But remember that implied odds apply to limit Texas Holdem poker as well so even here, one has to be a bit careful when identifying a potential “fish”. For the novice, “implied odds” are the estimated number of bets/pot size that will be in the pot at the end of the hand.

Failure to extract the maximum amount of money from the hands that you win is a sure sign of weak play. We all sometimes miss bets and raises but the “fish” are guilty of glaring errors. You no doubt have heard of the term “value betting”. This basically means betting on the end with mediocre hands that you are still quite sure is the best hand and you are also sure that your opponent has a hand that is not only inferior to yours, but that they will also call with it. Weak players are terribly guilty of this and I must see this type of error literally dozens upon dozens of times a day.

There is a lot more that can be discussed here but this is a very involved topic and not something that could be covered in one single series. The definition of a “fish” is very vague as it implies a poker player that is weak. However this is a very grey area as any player who was experienced and technically proficient may be a “fish” in a game full of world class players. But yet a big winner in a small poker game could well be classed as the “shark” in the game.

So in a strange way, a shark can be a fish and a fish can be a shark. What it all depends on of course is where you stand in the particular food chain and how that correlates to the games that you are playing in. If in a certain line up of ten players, you were technically the tenth best player then you would be the fish. If in a different line up of players, you were the best player then you would be the shark.

Poker is a strange game in so many ways. Skill and good play isn’t always rewarded and this tends to tilt many players and this is quite possibly the toughest part of poker. But to know where you fit in with regards the poker food chain is not only a very important piece of information, it may also keep you safe form loss. It isn’t just about technical knowledge either. Knowing poker theory is good but it only counts for a small percentage of the overall game of a skilled player. I don’t believe that poker skill can be found through reading or watching coaching videos, it can only be arrived at by a process of doing it repeatedly.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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One must remember with these things that nothing is ever set in stone and most players can and will adapt and change. Once you sit down in any poker game, the playing patterns of your opponents will reveal many things to you. For instance, any player who is calling a high percentage of the time especially in a game like limit Texas Hold’em poker unlike Omaha is a definite fish. There is simply no way that any player can be a long term winner in any poker variation who has a high calling percentage unless it is someone like a very skilled no-limit player who is constantly limping in because they feel that they can dominate the opposition. Many of the hands that players call with are long term money losers. This is very difficult to spot from the play of a very small number of hands, especially when a player is getting lucky with junk.

It takes poker simulation software that can run the same hand in the same situation literally hundreds of thousands of times to see the patterns emerge. Another classic “tell” of a weak player is the failure to take aggressive action of any kind unless the “fish” has a very strong hand or the nuts. Many players who are either inexperienced or weak shy away from raising because it makes them feel uncomfortable. This lack of aggression costs them dear because not only are they losing bets in the pots that they win, they are also losing entire pots by allowing hands that would have folded to stay in and draw out on them.

A player who does not raise at the appropriate times in poker is akin to the blackjack player who fails to take advantage of positive situations by not doubling and splitting. When you have the best of it, you want more money on the table, it is as simple as that. Failure to do this is losing poker and once you have spotted players doing this, make sure you remember them for these people are a major part of your earn rate.

Another example of “fishy” play although a bit more subtle is when players draw to hands without receiving the necessary pot odds. This is especially the case in structured betting games like limit hold’em. Be careful though not to apply this concept to big bet poker because implied odds are far more important in those particular disciplines. In a game like limit hold’em for instance, if you observe a player who is calling bets and raises with totally inadequate hands, then this is a definite fish.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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You may or may not see the same faces whenever or wherever you play poker. Obviously on the internet, there are large volumes of players and many will be unknown to you. It is vitally important to be able to classify your opponents very quickly wherever you happen to play. Nearly all of what I will be talking about here will not apply to internet poker sites simply because you cannot see your opponents.

Whenever you sit down in any poker game be it private or casino, you will or at least should be watching your opponents. Weak inexperienced players tend to stand out. You do not need an advanced qualification in psychology to be able to spot a new player. Any player who looks in awe, wonder or perhaps excitement at a poker table as they approach it may be playing poker for the first time. They could be playing live poker for the first time in this era of internet poker or they could simply be playing in a casino for the first time. They might even be in awe of a certain location (i.e Vegas) and be feeling very nervous or excited.

However, this look can be misleading and is certainly not proof of low skill level. This is simply because many internet players have good technical skills at certain forms of poker that may be superior to many of their live opponents. Therefore you will have to accumulate more data either based on the quality of their play or other factors that will be discussed shortly.

Another sign of lack of experience in either live poker or poker in general is poor chip handling. Fumbling and dropping chips is a sure sign that a player is not used to handling them. Although once again you have to be careful with this because skilled internet players would not have this ability if they didn’t have much live game experience.

Anyone who is ignorant of the rules of the game is likely to be a “fish” although beware of the actor who is trying to throw a smoke screen by pretending that they don’t know. Anyone who is unaware of poker etiquette is likely to be playing poker for the first time or at least is inexperienced. Notice here that I said “unaware”, this is because there are many players out there who simply do not care about poker etiquette. If you do not know poker rules and procedures and do not know what I am talking about when I talk about etiquette, better look out for those gills because I am referring to you. Look out for part three coming soon.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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At the end of the day, people deserve to be told how it really is. There were times where I sometimes used to think was it all worth it and limit hold’em makes you have these thoughts more than any other form of poker in my opinion. Gambling for a living is not really what it is cracked up to be and after thousands upon thousands of hours in the trenches playing both blackjack and poker then I should know.

But even for most of the players who beat the game, poker is still a negative sum game emotionally. I guarantee you that if you won $1000 today and lost $900 tomorrow that you would be feeling more upset about the $900 loss when compared to how happy you felt about the $1000 win. This will be the case with many people even though the net result over the two days is that you are ahead by $100.

The number of players who are beating online poker is very small. But beating online poker is only part of the equation anyway. Even if you succeed which at least 90% of you don’t then surely even for it all to be worth it anyway then you need to be earning a certain amount to merit all the grief and stress that it causes. This is why I only play at the $25-$50 level whenever I play no limit because playing any lower just does not motivate me.

Let us take a really successful limit hold’em player who is playing multiple tables with good rakeback and earning $1000 a week. I have seen figures as low as 5% for how many people are +EV in online poker so for anyone to be earning $1000 a week represents a serious achievement that perhaps no more than one player in every hundred could emulate and that figure is probably way too high. Personally I would not expect one player in a thousand to earn that kind of money who plays online. But let us say that you are earning that kind of money, is £500 a week ($1000 at this time of writing) enough to be sitting around a computer screen all week enduring bad beats and horrible runs when you could easily earn that kind of money doing something else?

I think that for it to be worth your while then you need to be able to earn money in online poker that would be beyond your capacity to earn in any other occupation that is available to you. This figure differs from person to person but another answer to the problem is not to play full time but part time and to fit your poker playing around other things.

This creates a far better balance to your life than merely watching cards go around a computer screen all week. But there are players out there who do earn serious six and even seven figure sums from playing online poker and even in limit hold’em. But that is no different to people in all fields. The top footballers earn mega wages as do the top golfers and also the top poker players but how many people fit into each of those categories?

But the bottom line here is that limit hold’em and the sheer nature of it will well and truly mess with your mind and you need to be aware of this and ready for it for when it happens.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson
Author – “Winning Cash Game Poker”

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But there is one very large problem with big pairs, weak players overplay them in games like full-ring and end up getting all in when their hand is dominated by a bigger pair. This nightmare situation is easier to walk into with queens as you have both kings and aces as potential threats. In fact QQ is only a slight favourite against hands like AKs and AK. In full-ring poker games then these possibilities arise more frequently than what you imagine and when you get stacked while holding KK against AA or QQ against KK then it has the capacity to tilt some people.

Tilt is bad enough at the best of times but it can be absolutely fatal when you are multi-tabling. I was playing in a deep stacked NLHE game yesterday at NL50 road testing “The Vulture” system when the following hand came up. A player limped under the gun and I raised from middle position to $2.25 with K-K. The small blind three bet to $9 and the original limper shoved all in for their remaining $47. What was I to make of this? Some players would say that folding kings here is impossible and especially at this level.

While it is true that NL50 is not a level full of great poker players, they are all too aware of hand values. A limp re-raise is a powerful play at the best of times but a limp four bet all-in shove is another matter entirely. If I was new to this level then I would certainly have called with the kings but I folded them. But the small blind called and showed QQ while the UTG player had the obvious AA. Many players will be critical here of my play and calling may have been correct but in this environment based on what I had observed over many thousands of hands then calling felt wrong.

But having hands like 7-6s can prove immensely profitable in their own right and you never have a problem folding hands like these post flop if you don’t connect. But hands like KK and QQ can be really problematical if you constantly go for your entire stack in deep stacked no limit full-ring and you will come to realise this as you learn poker. In four bet pre-flop situations then you will be against AA far more than QQ when you hold KK. I have got stacked several times with KK against AA in these situations in very quick succession and it is not a pleasant experience and it really puts you to the test when you are multi-tabling.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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If you want me to write about how to play a flush draw or bottom pair when heads up or from late position then drop me a line on this site and if I get time then I will write a book all about it for novices. But I will tell you right here and now, that would not be a book that I would enjoy writing because I wouldn’t be telling it as I believe it to be. I would in essence be producing material that I did not totally believe in.

I think that one of the best preparations and pieces of advice that I can give anyone who plays limit hold’em at the middle limits and upwards or who desires to do so would be to study and get experience of playing heads up. I am once again going to upset a lot of people by what I am about to say and many people will not agree with me but I have absolutely no problem with that. This is that heads up play and learning heads up play is perhaps the biggest and most important step that a player can make in my opinion. I have heard countless times about how players should get full ring games cracked first and foremost and then slowly but surely progress to short handed and then heads up if they feel comfortable.

Well there is a lot of truth to this as any novice really does not want to be facing a vastly superior opponent heads up because they will be locking horns with a superior opponent who is making better decisions than them on every single hand. But the fact remains that there are too many players out there who cannot play heads up and shy away from it. If you do that in today’s modern and more aggressive online poker environment then your chances of success are slim.

As the games are getting tighter and your opponents are getting tougher then you are going to be faced with more and more heads up situations in full ring games and semi-short handed games whether you like it or not. If you are playing nine handed and it is folded around to the small blind who raises and you are in the big blind then this is a heads up situation. Obviously your need to become involved in this situation is less because of the vastly reduced blind pressure but it is still a heads up situation all the same.

This article does not concentrate on heads up play but if you don’t take any other advice out of this series other than this then at least you will be starting to make some progress in your poker career. I am not advocating that you jump right into a heads up game online right here and now or tomorrow or next week or even next month. But what I am saying is that if you really want to advance your poker education as a whole not just in cash games but also in a poker tournament then you are going to have to improve your short handed and heads up play. Look out for part two coming soon.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson
Author – “Winning Cash Game Poker”

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This may seem obvious but if you are in a game that is too tough for your abilities then your expectation will be negative.

You may win or you may lose during any one given session but if you persist in sitting in poker games where your expectation is negative then you’re not going to become a winning poker player! At the lower levels, game selection is not as critical mainly because any player with adequate skills and a good rakeback deal will likely earn money. But as you begin to move up, the players get far tougher and the effect of a rakeback deal is offset by the increasing stakes that you are playing for and this is when game selection is critical to success.

But we can take game selection a step further and move into an area that few cash game players ever consider and that is one of seat selection. It is a common fact in poker that money flows in a clockwise direction and this indicates the importance of having position once again. This undisputed law of poker is basically set in stone and is why players who flout this law will be long term losers in poker.

But a bad seat in an otherwise good game can be almost as bad as a bad game. If I go onto a poker site and see a couple of players who I know to be good sitting in a game of $10-$20 then I may sit and watch that game for awhile to try and assess the other players or I may jump straight in if I can get a good seat. But what I don’t want to do is to jump into that game and take any old seat and have a good player having position over me on every single hand. Or worse still, what if I just sat down with both of the strong players sitting in the two seats to my immediate left?

It is bad enough one strong poker player having position over you but two is a bit much. On many occasions, I have simply refused a seat on a certain table because of who would be holding position over me. This handicap isn’t as pronounced in Sit and go tournaments as stack sizes shrink relative to the blinds very quickly and decisions become easier. Please keep a good lookout for part two of this hand example coming shortly where I will be finding ways to add metagame value to your poker game.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson
Author – “Winning Cash Game Poker”

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I see many players do this and their thinking is that they are getting nine to one pot odds with $4.50 in the pot and only needing to throw in a further fifty cents. But this is a leak that is apparent in the games of many small stakes players. The chances of an unsuited 9-4 making anything that is substantial enough to take the pot are remote, remember that we are not playing online poker tournaments here!

You basically have to hit the flop twice to get into a good situation either with a board like 9-4-2 or 9-9-3 for instance. But the problem with many flops is that you can be only a marginal favourite or a huge favourite where you simply will not get paid off like with the 9-9-3 flop for instance. In that scenario, you hold all the cards and are unlikely to get paid off even when you hit.

Also in that situation, you could easily be in a lot of trouble if someone else held a nine as they would surely have a bigger kicker than you. On boards like A-9-4 for instance then you are still vulnerable to the board pairing on the river like with A-9-4-5-5 for example and now anyone holding a bare ace has you beat. If you flop two pair on a A-9-4 board and someone is holding a hand like A-J while another is holding something like A-7 then that presents a further six outs that can beat your two pair.

I could go on and on quoting potential problems with this poker hand even after you have hit it. This is before we even get into situations like where a player flops something like 9-5-2 and they have top pair poor kicker. The hand is poor and out of position and not worth playing even despite the appealing pre-flop odds.

But these fifty cent losses start to add up as do the times when you get into trouble with the hand. So the moral of this hand example is to muck all those junk hands from the small blind even when there have been numerous limpers and the pot odds seem appealing. The small blind is one of the most difficult situations to handle on the poker table. You are out of position to every single player on the table and even in a blind versus blind situation then you are still going to be out of position to the big blind. This situation needs to be handled with extreme care and attention.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson
Author – “Winning Cash Game Poker”

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One of the ways to do that is by raising limpers with semi-decent hands like the one here. When a player open limps then you have to realise that the vast majority of the time, what you are seeing here is a bad player. At the very least, they have made a bad poker play and any player who has made a bad play is likely to be a bad poker player in my book.

If you desire to win money in poker then you need to be focusing on the bad players. If you see a player always open raise and never limp then this is not an indication that they are a good player. You will have to wait and see what other betting patterns are available for you to make a concrete verdict. But any poker player who open limps in no limit hold’em is likely to be weak in some way. There are exceptions when you move on up through the stakes but on the whole, a limper is a weak player and these are the players who you want to be playing poker with.

Most have a fit or fold mentality that will allow a raiser to have much the best of it post flop in a heads up encounter. Plus, you really don’t know how long the bad player is going to stay around for, he may be gone from your table in the next few minutes or the very next hand or they might hang around all afternoon. So you need to get yourself into confrontations with bad players as much as possible in order to increase your equity.

This means raising and not calling because you ideally don’t want other players to be diluting your edge against the weak player by entering the pot as well. This dilutes your equity and the best way to protect that is to raise and try to isolate against the limper.

If I were in this situation then I may slightly increase my opening raise and make it four times the big blind or in this case $4. Most players would either raise to three times the big blind ($3) or make a pot size raise ($3.50).

These are my usual raising amounts but in situations where I think that I am up against weak players then I will increase this slightly. In the higher limits, you have to be careful trying to isolate a weak limper.

In a game like $10-$20 or $25-$50 NLH for instance then you are not going to encounter all that many weak players. But if you did then other good players would quickly cotton on to what you were doing and would likely re-steal from you.

But this type of move is uncommon in low stakes play but I think that it is vitally important for players to know what they are trying to achieve when they sit down in certain games and what the reasons are for why they do certain things. I think that once they understand why strong players act in a certain way then much of the mystique surrounding expert poker will be removed.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson
Author – “Winning Cash Game Poker”
Come and play better poker with bwin poker school.

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This was another hand example sent to me by a student of mine who held the 8c-6c on the button. There had been a limper before it got to him and my student folded his hand. He admitted to me afterwards that he could never make his mind up in situations like these on whether it was better to fold his hand or to call.

I simply told him….. “why don’t you consider a raise?”

I think that it is very instructive here to take a look at the mindset of the average low stakes no limit hold’em player. Most have received some form of poker education either as a result of reading books or visiting numerous websites or watching poker on television or whatever. Most of them understand hand values and many of my students fold hands like the 8c-6c in situations like these and that is no bad thing. Playing tight poker is an attribute in games like these but another mistake that many low stakes players also make is to also limp along.

Many players at these levels are trying to make a big hand on the cheap when they limp along like this. They are trying to make a straight or a flush or something but the bottom line is that they are trying to make a big hand cheaply. What many fail to realise is that the hand that they were hoping to make will come along so rarely that the expenditure is rarely worth it. Plus they are dependent on a weaker hand paying them off and also the other players have stacks that are not always deep enough for their play to get amply rewarded anyway most of the time.

Many low stakes poker players pay little or no attention to their opponents stack sizes but this is crucial at all levels of no limit play. So in this situation, if limping along is rarely the correct play then is folding the right play?

Well first of all you need to remember one thing. If you are the best player on the table or you perceive that you are and this table is full of weak tight poker players then where do you think that the money is going to come from to provide your earn rate?

You won’t make big hands often enough and many players will not be committing sizable amounts of money to the pot unless they have a big hand in games like these. I think that being able to multi-table has something to do with this along with rakeback schemes simply because players can afford to fold more hands in an attempt to wait for strong cards. The rest of their playable hands, they limp in with them trying to make a big hand. Look out for part two of this article coming soon.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson
Author – “Winning Cash Game Poker”
Why not come and try your hand at Sit’n go tournaments on bwin?

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