I played some $15-$30 limit Hold'em yesterday. Very disappointing session, as I played a couple pots just plain horribly. While I'm very happy with much of my game, there's still a Fancy-Play Syndrome tendency I've noticed in myself recently. And these fancy plays have cost me a significant amount of money. And it's even more frustrating because it's a concept I'm very familiar with, and "know", ...
Phil Galfond and some great thoughts on poker
I had read the "Jman28 Well" thread on Twoplustwo.com about five years ago, then saw it was bumped just recently so I read the whole thing over again. If you don't know who Phil Galfond is, he's only one of the best players in the world. He's won millions beating up on high-stakes online cash game regulars under the screen name OMGClayAiken. His posts on Twoplustwo get highly-deserved accolades ...
Online players, live players, and tell-reading ability
Live players get a bad rap from online players. You can find back-and-forth bickering from players on both sides of the aisle on a bunch of online forum threads. Online players insist live players are mostly horrible donkeys. Live players insist there’s a lot more to live poker than just pure poker skills (like live reads and social skills that increase action). Who’s right? They both are. ...
Raising too much pre-flop against loose players in limit
The game I play most often lately is a $15-30 fixed limit Hold'em with a full kill (which makes it $30-60). The game is a very loose, aggressive game by average standards, far juicier than you'd find in an average Vegas game. There are quite a few fairly decent card players there, but even the better ones make some pretty substantial, simple mistakes. I'm going to write in this post and the next ...
Limit player who holds chips defensively
Live fixed-limit, full-ring Hold'em hands that interest me enough to spend much time analyzing them are pretty rare, just because so many of the decisions are pretty straight-forward. I've got a hand here from a few days ago that I've been thinking a while about. It's a hand I probably could have played a bit better and that seems obvious in hindsight. The hand involves a couple of common tells so ...
Using peripheral vision in poker
I’m a big believer in the power of peripheral vision. I think that with training, your peripheral vision can become a very solid tool for keeping track of your surroundings and the actions of the people around you. Military and martial arts groups work on developing peripheral vision because it’s incredibly useful for getting a quick sense of your surroundings and for doing so ...
Creating a loose, careless image in no-limit
This weekend I was thinking about the ideal image you want to have when you're playing no-limit Hold'em. Here are the main things I want my opponents to be thinking about me: I want my opponents to think it's hard to bluff me. I want my opponents to think I'm loose enough to have any two cards in any situation. I want my opponents to think I don't care about the money. These are all ...
Most useful tells in limit poker
I’ve been playing more limit hold'em lately, and I’ve put some thought into the tells that are most useful at limit versus the most useful ones at no-limit. Obviously there’s a lot less psychological pressure in limit, which makes for less tells. And the regular players, even the horrible ones, are accustomed to the common situations of the game and therefore give away less information. But ...
Importance of a tight image in fixed limit hold’em
This past weekend I returned to playing a $15-30 limit game, after spending the last few months mostly playing $100 multi-table live tournaments. Returning to limit after playing so much no-limit is a bit like suddenly having your hands tied behind your back. It is of course night and day from no-limit: a completely different game. Despite feeling a bit constrained and maybe a little impatient, ...
The importance of poker tells in poker
Just because I focus on how to read physical tells on this website does not mean that I rank this skill as more important than other skills in poker. I think it can be, similar to the psychological understanding I talked about in another post, what separates a great player from a very good player. ...
Threatening-to-turn-cards-over tell
The threatening-to-turn-your-hand-over move is a pretty common tell you'll see at low stakes and sometimes medium stakes. You can often see it happen very clearly when a guy bets, another guy goes to call, and the bettor, almost in a threatening manner, prepares to flip his cards over. It can sometimes appear like some comical Western stand-off, with the one guy getting ready to draw his gun (or ...
Movement and stillness when bluffing
There's this weird old man that I frequently play with in this $100 tournament. His actions and mannerisms perplex me - he's just a weird old dude and I can't ever tell where he's coming from. He plays like a nit when he has an average stack but double him up and it's very hard to get him out of a pot. I generally have avoided any sort of bluff with him just because he's so unpredictable and is ...
Kido Pham vs Doug Lee: verbal trickery and making speeches
In honor of recently finishing the infamous Doug Lee thread on Twoplustwo, I'll devote a little time to examining a hand between Lee and Kido Pham. In this hand, Doug Lee raises with K2 and Pham calls in position with TJ. The flop comes KQ9, with Pham flopping the straight. Pham checks and Lee bets. Pham calls. The turn comes a blank. Pham checks and Doug Lee goes all in and it's all ...
Bet timing tells. Strategic use of calling the clock.
So, there's this very, very slow regular who I've played with a few times in the $100 tournament I occasionally play in. His name's Nassir, he's a middle-aged dude, and he's as slow-acting as they come. I almost wrote about this guy a few posts ago, just because I've spent a lot of time examining his style, and also because I find him indicative of a certain type of player that I think it helps to ...
Three major misconceptions about poker tells
I want to cover some very basic and very practical information on tells. I wanted to talk about three of the most common misconceptions about poker tells. First off, let's start with the much-repeated but not-well-understood adage from Mike Caro that almost everyone knows: Strong means Weak, Weak means Strong. This idea, that people who act strong are holding a weak hand, and people who act ...
Leg shaking at the poker table
Did well again this week in the $100 multi-table tournament I play in occasionally. Split it 3 ways even between myself and two women who play pretty well. One specific read played a big part in one of the plays I made. The first important pot I got into was when the blinds were 200-400. I've got about 20,000, and I'm 2nd chip leader at our table. This young guy who introduces himself to people as ...