Whenever I wanted to study a certain form of poker, I would only ever read material on that poker form. This is OK to a degree but there is an awful lot to be learned from reading about other poker forms. It took me an awful long time to realise that I needed to use different strategies depending on what game I was playing in because the opponents were different.

What I am about to divulge to you is the culmination of what I have learned about NL hold’em over the years.

NL hold’em is not a game for big confrontations and especially cash games where the blinds never increase. Yet this is precisely the opposite of what many players do. They end up calling someone in an all in pot with AQ against their KK and think that they played well just because they happened to spike an ace. There is a book out there at this moment in time called “Kill Phil”.

It is a book that is designed for levelling the playing field for novice tournament players when they come up against big players. The title of the book is based around the four famous poker “Phils”. Namely Hellmuth, Ivey, Gordon and Laak and is their catchy name for a top tournament player. In a word, the book tells you how to eliminate a good tournament player’s advantage over you.

The way that the book goes about doing this is to teach the novice what is basically a very aggressive “all in” type strategy at various stages of the poker tournament. What it does is to effectively take most if not all of the post flop skill out of the game. It is after the flop where the great players excel over the novices.

Good players know that they have a big advantage over novices so why would they want to be dragged down to their level by getting involved in coin flips? They will gladly fold hands like AK, QQ and even KK pre-flop if the action gets too heavy. I look for situations in poker and NOT hands. I don’t need a certain hand to win a pot and I don’t get excited when I get dealt any particular hand either.

When I play NL cash games, I am continually looking to be aggressive because that is really how you get the money. But I am never foolishly aggressive, there is always a method to my madness.

I am constantly betting and probing when I am in pots but I am never risking my entire stack. This is called leverage and is something that is very important in poker. Many players play poker by the book and with fear, it is this that I set out to exploit and my aggression exploits this and is the secret as to how I win.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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So you start with $500 then and you play six tables of NL25, the plan is to drop down to NL10 if your poker bankroll drops to $300. It initially drops to $380 after you start but a good run of hands and situations sees you rising to $550 after the first week. You are also getting a good rake deal as well.

You are playing tight-solid and are merely looking to take advantage of the weak players at these levels. In week number two then you are really starting to feel out this level and you win a further six buy-ins which takes your poker bankroll up to $700. This equates to 14 buy-ins at the next level up which is NL50 but you want to get some more experience at NL25 first.

Week three sees you go up and then down several times and basically break even on the week. You are still $200 up on the month which is eight buy-ins and that increases hugely in week four when you go on a heater and win a total of fifteen buy-ins which sees your stack increase by another $375 and you now have $1075 in your poker bankroll.

You get another $75 in rakeback so you now have $1150 in your bankroll. You are seriously tempted to withdraw the $650 in winnings but you fancy having a shot at NL50. Both are viable options and you do have 23 buy-ins at the higher NL50 level which is a good bankroll to have for that level as well.

But you cannot just jump into any level with your whole poker bankroll and stay there for the simple reason being that this new level could be too tough for you. Caution is definitely advised when you move up. So you try your hand at NL50 with ten buy-ins safe in the knowledge that if you lose the $500 then you still have $650 to play NL25 with again. This is still more than you started with but if it does go wrong then this could be an indication that NL50 is too tough.

Of course there is a third option and that is to keep on playing NL25. Your sample size is still very small so you have not proved that you can beat NL25 yet. You change your mind and decide to wisely continue with your education and play NL25 for another month.

After a break even two week stretch you then win a total of sixteen buy-ins over the second half of the month which is a nice $400. You also get another $75 in rakeback which now takes your poker bankroll to a nice healthy $1550. You seem to be beating NL25 and now decide to take a six buy-in shot at NL50 to see how that goes.

Moving up and down through the levels like this can be your best weapon when it comes to making money in any online poker game.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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Even non-league footballers can play the game for a living. This may not give them the lifestyle of a top player in the Premier League but a living is a living. So what I am trying to say here is that you certainly do not need to play poker at the highest level in order to make a living. This then means that you do not have to be a world class poker player to earn money at the game.

You may have seen my articles on my bankroll challenge where I proved that a player could make $1000/week starting from as little as $500 multi-tabling NL50 games. At the time of writing that equates to £600/week and seeing as there is no tax paid on poker winnings in the UK then it is tax free.

That is a yearly income of £30,000 which would equate to around £45,000 if you were making that kind of money in a regular job. That kind of income is about double what the national average weekly wage is in the UK and constitutes a good living when comparing it to the average population.

But yet it wouldn’t bring the life of the jet set and it wouldn’t make you rich but then again, the vast majority of poker players have more mundane goals than that. There is nothing wrong in aiming high but the vast majority of people never reach those highs. So in my opinion, your goals should be grounded in reality and if they are then your chances of playing poker for a living would be greatly enhanced.

If you restrict yourself to only playing poker against novice or intermediate players then you will find that there will be far more poker games that you can extract value from. For example at a level like NL50, many players will either be weak or be playing for rakeback and multi-tabling. This will then make them weak but in other areas. Any player who is playing numerous tables but also playing too tightly is going to be weak simply because they are rocky enough to be folding too much.

So the bottom line is that you don’t have to be a great poker player in order to do well from playing poker. As long as you don’t expect to make millions from the game and set yourself more mundane goals then your chances of success will be very high. Working on your game and becoming a very good player is not worth much if you only sit in games with very good players like yourself. What types of players do I like…..give me the fish in the lower stakes poker games any day of the week!

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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My first question to him was to ask how long he had been sat at this table and what information or conclusions he had of his opponent. Were they aggressive or passive and if so by how much? As it turned out, he hadn’t seen this player before and he had only been sitting at the table for about ten hands or so.

There are multiple dynamics at work with all situations that involve poker strategy and there are few clear cut situations in poker. In this instance then raising, calling and folding could all be optimal plays but you need to know what criteria are work in order to be able to ascertain which play is optimal. If you are playing against an opponent who raises a lot from position but who also backs down to a three bet unless they have a strong hand themselves then re-raising with the J-10s would be the optimal play here.

Any player who does not raise liberally from the button and suddenly folding may be optimal. But even then, this is incredibly vague as knowing what an optimal line of play is simply isn’t that straightforward. You not only need to have a very good feel of what hand range you are up against but also what your opponent is likely to do both pre-flop and post flop.

You also need to know how they are reacting to you as well if at all possible. It simply isn’t possible to know everything and Texas Hold’em poker is a game of incomplete information as are all poker variations so you are going to have to make educated guesses most of the time. Many people would argue against calling but what if you are in a deep stacked situation where if you three bet, your opponent four bets very liberally?

What if I also said that this opponent was an absolute maniac who would launch multiple street big bluffs often? Now you can call the $7 raise with $193 behind so if you hit this flop hard then you could stack your opponent here if they decide to fire multiple bluffs. Or you could maybe raise them on the flop or float them and look to make a move on the turn.

When you make any poker play then you are not doing so in isolation. This is why poker hands are not independent of each other and what has gone off before has a huge impact on what will happen in the present and also in the future. So you may be looking for answers to the J-10s situation but I cannot possibly give them because I never had the information myself to begin with.

What you are looking for in any poker hand is to use multiple changing dynamics and game history to then attempt to make an on the spot decision regarding optimal or satisfactory poker play. It is folly to think that you will find optimal plays all the time, this simply isn’t possible in a game like poker. The more that you discover in how to play poker then the more that you will discover this truth.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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PRIMARY POKER SKILLS

But yet one of the primary skills in any form of hold’em poker is in how you handle post flop play. In no-limit hold’em, most of the time you will not go beyond the flop so post flop skills are not required as often. But in games where big bets cannot win the pot immediately like with pot limit and especially limit play then you have to be able to play very well after the flop.

While you cannot lose your buy-in in one foul swoop in limit play, your level of skill will be under constant bombardment by having to see flop after flop after flop. This will be even more pronounced in six handed play. Let us look at an example to show what I mean here.

It has been folded around to the button who raises, the small blind folds and you are in the big blind with the hand Qh-5c. Now if this was a no-limit situation then you can clearly fold and wait for a better opportunity as Qh-5c isn’t exactly one of the better poker hands. In fact even if your opponent on the button is a very loose and aggressive player then folding would still be correct here. Even though you would be looking to open your range, it wouldn’t be opened wide enough to incorporate a hand like Q-5.

LIMIT PLAY IS DIFFERENT

But in limit play then you really must play this hand. Your pot odds and implied odds coupled with your opponents likely range gives you a straight forward call here. In fact to balance your play somewhat then you can even consider throwing in a small percentage of re-raises although that percentage cannot be very high with a hand like Q-5.

Your opponent could have something like K-9 but yet pot odds of 3.5/1 dictate that you simply cannot fold this hand. Then you can decide how to proceed on certain types of flop. For example if the flop came J-7-2 rainbow then you may get the opportunity to take the lead here on a ragged rainbow board that has likely missed your opponent.

You could try leading out or maybe check-raising for balance. You have reached this situation purely because you were playing a form of poker where you were receiving good pot odds to get involved before the flop.

Poor post flop play at limit hold’em is like a slow bleeding of money and this is why having a rakeback deal is critical these days to your hourly rate. The overall level of skill in limit play has led to variance becoming more and more of an issue.

This is precisely why I stopped playing the game and switched to no-limit play via a brief fling with SNG’s. But do not let anyone tell you that limit hold’em is a far less skilful game than no-limit because anyone who says that simply does not understand limit hold’em.

This article was written by Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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There is a lot of merit to this view as SNG’s and large MTT’s do have many similarities. They have a prize structure that favours the higher end of the ladder. The winner of an SNG traditionally gets 50% of the prize pool with the second and third place players getting the other 50% and the rest of the field gets nothing!

This top heavy prize pool is similar to tournament poker as well where the majority of the prize money goes to the top three seats. This leads to various players implementing various styles of play and the most common style is to start playing very tightly and try to allow the crazy players and the crazy action to fizzle out. This leaves you in a situation where you have outlasted a good percentage of the field and are now into the tournaments middle stages.

The idea is not to get involved unless you have a premium hand or a very strong hand. Then you slowly open up the aggression levels as the tournament gets deeper and the blinds get higher. Your blind to stack ratio will be such that your number of moves will be limited and you are now looking to make moves to accumulate chips.

However this style of play does have drawbacks, it will not allow you to get a big stack early in the competition. The early stages of the tournament are where the real dead money is and the novice tournament players who may be in their hundreds if the field is large enough will be passing their chips to someone and you will not be in enough pots to take advantage of that.

It is for this reason that many online tournament professionals play a far faster style of play. They don’t want to be on the curve or behind the curve but considerably ahead of it. They would rather be out of the competition than treading water until the inevitable knockout arrives.

In the tournaments that I played (which wasn’t all that many as I am essentially a cash game specialist) then I would say that my own style fell somewhere between the two styles. Whichever style you choose comes down to personal choice. For instance in his great book “Every Hand Revealed”, Gus Hansen even stated that there is little to choose between the two styles and much of it comes down to preference.

I have known some of the tightest poker players you could ever wish to meet, take down large MTT events. They didn’t open up until the final two tables but they survived by playing tightly and then a good run of cards came for them at just the right time. I have known numerous players who were very uncomfortable at the prospect of playing short handed but that still didn’t stop them from cashing very highly indeed.

In fact if you have won your way into a tournament by a satellite or by utilising your frequent player points then the return on investment could be very substantial indeed.

This article was written by Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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I hope you don’t mind if I ask something about betting.

Let’s say for an instance, in a no limit game, the blinds are 50/100. Then there is player 1 who is the first one to act after the big blinds and a raise to 300, players 2 and 3 fold to player 4 who eventually places a 500 chip.

Player 1, being dissatisfied discoursed that a re-raise less than double the original bet is not possible. Any idea?

Somehow, I thought that a re-raise was only bound to the minimum of the big blind, therefore if someone places a bet of 300, I could make it 350 or so. Do you think, the minimum raise should be twice larger than the bet placed earlier? And one more thing, is this the same thing at all betting rounds?

Thanks!
Jacob
Jacob,

Once a pot has been raised, the re-raise must be in the amount of the previous raise. In your example above, since your opponent raised by 200, the reraise must be at least 200. Player four’s bet off 500 was a call of 300 and a 200 raise.

This applies to all streets of betting.

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I have a question, it’s something about what happened to me in a no limit game online. I’m actually heads up and by the river, there is an A high straight up on the table. Well, there aren’t three card to a flush, therefore the nuts are still on. Then, my opponent called for a check so I go all in. Suddenly, he made a call and we divided the pot.

After that, I received a message from that player telling me that what I did just increased the rake so the casino ended up making more than we do. Well, I believe I did the right thing for it was a split pot and we are in a low limit type of game.

Any comment about what happened?

Thanks!
Norman
Norman,

Your opponent was saying that there wasn’t any reason to bet since there is an ace high straight on the board. He is correct. You basically increased the pot and gave the card room more money. When a nut hand is on the board, betting will usually only put money in the casino’s pocket. There isn’t any point to it.

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