The art of being unpredictable is a lot easier to master when you have a comfortable bankroll to back it up. If your bankroll is lighter, then being unpredictable may be slightly harder due to the fear of losing your stack. This is why it’s recommended that you have at least 20 times the buy in for the table if you intend to play. So how does being unpredictable win your bigger pots?
Making the correct bet based on your table
The psychology of raising versus pushing all in works something like this. When you push all in you encourage one of three things to happen – no one calls because you don’t have loose players at the table nor do you have tight players with anything worth calling with – you wind up having someone call you with another pocket pair or a premium hand that could possibly beat you – you encourage a loose player to try and outdraw you to send you on tilt. Option #1 can actually be the best scenario in some cases.
Making use of your block chat button
Today is more about my annoyance with certain players than a tip. The block chat button is by far the most useful tool available for online players. When you get tired of the Phil Hellmuth wannabe at the table telling you how “badly he was beaten by a fish” simply block his chat. He can no longer bother you with his long winded tirades of how great of a player he is while he’s playing at the 0.10/0.25 or lower tables.
Playing the small stack in ring games
When you buy in to a ring game you have different options. Some tables are “deep stacks” meaning you’re buying at at somewhere around 50 times the big blind. Other tables allow you to buy in at 20 times the big blind. Now at 20 times the big blind you don’t have a lot of chips to play with so you’re going to have to adjust your strategy accordingly, especially when your opponents may have 100 times the big blind or more. Let’s cover a few different table options now.
Taking Advantage of Overly Aggressive Players
An overly aggressive player is defined as one who raises something like every other pot he plays. I’ve employed this playing style before in tournaments against a passive table, where it worked something like this, you raise the pot pre-flop, you raise the pot on the flop. If someone calls you on the flop you slow down. If they fold you repeat. Eventually no one takes your hand strength seriously and they’ll play back against you when you’re holding a monster. But let’s say you don’t want to play that reckless style, you want to take down the opponent playing that way, how do you do that? Fairly easily actually.
What not to do in heads up play
I’ve said it in several articles, I’m not that good at heads up play. I do, however, know exactly what you shouldn’t do when playing an opponent heads up as I’m learning from my own bad plays of what not to do. What better way to learn than from someone who already made the mistakes for you right? I’ll save you the trouble of making these mistakes by making them for you.
An introduction to Omaha
For those who have never played the game Omaha is similar to Texas Holdem in betting rounds. There are a total of four rounds of betting – preflop, the flop, the turn, and the river. In Omaha, however, you have 4 hole cards instead of 2. That’s right 4. The other difference is you HAVE TO use 2 of your hole cards and 3 cards on the board, no exceptions. That means you will not lose to a flush if your opponent has 1 diamond in their hole cards and 4 on the board. They must have 2 diamonds in their hand and 3 on the board to actually have a flush. The same applies to the straight. None of those weird river cards to mess you up like in Holdem.
Freeroll Tournaments
Well tomorrow will be the second freeroll tournament I’ve played in in years. The last one I was set to at least place before the break, then lost interest. From years past, Pokerchamps had the toughest to place in, something like 1,000-2,000 players at a time with only either 27 or 18 places paying (I forget which, this is years ago.) USA / Titan had the best freeroll tournaments online, too bad they banished US players from playing on their site. It was something like 400 starting players with 40 getting at least enough to start playing at the 0.01 /0.02 tables. Earned a nice paycheck from them before they closed their doors to me. Anyway, let’s go over some freeroll tournament tips I have lodged in the back of my head from yesteryear.
Rebuy Tournament Strategy
Rebuy tournaments operate quite differently from no rebuy tournaments. In a rebuy you typically have a shortened chip stack compared to what you’d start with in a regular tournament. Rounds are shorter and after the end of the rebuy rounds there’s typically an addon available as well.
Tournament Break and Addon rules
Saw in the stats today that someone was looking for information about Texas Hold Em Tournament breaks and addon rules and while I think I’ve hinted at it before, I know I haven’t fully covered the information. So the following is for anyone who would like to run their own tournament at home, or for anyone looking for the most common information when it comes to addon’s.
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