” is agree to after the flop, then a turn and river are put out and then another turn and another river. The players are in effect playing two hands. If one player wins both, they win all the pot. If the players each win a hand, the pot is split.

This really is just a form of insurance when players get involved in a big pot. Not all poker rooms allow players to run it twice and some only allow it in their high limit games, so check with the floor or the dealer, if you want to run it twice.

If you want to discuss this interesting poker idea, head over to the online poker forum

-this is Beginner’s Poker Blog Post #205

In the previous post we wrote about making a laydown, which basically refers to any folded hand that “may” have had a chance to win the hand. Sometimes we get bluffed out with the best hand and other times some other factor like chip stack or position contributes to our laydown. A read on a player might lead us to play a hand or lay it down. This is just one more of the factors in making good solid decisions at the poker table.

But we often hear about a professional poker player making a Big Laydown. Of course, there are the television ads where the pro easily tossess away pocket kings when an ace comes on the flop. “You gotta lay’em down when you are beat.” Or so we are told.

The key skill in making the Big Laydown is an overall complete poker game. It is one thing to lay down a big overpair on an “all small” flop but the reasons why you make the laydown is what is key for a beginning player. A good read or a tell on your opponent will often give you the information you need to get away from a second best hand. And that is the key to any good Big Laydown, you are willing to muck a good, even a very good hand because you know you are second best this time. Sometimes you will be wrong, sometimes you will get bluffed, but if you never make a Big Laydown, you will never win the big event. Sometimes knowing when you are the loser is more important then knowing you are the winner.

-this is Beginner’s Poker Blog Post #203

Sometimes you win even when you lose a hand.

We all know that when we miss the flop with our garbage hand played out of the big blind into an unraised pot that when another player bets, we can just fold and move on to the next hand. Sure sometimes you might want to try a bluff or a longshot draw but usually we just fold and move on. We lay down our hand.

But there is a lot more to making a laydown in many circumstances. Take for instance when the flop comes AJ2 and you were playing J2, again from the big blind in an unraised pot. You just got very lucky! Or did you? You check with your bottom two pair, hoping to trap another player holding an ace. Sure enough some one bets and you decide not to let them draw out on you so you reraise. Here is how it goes.

You: J2

Flop: AJ2

You check and into a 150 pot, your opponent bets 100. You raise to 400.

So far, so good. But now your opponent makes it 1,000! What?

Can he have: AA or AJ or JJ or A2 or 22? Or AK, AQ and be drawing to beat you or KK or QQ and again drawing to beat you. Is there a flush draw out there?

Here is the question, is the big reraise worth calling or should you just cut your losses with this garbage hand (J2) and get out of the way? Should you make the laydown? Certainly it depends on a lot of other factors we have not considered, like your read on this opponent. The point is that making a good laydown can save you a lot of chips. A laydown is not a surrender, it is surviving to play another hand.

-this is Beginner’s Poker Blog Post #204

Two facts are nearly always true at a final table. First the blinds are high and second someone is short stacked. This leads to one of the biggest mistakes that beginning players make at a final table. You simply cannot allow yourself to be blinded off. Your short stack can reach a low point where you will have no course of action other than moving all in and your opponents will have no fear of calling you.

Take this example: blinds are 1,000/2,000 with a 200 ante. If your stack is 10,000 and you move all in, your opponents will definitely think before making the call. If you stack is less than 4,000 they will not. The value in the prize pool to eliminate a player is too high not to call a very short stack. When you make your short stack move is up to you, but the point is that this decision should be based more on the stack and less on the cards. An all in move of 10,000 with 72o is a better move than going all in with AJ and only 3,200. The huge added value of your opponents folding has to be considered.

Getting super short stacked can happen because you lose a pot or because you let yourself get blinded down by being too conservative. At a final table the odds are immensely higher that moving in early with a reasonable stack will succeed over waiting for a monster hand and folding away the blinds while waiting. Short stack play at a final table often determines who wins and who loses but more often who places higher in the money list. Don’t get blinded off is nearly a cardinal rule of final table play. Pick your spot and make your move!

-this is Beginner’s Poker Blog Post #202