The Payoff Rule (Aces & Set Farming Part 2)
Last article we looked at the set farming strategy, and saw that it was an effective way to take money from an opponent with a big pair if both players adopted certain strategies. We also looked at two...
View ArticleGame Theory Part 4: Personal Opinions, Or Why I’m Not a Big Fan of Game Theory
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 It’s time to talk personal playing philosophy. Over the last month or so, I’ve written a ton about strategy rhos and game theory. I’ve talked about several different rhos: The...
View ArticleThe Basic Theory of Bluffing
Previously, I discussed how bets can at least loosely be classified into one of two classes, value bets or bluffs. I now want to discuss the theory behind bluffing. First, let’s reiterate what it means...
View ArticleClassifying Bets & Raises Part 1 – Why You Should Care
In a couple of previous articles I’ve talked about classifying bets as either value bets or bluffs. This classification was originally derived looking at last street play in fixed limit games. I now...
View ArticleClassifying Bets & Raises Part 2 – The Risk-Reward Approach
In this series I discuss how bets and raises are classified, and the thinking behind determining if a given bet or raise is correct. Part 1 As you’ll recall from last article, there is a well defined...
View ArticleClassifying Bets And Raises Part 3 – Aggression Is Overrated
part 1, part 2 The 10 most aggressive players in Vegas are broke – Bob Ciaffone in Improve Your Poker This is probably going to piss some people off, but Bob’s exactly right. For the last 25 years, the...
View ArticleProtect Your Action
This article is specifically for online players switching to playing live and new live players. When you start playing live, you unfortunately have to cope with one of the major downsides of live play:...
View ArticleThe Betting Lead
Last time, I wrote that the play of the cards in holdem often times coveys very little information about the state of the hand. This produces an interesting effect: since the available information at...
View ArticleAre You (Pot) Committed? What Exactly Is Commitment Anyways?
Poker books, TV shows and forums love to talk about being “committed” to a hand. However, I’ve come to a realization over time while reading and watching all this stuff: no one can agree on what it...
View ArticleThe Effects of Structure And The Motivation To Play a Hand
I want to make sure everyone is familiar with the concept of the “structure” of a poker game. The structure of a game is simply a shorthand for a few related rules for a given game: The number,...
View Article