No-limit Texas Hold’em games are getting tougher.  There was a time that isolating limpers and c-betting every flop was enough to make you a winner.  Not anymore.  If you’re using the same moves you used five years ago, you’re probably getting tooled and are wondering why your opponents always seem to have a hand.  I’m gonna let you in on a little secret.  They don’t always have a hand.  They’ve adjusted to your old bag of tricks.  It’s time to take what’s left of your bankroll and fight back.  Here’s how to improve what you’re doing to start making money again.

The C-Bet

The c-bet used to be a license to print money.  You raised pre-flop and bet 100% of the time when the action checked to you regardless of the flop texture.  Your opponent would fold roughly 66% of the time, money would fall from the heavens and you’d congratulate yourself on being a poker god.

But times have changed and these days most aggro-donks realize that there’s a good chance that you don’t have much on that J36 flop either.  The result?  They check/raise your ass and take away the pot.  At least, they used to.

What You Can Do About It

You’re lighting money on fire if you lay down your hand every time an aggressive opponent check/raises your c-bet.  You need to fight back but you have to be smart about it.  Fighting back every time your opponent check/raises you is suicide.  Eventually he’ll wake up with a hand and clean you out.  So here’s how you regain your edge.

Re-raise your opponent with a wide range of hands.  Take our J36 flop for example.  It’s a hard flop to hit and your opponent’s raise says he did it.  If he’s a good player, there’s a good chance he didn’t but you’ll have to re-raise him to find out.  I would re-raise with AJ+, 66+, 33 and any flush draw.  Your opponent will have to lay down anything except a strong Jack or a set.  You don’t have to make it a big raise.  About 2 – 2.5 times your opponent’s bet should do it on a dry flop. Is it a high variance play?  Yes.  But it has its advantages.

Occasionally you’ll have to lay down to a shove.  It sucks but it also shows your opponents that you’ll 3-bet post-flop without the nuts.  That means you can play your big hands fast and get paid.

Isolating Limpers

Isolating limpers is still profitable.  Limpers tend to be shitty players and shitty players don’t play well when they’re out of position post-flop.  If you don’t know how to isolate limpers, it’s easy.  You identify a bad player and wait for them to limp (call the big blind) pre-flop.  You raise their limp with all kinds of weird hands like suited single-gappers, suited double-gappers or complete trash.  Your opponent calls ( ‘cause that’s what shitty players do) and then check/folds the flop when you c-bet.

The problem starts when a tough player in late position notices that you’re bogarting the fish, decides to put a stop to it and starts to 3-bet you.

What You Can Do About It

The first thing you should do is nothing.  Just because someone 3-bets you once or twice doesn’t mean that he’s making a move.  Your opponent may have picked up a legitimate hand.  Just fold and wait for another opportunity.  If you keep getting 3-bet, however, you’ll need to shut down your opponent.  There are a couple ways to do this.

First, open up your 4-betting range.  Four-betting works great if your opponent can fold but it sucks if he likes to call and play his position (unless you can 4-bet shove).  Hands like 88+, AJs+, AQ+ is a good range.

Your other option is to flat call and check/raise a lot of flops.  This option is my favorite because people tend to be less aggressive when the flop is down and I can call/check-raise a wider range of hands.   It also gives me the option to fold if the flop looks ugly.  The call/check-raise also makes your opponent less likely to want to mix things up with you post-flop which means you can get away with 4-betting light later in the session.

Stealing the Blinds

Once upon a time we could raise from the hijack, cut-off and button when the action folded to us and pick up the sweet, juicy blind money without a fight.  The blinds would have to play out of position against a raiser so they’d fold the majority of their hands.  Not anymore.

These days the blinds will re-steal with a wide range of hands.  Suited connectors, pocket pairs and any two broadway cards are fair game.  Some players re-steal even wider.

What You Can Do About It

Most people adjust by not stealing as frequently.  I think that’s the wrong way to adjust.  Stealing is still profitable, you just have to be willing to play a little poker and make the re-stealing player’s life miserable.

Pick your spots when facing an aggressive re-stealer.  Fold your trash and defend with your premium and speculative hands.

You can 4-bet premium hands.  Hands like TT+, AJ+ and even QJs+ can be 4-bet against an aggressive re-stealer.  For most speculative hands I like to call and force my opponent to play the hand out of position.

Aggressive re-stealers will c-bet a wide range of flops.  You can make their life difficult by raising the ones that give you decent equity and floating the ones that don’t improve your hand but are unlikely to hit your opponent’s range.  After a couple clashes, you opponent will figure that it’s easier to just let you have the blind.

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Poker is a dynamic game.  Exploits only work for so long before someone comes up with a counter-exploit.  You have to keep your game fluid and watch for shifts in the way your opponents play.  Does it make the game higher variance?  Yes.  As players get better the edges get smaller which makes the swings bigger.  But the alternative is to keep playing your old game and get crushed by newer strategies.  The choice is yours.

I just sent out a broadcast email with a link to my first free poker video and while I’m proud that I finally pulled the trigger on it, I think I played pretty terrible in the video.  Fortunately I chose to do the analysis post-mortem so I was able to point out what I did wrong and what I could have done better.

I learned something making the video.  Forcing action is always a losing move.  I only had one table up since this was my first video and I wanted to keep it simple, but I found that I was trying to make moves that I wouldn’t normally make just to make things more interesting.  It usually didn’t work out.

Poker players have a reputation for being a prideful group that likes to brag about how much they make or what great moves they can pull off, but the best quality for a player to have is patience.

I’m not saying that you always have to wait for a big hand to enter the pot.  I’m just saying that you have to wait for the right situation when you’re ready to make a move.

From now on I plan on keeping at least two tables open for my videos and maybe as many as four.  That should be enough that I’ll always have an interesting situation come up or something different to talk about.

If you missed this broadcast, make sure you sign up now so you’ll get my next one.  I’d be happy to hear your feedback or requests.  My hope is that these videos help me improve my game as much as they help others improve theirs.

Finally the newsletter is ready!  I’ve promised Free Poker Videos for about two months now and I’m ready to pull the trigger.  Just click on the Free Poker Video tab (or the previous link) and put in your name and email address.  That’s all.

Every week I’ll send at least one poker video.  Sometimes it’ll be game play, sometimes it’ll be classroom style and I’m open to requests.  If this ends up being a successful newsletter, I’ll start doing freerolls for subscribers too.

What’re you waiting for?  The first video is coming tomorrow night.  Sign up now!

I used to be a big Sit ‘N Go player but recently I realized that I make a better hourly rate when I’m playing cash or multi-table tournaments.  A few people have questioned my decision to include SNGs in my poker routine since it doesn’t make sense to spend my time playing a game that isn’t maximizing my hourly rate.  My response is that SNGs make a great filler game.  Let me explain.

Both cash and tournaments are time intensive.  I have to block out 3 to 5 hours when I plan on playing multi-table tournaments for obvious reasons and it usually takes me about half an hour to an hour to select a good cash table (gotta make sure I get one full of fish).  But Sit ‘N Goes are easy.  All I have to do is fire them up and I’m ready to go.

Of course, there are a few SNG regulars that I’d rather avoid, but they’re usually easy to spot since they sign up for several tables at once.

The other great thing about SNGs is that it’s easy to play a winning strategy.  There’s very little post-flop play and your edge comes from making +EV shoves and calls.  Personally, I think the simplicity of SNG strategy is part of the problem since a lot more players are getting wise to the Independent Chip Model.

Finally, one of the big reasons I’m keeping SNGs in my poker plan is because I can multi-table the bejesus out of them.  I can only play about 2 cash games at a time (’cause I have to pay attention to the people I’m targeting) and I can only play about 3 or 4 multi-table tournaments at a time (’cause that’s about the most that run at once on Bodog), but I can play 10 or 12 SNGs in one sitting.  It’s super sweet.

If you haven’t played SNGs yet, give them a try.  They’re quick games and they’ll improve your multi-table tournament play especially at the final table.

For more information about winning SNGs, see these articles:

What Makes A Winning SNG Player

Low Blind Strategy

Mid Blind Strategy

High Blind Strategy

I make a decent amount of money playing poker.  I’m better than most, but I tend to play above my bankroll which means I’m less likely to make the line-balancing bluffs needed to profit from good, thinking players.  So what do I do?

I target the bad ones.

I didn’t realize what I was doing until a friend of mine asked to sweat one of my cash sessions.  After we finished he said, “So you really only play against one person at the table.”

I thought about it for a minute and realize that he was right.  When I sit down at the poker table I target one or two players and tend to avoid the rest of them.  My targets become my bitches.  I isolate them with all kinds of crap and pound them ’til all their chips are mine then I rub the virtual chips on my titties and fall asleep on a bed of money.

My point is that you don’t have to be the best poker player to make money.  You don’t even have to be that good.  All you have to do is find the bad players and know how to exploit them.  Here’s how you can make a shit-ton of money playing poker even if you’re not the next Durrrr:

Data mine

Data mining straddles the fence of morality.  Some people say that it’s cheating since you have information derived from hands that you didn’t play.  Others say that it’s a tool available to anyone so no one truly has an edge.  I tend to side with the latter camp.

PokerTableRatings.com makes a ridiculous amount of information available to everyone.  Recently AnskyPoker.com, one of my favorite blogs, posted this information that showed the best times to play poker on different sites at different limits using Average Pot Size.  Gugel also analyzed how hard it is to move up in limits using the average number of hands played at each limit.  You’ll have to sign up for his forum to get the full reports, but it’s free and well worth the 30 seconds it takes to sign up.

It’s great to know when the fish are swimming, but it’s even better to tag individual fish that you can stalk over and over again.  There are a couple ways you can do this.

The first thing you can do is go through your Hold’em Manager or PokerTracker database and find all the big losers at your limit.  If you don’t have a large database, you can buy hand histories from PokerTableRatings.com or just use their “Biggest Losers” tool to find the people hemorrhaging money at your stakes.

Once you have your fish list, sign up for a free PokerTableRatings.com account and go to the “My PTR” tab.  There you’ll find a place where you can enter your fish into your buddy list and get email alerts when they’re online.  I have a Blackberry so I know instantly when one of my fish is online.

The other way you can find bad players is to get a program like IdleMiner and let it run for about a half hour before you sit down (Careful with this. Some sites have banned IdleMiner.).  Find a table with one or two really bad players and sit down – preferably with position on your mark.

Identify Your Opponent’s Weaknesses

This is where Hold’em Manager or Poker Tracker really comes in handy.  If your opponent has a VPIP of 53 and a PFR of 4, you should isolate their limps but respect their raises.  If your opponent has a VPIP of 53 and a PFR of 32, their raise should mean shit to you and you can 3bet them wide – especially if they have a high “Call 3bet” stat and a high “Fold to Cbet” stat.

Tend to isolate with hands that are ahead of your opponent’s range or hands that can flop well.  For example, ATo isn’t usually a hand you’d 3bet, but it figures to be ahead of someone who’s raising 32% of their hands.  Likewise, mid suited connectors and suited single-gappers can flop big.

I prefer raising to calling since it tends to isolate the bad player and gives you a shot at him heads-up.  For that reason I tend to isolate limpers more often than raisers since there’s less risk involved.

Watch Out For the Sharks

Be aware that you’re not the only person preying on your mark.  There will probably be one or two good players trying to take a shot at him too and they might get annoyed with you hogging all the action.  If you want to keep feeding, you’ll have to adjust to the good players too.  Here’s how I do it:

1.      I don’t isolate with every hand.  I only use premium hands or quality speculative ones.  No trash unless I’m on the button and the blinds are passive or I have a good squeeze opportunity.

2.      Cultivate a tight/aggressive image.  If you seem loose, the TAGs will stop respecting your isolation plays.

3.      Watch out for obvious plays.  I was playing on Cake once and was hammering a really bad player who called raises in the small blind and check/folded a lot.  I raised from the cutoff, he called in the small blind and a strong TAG 3bet from the big blind.  This is a textbook squeeze spot so I put in a 4bet and took the pot down.  Decent players will make plays on you, but they’ll be obvious.  Exploit them.

4.      Throw some scraps to the sharks.  You don’t have to be involved in every pot your mark plays.  Lay down your weaker hands if there’s another shark that’s keen on a kill.  By avoiding other sharks, you’ll reduce your variance.  If you’re confident in your skills and are rolled for the stakes you play, you can fight the sharks.  Otherwise, avoid them.

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Poker is a predatory game.  A there’s a definite food chain that develops.  Seek out the weak players and avoid the strong ones.

This tip is one of the most obvious and overlooked tips in poker.  If you want to make an obscene amount of money in poker, all you have to do is play worse players.