Poker isn’t about the cards you get. It’s about what you do with the cards you get. All players will get the same distribution of cards over time. Winners maximize their profits when they get good cards and minimize their losses when they get bad cards. Here are some tips to get more value from your hands when you flop well.
Balance Your Line
If you ever expect to get paid on your good hands, you have to balance your line. That means you occasionally have to make the same moves with a marginal hand as you would with a great hand.
Do you 3-bet with Aces and Kings? If you do, you have to 3-bet with other hands as well. That doesn’t mean you have to 3-bet with trash, but throwing in an occasional 3-bet with mid pocket pairs, high suited connectors or some other quality speculative hand will balance your line. Now your opponents will have to wonder; do you have AA/KK or are you making a move with 88 or QJs? When you balance your lines you force your opponents to make tough decisions and when your opponents have to make a lot of hard choices they’re more likely to make a mistake.
How Good Is Your Hand?
The stronger your hand, the more options you have to extract value. The first question you should ask yourself is whether you should be betting for value or betting to defend your hand.
If you hold KQo, for example, and the flop is QJ7 with two hearts verse three opponents; you have to make a solid bet to defend your hand. However if your hand is 88 and the flop comes A83 rainbow against 3 opponents, you have many more options for extracting value.
Know You Opponent
It’s vital to know what kind of opponent you’re up against before you try to extract value from them. Some opponents you have to slow play, others you have to bet big. Knowing your opponent is the key to getting maximum value from your hand. Here are some tricks to getting more money out of different villains.
Aggressive Villains
These guys were born to pay you off. Just play your hand like you have a weak pair or some other small hand. Aggressive villains won’t be able to resist trying to take you off the hand.
Probe bets are good. Bet around 1/3 the pot into your villain especially if they were the pre-flop raiser. You’ll get a raise a good portion of the time. From there, your play depends on the flop.
If the flop was likely to hit your villain, just get your money in. If you’re not sure, tank and call like you want to re-evaluate the turn. If the turn is a scare card, you can donk again and hope the villain will still think you’re weak and trying to buy the pot. If not, you can use the rope-a-dope line suggested by Harrington and check to induce a bet.
Loose Villains
No moves needed here. Loose villains want to call, so let them. All you have to do is bet-bet-bet to get your money in. If your villain is doing the betting, just let them. Don’t raise and scare them away. Save the raise for the river and hope they’re too committed to fold. The exception is when these players bet ridiculously small amounts into you. Treat these bets as a check and raise them to the level of a standard continuation bet.
Tight and Tight-Passive opponents
These are the toughest players to get money from. Just make a standard bet if the flop looks like it hit their range or check and hope a good card comes off. You’re not going to get any money out of these players unless they have something too. Bet small unless you think they have a decent hand.
Know Your Situation
Force your opponent to make a move that doesn’t make any sense. For example, if you have 88 on a board like A83 rainbow vs. an aggressive pre-flop raiser and you donk the flop, get called then the turn comes a 4 and your turn donk gets raised; your opponent’s line doesn’t make any sense. He’s not raising with 52 so what is he representing? You know where you are in this hand and can take him down.
By contrast, let’s say you have JJ and your opponent 3-bets you OOP pre-flop. The flop comes down low cards and your opponent bets pot. You still don’t know where you are. The pot bet looks suspicious because an overpair would usually want to extract, but you never know. You’re a coin flip against the villain’s range of AK, KK+ and maybe a slight dog if his range is wider. You should probably fold if the pot is small or if it’s early in a tournament.
I made this mistake in a Twitter Poker Tour tournament. I figured the villain’s range was AK, KK+ but when he made a pot bet I got suspicious and decided to play for stacks with my JJ. It was a bad decision. The tournament was double stacked and I should have folded. I was roughly a coin flip against the villain’s range and it wasn’t worth the tourney.
* * *
Make sure you know where you are when you play to maximize value or you might end up taking yourself to value town. With some shrewd moves and some good reads you can increase your win rate by a couple big blinds per hour.
Ready to try out your new poker skills? Play for real or free at:
