It turns out I had just enough time to go to the Rio and play one satellite, which I won outright. I'd asked for a chop twice - once at 100/200 when I had 6K/big stack 11K/shortie 3K, and again just before the final hand at 200/400, when it was 4K/8K/8K. Both times, the big stack refused; after the second time, the shortie wound up pushing AJ into the big stack's AK when, as it turns out, I had kings. Ballgame, ship the 5 grand, etc.

This makes me want to post about making deals in general. Most of the "A+" online elite either don't make deals at all or won't accept anything that isn't wildly in their favor. When I'm playing my best, I think I'm up there, and I definitely don't give up much in shorthanded tournament situations (my final table record proves it) - but I definitely do make deals, and in fact, will sometimes take slightly the worst of it (giving up a couple of percentage points, though not more) to make one stick. Two or three thousand dollars is significant to me, but it's not a huge number or anything. And yet, I'd probably be okay with giving up some fraction of a c-note to take it down.

Why is this? I think most of the pros around the net these days greatly underestimate variance. I'll fess up right now and say that two thirds of my net profit last year came from a whopping one tournament. So did Nath's. Taking the first couple of 2+2'ers that come to mind, after making his deal for 400K 3 handed at the WSOP, Jurollo's going to be around there, as well; Rizen is an absolutely ridiculous tournament player, but does anyone think he made more than 500K last year if you don't include his WSOP result? Gobboboy's second place is probably pushing 80% of his roll...etc., etc., etc.

All of these big wins have one thing in common - suckouts. I had 3 big ones in mine. Gobboboy hit a one outer (among many others) in his, Nath, Jurollo and Rizen doubtless had quite a few, and so on. Even playing your best, it's very difficult to play so well or get hit by the deck so hard that you never get your chips in while behind. What's important about this is that it only takes one time where your 25% or 33% shot doesn't hold up to turn 2/3 of your profit for the year into a loss. You can argue that in the long run, that's irrelevant, because even tournaments full of suckouts factor into a good player's expectation, but the long run in poker is somewhere between the cockroaches inheriting the Earth and the Sun going supernova; in addition, there's no such thing as a tournament these days where shorthanded play doesn't consist of "push top X%, get called by top Y%". I firmly believe that when you get to a final table and are in line for a significant payout, you should do what you can to lock it up, rather than winding up in a "who can run the hottest 3 handed with 20 BB" game. Of course, this doesn't apply when you have a significant edge, but those aren't that easy to come by - and are somewhat cancelled out by the utter monkey tilt that I'd go on if I passed up a huge deal and then lost a coinflip.

The A+ league, especially the 18-22 crowd, has an easier time ignoring variance than I do. A lot of that has to do with the fact that they don't care about money management anyway, which is actually an advantage in nosebleed stakes poker. I, on the other hand, do care about money, and I have to admit this causes me to give up a step to guys like sbrugby that have no problem with dropping 1 million a week. Maybe I'll get to be enough of a degenerate gambler to stop caring about that, but I'm okay with where I am for now...and it sure looks to me like chopping tournaments, especially with short stacks in the endgame, is a much better idea than playing them out*.

*of course, if you're playing live and they don't call with a push with anything but aces, it's another story.

I had a bunch of interesting hands this weekend, but one ultimately totally inconsequential one stood out. In the Absolute 150K, with effective 5K stacks at 50/100, a terrible player (something like 60/9 in PT and unable to fold a pair if his life depended on it) limped UTG, I overlimped 6 5 in MP (not something I do all the time, but worth doing with a guy like this in the pot), a nondescript TAG button also limped and 5 people saw the flop, which came A K 5.

The BB, who was running at something like 40/25 [and later put 40 BB in postflop with K4o on a KJ99 board], bet out 300 into 500. UTG did what he'd usually done so far and called. I could safely assume that, barring exactly a flush draw or the remaining fives, the button was out of the hand. What should my action have been?

Lately, I've been reading stoxtrader's new limit book from 2+2, Winning in Tough Hold'Em Games. It's an excellent book - probably the best limit book ever written. Most of it is inapplicable to NL, but there are some concepts that roughly transfer over. If this were a limit hand, the book's advice here would be straightforward - fold PF (your hand strength is not high enough to raise or call, even against this horrible limper) but certainly take a card off on the flop because of the immediate odds, the double bet size on the next street and the fact that neither of these guys will fold top pair. There's one big difference here between limit and NL - I'm only getting a shade under 4:1 here, while in a limit pot it'd be closer to 7:1 - but then again, implied odds are much greater in NL, I can perhaps bluff a turned heart if they both check to me*, and of my 5 outs, 4 are almost certainly clean.

*This isn't really a contradiction from 'these guys will never fold'. Lots of people will bet Ax here as the BB, and UTG is bad enough to call with as little as Kx. But once someone else overcalls, many of these same guys will check/fold, or bet very weakly on the turn, allowing cheap draws in.

So, in this spot, I'm limping a hand exactly because of its implied odds potential against, frankly, someone who's terrible at poker, then go on to flop what is basically a very well hidden ~5 outer counting the backdoor draw. But from an informal poll over AIM, many people simply fold even with 100 BB, never mind 50, and almost no one peels every time even with the players described. I think that in this particular spot - against bad players who are often happy to get their stack in with A2 if you turn a 6, and will *always* do it assuming a split if you turn a 5 - you might have to peel every time, even if you know for sure that only improving will win you the hand. The only real problem is the relatively shallow stacks; with 100 BB in this spot in the future, I won't even be thinking twice.

Caveat: in the actual hand, after I called, the button overcalled and almost certainly got there when a spade hit the turn. Don't *totally* count the TAG out :P

---

Some other hands from the weekend:

1)With about 2.5K effective stacks, CO raises to 180 at 30/60 blinds and I make it 600 with AKs. He calls, then leads a Q66 (1 heart) flop for 300 (that's 1/4-ish of the pot). If you choose to continue here (it's not a crime if you fold), what's your play? I see shoves all the time, but rarely calls - and I think calling is the way to go. Nobody ever folds a queen to a flop shove and some of your opponents will even make heroic calls with middle pairs, but if you call, you have two shots to win - by spiking something or by raising them off their hand on the turn if he checks/bets a small amount one more time. As a bonus, you can mix in the occasional bluff of this kind with slowplaying your aces.

2)Simple, common spot that's really annoying when you guess wrong and he checks or folds: I'm deep stacked in the BB with Q 9. The CO, with a 15-20 BB effective stack, minraises and I call. I flop a K high flush (we'll call the flop KTx, but it can really be anything). What's the play? Checkraising usually wins a small to medium-ish pot; leading wins bigger pots but less often. The trouble is that it's incredibly hard to find the right balance of hands to lead on those flops vs. hands to checkraise (note: cash players don't have this problem because stacks are deeper and you can bet/3 bet enough that nobody wants to check in this spot.) This is also tricky because the king and queen are accounted for, so if you lead, only the A will continue/your hand isn't horribly vulnerable like it would be if you had 54. I suspect there's a mathematical answer that makes one option correct vs. most people's ranges, but it'll take a long time for someone to figure this out.

3)Another bitch about Stars tournaments: at one point today, I was 75'th of 2000 in the Million with a whopping 60 BB. Considering it's a 7000+ man tournament that starts with 200 BB, something is ridiculously wrong here. There are live tournaments with a 50K prize pool that have deeper stacks/better structures 2/3 of the way through than that one! But oddly enough, as I write, both the Million and the FTP 400K - which has a much better structure in the first 2 hours - have 20 BB average stacks with 150-ish people left and are more or less evened out with each other. How does that work, and why is the Stars structure so skewed 2-3 hours in? I hope someone fixes it soon, because between that and the terrible payouts, I have to fight myself to play it every week even after winning it once.

Looking forward to the WSOP...look for some big updates all month.

Getting back to bread and butter for a while, until I get back from the WSOP I'm going to focus more on specific hands and tournament summaries.

To start off, I'm going to talk about a hand that was actually posted in BBV. I had a couple of people disagree with me in that thread about it, but I'm very, very sure I'm right. The hand in question:

PokerStars Game #10068071900: Hold'em No Limit ($2/$4) - 2025/05/23 - 15:26:24 (ET)
Table 'Errai' 6-max Seat #2 is the button
Seat 1: MrteddyKGB ($388 in chips)
Seat 2: XTBCX ($191.70 in chips)
Seat 3: gambler2k4 ($878.05 in chips)
Seat 4: 007james007 ($298.60 in chips)
Seat 5: MrDima ($425.80 in chips)
Seat 6: Stoffer77 ($209.40 in chips)
gambler2k4: posts small blind $2
007james007: posts big blind $4
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to gambler2k4 [Ks Qs]
MrDima: folds
Stoffer77: calls $4
MrteddyKGB: calls $4
XTBCX: folds
XTBCX leaves the table
gambler2k4: calls $2
007james007: checks
*** FLOP *** [Qd Qh 5c]
gambler2k4: checks
007james007: bets $4
Stoffer77: calls $4
MrteddyKGB: calls $4
gambler2k4: calls $4
*** TURN *** [Qd Qh 5c] [As]
gambler2k4: bets $20
007james007: folds
Stoffer77: folds
MrteddyKGB: raises $20 to $40
gambler2k4: calls $20
*** RIVER *** [Qd Qh 5c As] [Qc]
gambler2k4: checks
MrteddyKGB: checks
*** SHOW DOWN ***
gambler2k4: shows [Ks Qs] (four of a kind, Queens)
MrteddyKGB: mucks hand (AA)

gambler was frustrated that KGB checked behind the second nuts here. Now, there's no question KGB played it bad on three streets, but the river was actually quite good and this is a spot where people should frequently save themselves a lot of money (but rarely do). Consider the action:

-In a 4 way QQ5r pot, BB minbets (who cares), the first limper calls (this can be a 5, a pair, occasionally ace high), the second limper overcalls (this is usually *not* a 5 or worse, although really bad players will sometimes still have ace high, and occasionally something like 88 will show up here) and now the SB makes it call #3. What does SB, a regular actually dropping down from 5/10, have on this completely dry flop? Hint: it's not a 5. Even without any reads, you could check/fold unimproved AA on the next street here and be right 9/10 of the time - even if SB is bad enough to have nothing, there are still the other guys to worr about.

-The turn is an ace and now SB leads into the field with a large bet. This one's pretty simple: either he's a giant clown with an ace (if you're KGB holding two of them, that's sort of unlikely) or he's been badly slowplaying a Q (pretty much 90% of the time). When KGB raises and gambler calls, since even a complete idiot isn't likely to think A5o is still good here, that changes to around 95%.

-The river is a queen. Gambler puts his opponent on an ace and 'of course' checks. This is a terrible play as no opponent in his right mind would value bet this river with an ace (even the Zeebo theorem doesn't usually work on a guy with a 5 in this spot), but KGB has two aces. Does that change anything? A cursory look at this hand says 'not really' - there's just very little way for gambler to end up with the last ace in his hand at this point, and he's certainly getting checkraised by the last queen. Therefore, what KGB has is a crying check behind. In fact, if I were him, this is the rare spot where I don't even bother calling a river bet with the second nuts, either.

---

I recently played a 20/40 limit hand (yes, I know, bear with me) with the same idea. In a very good 8 handed game, 2 people limped, the button raised, SB called, I called with Kxs in the BB and 5 of us saw a flop, which came KJJr. It was checked to the button, who bet; SB called, I overcalled, and both people called behind me. The turn was another jack; if it were not disrespectful, I would have open folded.

Certainly, when the button bets, he often/usually has me beat here, but not always; it's a big pot, he might have raised some other suited king (giving me outs to split) or QTs, even if he has AK I'm only losing a small amount in equity by taking a card off for one bet, etc. When the SB calls, he can have QT, 99 (it was a good game), some sort of AQ/AT type hand, and so on. As long as he isn't slowplaying a jack *most of the time*, my overcall is still marginal either way. But when both limpers call after me, either we're playing a live game where everyone is drunk and hasn't looked at their cards yet, or at least one jack - and probably both the other kings - are out. It's simply almost mathematically impossible for me to have > 1 out. While the third jack makes my third nuts look pretty, it doesn't actually mean much except that I'm now drawing dead.

---

This leads me to the title of the article- in a game with thinking players, or at least players that understand the other guys have cards, too, overcalling on scary boards is a tell that cuts both ways. Note that in the second hand, I overcalled on a KJJ board with a king/no kicker, essentially a bluff catcher, counting on my overcall to shut down the action from anything worse and telling me whether I had the best hand; to some extent, you can use the 'implied strength' of this kind of overcall to your advantage. But after that point, on a board that scary, slowplaying is useless because your hand is just as face up whether you raise or call - and you really shouldn't be calling the bottom 95% of your range.

There is absolutely no need to make your opponent feel that acutely aware of his need to fold the second nuts.

Note: Because of the nature of this post, it's more applicable to MSNL than HSNL, and won't help you much at nosebleed stakes.

Getting the most out of a guy telegraphing an overpair or a huge draw when you have a monster is pretty easy - just don't slowplay and all the chips will be in the pot soon enough. When you don't have a monster, your action is also pretty easy - just fold, unless you've got something with enough outs or implied odds to continue. Running big bluffs on people with big hands doesn't pay.

Of course, people don't always have a big hand when they bet, and rarely have a big hand when they check. Nevertheless, it also doesn't pay to blindly bet/raise trying to pick up every medium or large pot just because the villains aren't showing any strength - even bad players will eventually catch on, and decent ones will quickly start trapping you. So the trick here is to read villains' hands well enough to know when their hand is OK, but cannot stand much heat, and take away a decent portion (not all) of these.

This is a very broad topic and can't really be covered with one post, mostly because every player has a different set of tendencies. But almost everyone playing MSNL and even many HSNL players will telegraph their hands to you in their own way, especially in limped pots and given multiway action. (Limped pots are great for this because the average hand is weaker and people are less willing to contest them. You can often get a hand like JT to fold on a J64 board in a 10 BB pot, where the same bad player will happily stack off for 100 BB if you raised PF.)

When you are not the initial aggressor, the trick here is to recognize when somebody is trying to exercise pot control. In an MSNL 4 or 5 person limped multiway pot (generally, this will be a live game), when the first or second limper bets less than 2/3 of the pot on the J64, rainbow flop, they are very likely to have exactly a weak to decent jack. Most of the time they're called in one spot, they will either check or blocking bet (underbet) the turn; if they are raised, they will either call and check/fold the turn, or fold immediately. This is the type of board and hand on which a late position float is profitable; you can see if anyone else overcalls, the other guy doesn't typically have much, and unless you have 72o, your hand almost certainly has a decent number of outs if your planned turn bluff doesn't work. The more outs you have, the better a float is; keep in mind that something as weak looking as 87 with a backdoor flush draw might turn out to have 40% equity in the hand!

When you *are* the guy taking a stab at the pot in the first place, you should pay attention to how likely the people in the pot with you are to fold to second barrels and how likely they are to have draws. If everyone checks to you on that J64 flop when you have the button and you have a tight image, it's OK to bet with almost any two cards, as long as your opponents aren't so bad that they will call down with something like 76 over multiple streets (very few are.) There aren't many draws out there, the checks say nobody is likely to have a jack (but since you're on the button and overlimped, you very well might), and even if someone calls your flop bet, they will probably not call a turn bet. BTW, keep in mind that if one of the blinds calls your bet on this board, they are far more likely to have a jack than when a limper check/calls, instead. Limpers here will sometimes take cards off with very little, but because there are people behind them, the blinds have a tighter range. That doesn't mean they won't still check/fold lots of turns, though.

Some other things to look for to identify opponents with weak or medium strength hands that can be taken off them:

-people who will raise PF and cbet most flops, but usually will not bet the turn (and if they check the turn, usually check the river as well)

-people who limp a lot from early position and weak lead on the flop

-any sort of weakish looking bet (more applicable online than live, since live bets are undersized)

-when the player quickly checks any scare card (a third flush card, an ace, a straight completing card), especially on the turn - even if they call the turn, a river follow through is nearly always profitable (bonus points if you actually are merely semibluffing on the turn)

Against decent or good players who are unlikely to put in a full stack light, you should also consider otherwise rarely used alternate lines. Let's say you are in the blinds and defend a hand to a middle position raise in a full ring game. The flop comes 872, and you know that this player is unlikely to have hit this board. What is your plan?

Note that I didn't say what your hand is. No doubt, you'd probably check/call some hands, check/raise other hands and maybe bet out a few. But most of the time you check/call, you also check the turn, most of the time you check/raise, you will lead the turn, and if your bet on the flop gets called, you will probably check scary turns and bet random ones - again, regardless of your hand. These are all natural tendencies and your opponents get confused when you go against them - so, when you think they missed the flop, consider doing that. When you are against a thinking, but straightforward opponent, check/call, betting a board like 8723 with a hand like 65 will often get better hands to fold cheaper than checkraising the flop would have, and if you then follow through on any river, good players will frequently even talk themselves into folding overpairs.

I'll be on vacation for a while, but should be back posting in a couple of weeks.

In my last blog entry, I wrote about a couple of basic online poker tells. Like I said in that entry, these tells shouldn't really be new to you if you are an experienced online player; they're meant to be representative of the several dozen other tells exactly like those two. In fact, except for the better HSNL regulars and the best tourney pros, almost everyone gives off tells via their timing and betting patterns in almost every hand they play. This time around, I want to give out some tips on how to take advantage of that.

First, let's talk for a bit about preflop tells. These are more important for tournaments, but do tend to show up vs. shortstackers in cash games, as well. The majority break down into two categories:

1)Oversized raises

2)The speed of the preflop action

Oversized raises are obviously the easiest ones to spot and are almost always accurate (that is, few people fake a 4x raise; even if they do, sooner or later, some short stack will reraise them anyway and their faking will be uncovered.) I'll make it simple: most of the time, a bigger than normal raise is AK, QQ-88. Sometimes, it's AA-KK, especially when a low stakes player makes it deep into a big tournament. Overbet pushes (when someone just shoves 20-30 BB, especially with no limpers) tend to be a shade weaker - something like AK-AJs, JJ-77. Keep in mind that a good player shoving 20 BB after several limpers will often have something worse, though, and a 10-12 BB late game shove is also quite different/depends on position.

The speed of the action - especially a preflop call - also sometimes means something. This is quite a bit trickier to spot, is not nearly as accurate as bet sizing, and needs experience to get it right, so I won't go too deeply into it. One thing you can take on faith, though: if a bad player autocalls (that is, checks the 'call a raise' button) a PF raise with medium or deep stacks, it is a hand that he will play no matter what, but not a monster or anything special. Look for small pairs, small to medium suited connectors, or two 'not so great' big cards like ATo/KJo. These same players will quickly call with any pair postflop, and will stack off with top pair, but they'll need to think when calling with overcards or a gutshot.

Taking advantage of these should be self-explanatory, so let's move on to postflop tells. Most of the time I see decent - but not great - players lose tons of chips or bust out of a tournament *early* is when they ignore an obvious tell coming from a horrible player. I'm not going to list individual tells - there are too many and I'd like to be able to play poker afterwards without having to adjust all over the place - but here are some things decent players should do far more than they do:

1)Raise blocking bets. When somebody bets 100 chips into a 1000 chip pot, a raise to 1000 - or even 800 - must work < 50% of the time to show a profit. Very few people betting 100 into 1000 know anything about poker, so that bet is almost always what it seems - scared money. (Even if you get called here, you should sometimes follow through on the turn for the same reason.) Once in a great while, you'll run into an exception, get minimum 3 bet, make a note of it and move on; next time, you can fold top 2 pair to his set.

2)Pay attention to the flop bet. When a decent, straightforward player raises, gets 5 calls, and then bets a decent amount into the field on an 8 3 2 flop, your nines are no good. Don't even bother to call the flop bet to 'see where you are' or any of that nonsense. Yes, you have an overpair, and yes, sometimes he will merely have a flush draw - but that doesn't mean anything. You're still a giant dog to his range and losing tons of money on the call, so just fold. (However, if you're deep stacked and have implied odds, sometimes you should take a card off with a hand like 43, even when you'd fold 99. See below.)

3)Pay attention to the flop bet, the flip side: When that same player bets big in a 6 way pot, you can assume he has at least an overpair or a big flush draw. If you have a set, calling is almost always a bad play. Why? Sometimes, an ace will hit the turn when the other guy has kings (and so on down the line); sometimes, the third flush card will hit and kill your action/hand; sometimes, you'll make a boat with the second 8 and freeze him up...and so on. Bottom line: in multiway pots, when somebody's hand is face up as a big pair, it is very rarely correct to slowplay your monster. There are only a few exceptions, such as when you're second to act and there's a couple of maniacs behind you, or when the guy is good enough to make a tough fold if you raise the flop but will commit himself on the turn.

3.5)When and how to try to crack that big pair: Mediocre players will often just raise every draw, including hands like J T, on the flop, thinking "flush draw + overcards + fold equity". Big mistake. His bet told you that he isn't folding and probably has an overpair, so why are you counting any fold equity *or* overcards as outs? More often, it's correct to just call and go for overcalls - reserving the right to semibluff raise on the turn, especially if a J or T hits. Conversely, if you have that 43 on the 832 flop I mentioned earlier and are closing the action, you should sometimes also call even when definitely behind, looking for a "brick" 3 on the turn. In HSNL against thinking opponents, you would also look for aces and fives and occasionally semibluff those cards, too. (But do *not* usually call with aces, such as A3 on an 832 flop, when facing a certain big pair - your implied odds simply don't exist.)

That generally covers "what to do if villain has what he thinks is the nuts." Next time, I'll write about a few ways to take advantage when the villain telegraphs a weaker hand.