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Before you even consider making a value bet, try to determine if the bet will have any value at all. Attempt to put your opponent on a hand that he'd likely call a bet with on the river. To do this, you'll have to mentally play back the details of the hand. Think about your opponent's playing tendencies.
In tournaments, players typically raise when they enter the pot. In cash games, though, players are more likely to limp in before the flop. That's because cash games are usually deeper-stacked, meaning that players will have a higher ratio of chips in relation to the blinds than they would in a tournament.
When you play No Limit Hold'em, the ideal strategy is to take minimal risk, do little bluffing, and hope that weaker players call you when you have a strong hand. But that's the perfect world. Sometimes you'll face opponents that play very conservatively and will rarely pay you off when you have the goods.
The flop bet is a useful tactic for both old-school and new-school players because it can be effective if you are strong, weak, or somewhere in between. Betting out weak on a bluff can allow you to pick up an uncontested pot while betting out strong gives you the opportunity to control the size of the pot.
I like to peruse the Full Contact Poker online forums to read and comment on posts about interesting poker hands and whether they were played properly. I find that many of the contributors consistently suffer from the same problem: they are far too preoccupied with statistically insignificant aspects of a poker hand.
In order to maximize your profits at the poker table, your goal should be to play completely opposite of the way other players at the table perceive you. Simply put, if opponents label you a conservative player who never bluffs and only plays premium hands, you'll do better playing aggressively and bluffing frequently.
We've all heard stories about poker players grinding it out for two days straight. Believe me; I've got stories like that of my own. But the bottom line is that these stories usually don't have great endings. That's because the mind starts playing tricks after a marathon poker session, especially after a losing session.
I dropped out of school to play poker, and at 21, I moved from Toronto to try my luck as a pro in Vegas. I ate the typical meat-heavy diet of most poker players in the '90s: burgers and steak, along with French fries, mash, and a bucket-load of wine, beer, and vodka. There was nothing fresh in my diet, and I felt terrible.
The biggest thing when you're playing live is that you're sitting across from the player and can get a detailed impression of how they're acting, and whether they're expressing strength or weakness. Online, it's much more about betting patterns and you're using a much narrower range of cues to what they're holding and thinking.
Some players like to add a little more spice to their no-limit Hold 'em game. They add a live blind, also known as a straddle, where the player to the left of the big blind voluntarily puts up twice the big blind before looking at his hole cards. The player in the straddle then has the option to raise it up when the action returns to him.
I think that we are all in the right place at the right time almost every day. It's the people who are prepared to be lucky who can take advantage of being there. How do these people position themselves to be lucky? It was Goethe who said, 'Anytime that you take the first step toward trying to achieve something in life, all manner of good things will mysteriously fall into your path to help speed you along your way.' Amen to that!
I was very curious, that's why I think my reality TV seems normal. I watch a lot of reality TV because I am so interested in people and observing people. From a very young age I can remember watching a woman with a guy and she's rolling her eyes and he's pleading with her and I would think, she doesn't want to be with him, he's in love with her, she likes this other guy and I would make up these stories in my head about these people. That helps me sort of profile people and that is a key to being able to read people.