Playing Slowly
I am frequently amazed at how slowly some poker players play. Assuming you are a winning poker player, you make some amount of equity per hand you are dealt. Let’s assume you make $1 per hand. If you usually know what you will do within a reasonable amount of time, you will make around $30 per hour at the standard live poker table that plays 30 hands per hour. If instead, you take your time on every street and slightly increase your win rate to $1.20 per hand but now play only 20 hands per hour, you will cut your win rate to $24 per hour despite making (hopefully) better decisions. …
This hand came up in a $1,000 World Series of Poker event I last year where I raised to 400 out of my 11,000 effective stack at 100-200-25 from middle position with 9s8s and an older, fairly straightforward guy called in the small blind. The flop came 9h-8d-5d, giving me top two pair. He checked, I bet 700 and he called. The turn was the Kd, making the flush possible. He checked, I bet 1,700, he raised to 3,400 and I called. The river was the 2c. He bet 2,100 and I called.
Quite often, when playing the major tournament circuit, you’ll find yourself with no chips at a final table despite recently having a decent shot at a title. When you go from having lots of equity to none, crazy things start happening in your mind. I’m going to let you into my world and enlighten you to what I do to stay sane when things go wrong when there is a lot of money on the line. …
While a high amount of your profit, especially in soft or small buy-in tournaments, will come from getting maximum value from your strong hands, occasionally you will need to run a well-timed bluff. I played a hand in the recent $3,500 WPT event at Borgata that illustrates this point. …
I was recently told about a hand from a $500 buy-in live tournament that illustrates an important concept that many amateur poker players fail to fully understand. With blinds at 500/1,000 with a 100 ante, our Hero raised to 2,500 out of his 50,000 effective stack on the button with Kh-Qc. Only the big blind, a generally tight and extremely straightforward 50 year old man called. …
I have recently been spending a decent amount of time working on my turn and river strategies. It is somewhat easy to play in a relatively straightforward manner and not do anything horribly wrong, but if you want to succeed at the highest levels, you simply must be willing to make what may appear like an optimistic bluff from time to time, often when you find yourself with one of the worst hands in your range or when you block the nuts. On one of my recent poker trips outside of America, I made a point to play a bunch of online tournaments take as many turn and river spots that I could. Here is one of them: …