All Aboard for the Best About Cruising!

You may play $1000 Buy in, you may play free poker but what you do not do is just play your cards. You also play the player, or to put it another way, you aim to manipulate other players so that they do what you want them to do. The desired end result of course is that they give you money!

There are two elements in this. On your side you are trying to read your opponent, classify their style, of play, motivations and actions and play your cards in accordance with your conclusions.

On the opposing player side you are trying to play them to increase the degree of error with which they classify your style of play, motivations and actions.

To learn how to do this lets look at an example of playing the player in action from a WSOP event.

BLINDS 50k/100k

1) A has Ac-Qh raises 350k
2) B is on big blind, has Kc-Js, calls 230k (Pot 880k)

K-J is usually a bit weak to call a raise. Moreover, B doesn’t have position over A, but he calls because he wants A to guess.

From the big blind, generally we just call because we are on a discount, so we might have 6-5, 10-8, and a bunch of other indeterminate hands which require guessing.

FLOP 4d-5h-3d

B bets 535k

Because small cards fell, B now wants A to think that his call from the big blind hit the Flop, and that his hand may well include those indeterminate hands like 5-4, 8-5, or even 6-7, or two Diamonds. But what did A think?

A raises to 1.8m (Pot 3.215m)
B needs 1.265m to call

Here, A thought that B’s bet was just a continuation bet, and with small cards falling A’s belief is reinforced that B is just trying to finish the hand. How would small cards likely hit B?

Additionally, B has been playing aggressively all night (stealing pots, etc.) so B could be betting with something (which is not likely with small cards falling) or with nothing. B could be playing just about anything, especially from the big blind.

At that point, A gambled that B has nothing. He may have also figured out that if B had something and then moves all-in later then he can move out quickly. So he raised to test B’s resolve.

B folds

B folds, because, indeed, he has nothing, and if he calls, he will be committed to continue. (Had B moved all-in then it will be a good all-in, for A could still be guessing at this point what B’s hand was. But B’s cards were not strong enough.)

Also, he folds, because A raised from late position, which allows for a wider range of hands, like even 5-4 or two Diamonds.

Poker, indeed, is not simply a game of good hands versus good hands. Experienced poker players will win with bad hands under the right conditions.

We give credit to B for first trying to win with a bad hand, a good effort to play he player. Unfortunately for B, A did the playing the player task superbly too, having noted previous actions and motivations and related that to current con text and probability and so played out to win well.

Summing up
I know this may seem like a lot to take in all at once, the fact is though that while poker is an easy game to learn it is hard to be very good at, hence the crazy stupid “chip flinging” you will come across on many poker sites.

Ironically the fact that so many players inhabit this dumb donk zone is great news for you. The reason why is that when you really learn how to play poker well you can turn mercenary and hunt them down in droves in low stakes real money games as well play free poker games sites that pay out real money like NoPayPOKER and happily build your skills and bankroll!

To make this work first, learn how to play poker on free online poker tables where you can learn while you lose but without losing real money, then once ready to can move up to low stakes and start to get rich!

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 26th, 2010 at 5:10 am and is filed under JetSki. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.