Secrets of Professional Tournament Poker, Volume 1 (47 page)

  Chapter 9

Miscellaneous Topics

Poker is a complex game. More situations come up than I could write about in this book. You must learn to be quick on your feet and know how to determine the best play. This section consists of random topics that apply to poker in general. These concepts can be applied to most betting rounds. There are technical concepts as well as mental ones. These concepts will help you navigate through a poker tournament and give you the best chance to win.

Make Your Decisions Simple

If all your decisions in poker are simple, you will win more money by making more correct plays. This does not mean you should play only premium hands. If you do that, you will surely blind off and go broke. It means that when you make a bet, you need to think ahead about what your opponents are most likely to do so that you can make better bets earlier in a hand.

The easiest way to make your decisions simple is to get all-in early in a hand. Most professionals try not to get all-in, but once you are down to 25BBs or less, getting all-in over a raise is usually the most +EV way to play most decent hands. Also, if you get all-in on the flop with hands like a good draw or the nuts, it is impossible to make a mistake. For example, say you have A
-K
and raise to 2.5BBs out of your 40BB stack. One opponent, a good, aggressive player that has you covered, calls on the button. The board comes J
-9
-4
. You bet 4BBs and your opponent raises to 10BBs. In this spot you should usually go all-in for your remaining 23BBs. If you just call, you will have 23BBs left and will be out of position for the rest of the hand.

If you miss the turn and check, your opponent will usually go all-in. You will be getting 1.8-to-1, giving you a tough decision – you are ahead of your opponent if he has a worse flush draw or a straight draw. Also, you will be unsure if an ace or king will give you the best hand. If you just go all-in on the flop, you will be applying aggression to your opponent and forcing him to make a tough decision.

You must also think ahead when everyone is short-stacked. If everyone has 10-30BBs, which happens often towards the end of a tournament, any time you raise, you must think about whose all-in bets you will call and whose you will fold to. Suppose you have 6
-5
with 30BBs in the cutoff. The button and big blind have 20BBs and the small blind has 10BBs. If you raise to 2.5BBs you can easily fold to the 20BB stacks and call the short stack’s push. That being said, if you raise and one of the 20BB stacks pushes, you will only need 40-percent equity to call. Because of this, you should call the 20BB pushes much more than you would think because you will have around 45-percent equity with much of your raising range. If you raise with A
-J
instead of 6
-5
, you need to be prepared to call anyone’s push, assuming the player is not too tight, in the situation above, even though you could be dominated. If you know one of the 20BB stacks to be very aggressive, you can call with much weaker hands than A
-J
. What you don’t want is to raise a hand like A
-7
and be left getting 2-to-1. In these spots you need to win around 33 percent of the time. A-7, as bad as it is, usually wins at least 30 percent against everything, so you must seriously consider calling.