One of the great poker players over the past few years bases his entire game around molding himself around the flow of his opponents. That player is Phil Ivey who you may or may not have seen on TV. He is regarded even by many of his peers as being one of the top five players in the world at this moment in time and is great at all poker games.

He does not go into any poker game with a set plan of how he is going to play, what hands he plays from what position and so on. He lets the actions of his opponent’s dictate HOW he plays. He does not simply fold junk because some book says so. He will gladly call a raise with 7-3 if he has a great read on his opponent. Why is he doing this, well certain players play solid conventional “book” poker? They base their plays on position and will only raise with what are deemed conventional raising hands.

This means that he knows pretty well what poker hands they hold and that they are far more likely to have two unpaired high cards than a premium pair. He is not playing the 7-3 because it is strong, he is playing it because of the predictability of his opponent and his confidence in taking the pot away from them when they miss the flop which they will do on two out of three occasions with hands like A-K and A-Q. This is precisely what I mean about things going full circle. Here you could have two players playing the 7-3 and one of them is a beginner who does not know any better and the other is a true poker great.

When you start out in poker with no knowledge and you set out to learn poker like everyone does then you would see no wrong in playing a hand like 7-3. As you start to acquire knowledge then you realise what good starting hands are and you learn about position and you stop playing hands like these.

But then your knowledge goes even further and you suddenly get to a stage where you can in fact start playing them again once you have a certain level of expertise. The difference is that you are not playing the hand for the same reason. This is precisely what confuses novice players. They see all of this information and guidance about what constitutes good and bad starting hands and then see great players on TV playing junk and cannot understand why.

The truth is that there really is not any good or bad hand in poker only good and bad situations. Keep this in mind, A-A could be absolutely lethal to you if you do not have the skill to play it correctly. Yet people sit there and wait patiently for these poker hands and don’t have the skill to play them when they arrive. There are so many variables in poker that you really cannot narrow it down to how to play a certain hand in a certain position and it is this that frustrates a lot of students because they want solid answers to every question.

It is why I am attempting to show you how I THINK about poker because once you understand that then you will be able to assess what to do in every situation.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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