Archive for September, 2009
Ever since I started playing NLH I have incorporated a little game in which I try to guess exactly what two cards my opponent has in the hole. I can usually narrow it down to a very few possibilities, and on occasion I have ventured a guess out loud when I feel confident about it. Boy, did I freak the other players out when I would guess my main opponent's Q-Q and he would then flip his Q-Q faceup and say, "How in the world does he do that?"
How in the world do I do it? I'm able to do it because I practice observation, logic, and deductive reasoning while I play in the game. By the time someone has acted on his hand three or four times, a lot of information has been made available. How did he bet it before the flop? How much did he bet, and what did he seem to want his opponent to do in this hand? Did he look weak or strong? Exactly how weak or strong did he appear? What did he have the last time he acted this way? How did the flop alter his demeanor? Was he doing any acting that I could see right through? And of course the cards on the board figure heavily in my assessments.
Usually, all the information I gather in this way helps me form a mental picture of my opponent's hand. I'm blessed with an excellent poker memory as well (I still remember hands that I played 17 years ago, and all the details—not just hands of today or yesterday), and all that helps the process too. So I could narrow it down to, say, a pair of tens, jacks, or queens. Then I would think for another few seconds and refine my guess on the basis of the way my opponent had acted in the past during a hand that I witnessed. Finally, I would throw out my guess, "You have pocket queens in the hole, don't you?" I became so good at this little trick that for a long time the other players stopped trying to bluff me. (This was awfully nice for me, but on the other hand I wasn't picking off anyone else's bluffs either!)
Trying to determine the cards your opponent holds is a great game when you play poker, and it will help your reading skills immeasurably. If you're bad at it at first, don't worry your reads will get better and better. Practice makes perfect! Daniel Goleman claims in his book EQ: Emotional Intelligence that "certain 'star qualities' are learnable." (Goleman believes that many of the characteristics that have made some people very successful can be studied and learned.) I believe that reading people is a learnable "star quality" (characteristic), although I concede that some people can take it further than others. In any case, you'll improve your reading skills a lot with practice. And when you're way off on a guess, you'll begin to see why. ("Oh yeah, I forgot that he reraised before the flop with that hand.")
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Now we'll simply add A-x suited to the mix of hands that you play. The ramifications of adding these hands are two: you can get yourself into trouble when you hit an ace or the x with an A-x suited hand, and you will occasionally make an ace-high flush.
Try not to lose too much money when you hit an ace with your A-x suited hand. In NLH most of the value of A-x suited comes when you hit the hand hard, as when you make a flush, two pair, or trips (when you make trips with the x card, it's hard for anyone to notice). When you hit the ace only, as with [V|-p*] and a flop of A-K-2, then watch out! Don't get over involved in this situation, because anyone putting in big bets against you will almost certainly have you beat, unless he's bluffing. In limit Hold'em you can just call someone down in a situation like this, without doing too much damage to your chips, but in no-limit doing that could cost you a big chunk of your chips.
When you do hit your hand hard, then you need to figure out how to win the maximum number of chips with it. You should also be thinking about protecting your hand, especially when you draw a flop of [*»|-p»]-[V] and you have 0-[*»]. In this case, your opponents could be drawing to a straight or a flush. Keep this in mind when you think about betting a small amount to lure your opponents into the pot. The funny thing is that you want action with this hand and this flop, but you can't just let someone beat you for free. If you knew that your opponents didn't have a straight or a flush draw, then you could check on the flop, hoping for a lot of action on the next two rounds of betting. Betting out with a hand like this may cause someone with a drawing hand to raise you, and now you can reraise and win the pot right then and there.
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