XEOflex's Blog

Controlling-The-Size-of-a-Pot

2009-10-23T06:19:19Z

Pot control is the art of manipulating the size of the pot based on the relative strength of your hand. “Relative strength of your hand” refers to how strong your hand is in comparison to the likely range of hands of your opponent. This means that the tighter your opponent is, the stronger hand you will need to play a big pot and the looser your opponent is, the weaker your hand can be to play a big pot.

For example if you have top pair against a calling station fish, you would usually be correct to place bigger bets on the flop, turn and river. With top pair against a tight nit, it’s more of a judgment call, but you still usually want to avoid a situation where you end up with all of your chips in the middle.

Pot control is one of the most important skills for no-limit players. By keeping the pot the appropriate size, it becomes much easier to avoid mistakes. Pot control both keeps you out of trouble and gets as much value for your hand as possible.

There are two parts to pot control:

1. Factors to consider

2. Implementation

Factors to Consider

When practicing pot control, there are several factors one must consider. The easiest is stack sizes. As a general rule the range of hands with which you’re willing to showdown with all the chips in the middle should be wider with a 50BB stack than with a 200BB stack. This means you should be much more willing to put a 50BB stack all in with top pair top kicker than you would with a 200BB stack.

The second factor to consider is the strength of your hand vs. the range of your opponent’s hand. This is more of a judgment call based on past experience, reads of the opponent, table dynamics, board texture and betting patterns. There is a lot to consider when trying to figure the strength of your hand vs. the range of the opponent. This is basically a problem of hand reading. The more you play and the better you get at hand reading, the easier this step will become.

The last factor to consider is the style of the opponent. This is closely related to the last factor but I have separated it for one reason. Two different styles of opponents can have a wide range but you want to practice pot control differently for each one. If you have top pair top kicker against a bad chaser, you will want to bet the hand aggressively and let him pay you off. If you have top pair top kicker against a tricky, aggressive player who has a wide range that you can’t read, you will want to practice pot control to keep the pot small. The aggressive player will be able to put you to difficult decisions in big pots if you don’t have a very defined range of hands for him.

Implementation

Implementation is the actual method you use to manipulate the pot to the size you want it to be. Implementation can include the decisions of whether to bet or check, raise or call, and sometimes fold.

An easy example of this is the top pair top kicker vs. a calling station. If you believe the opponent is on a draw or weak hand and will call any bet, it’s a good idea to bet the full pot on the flop, turn, and sometimes the river. Occasionally, if you feel a weak opponent is on a draw that missed on the river, you can check to him on the river and call a bluff. Other times you will want to go ahead and bet the river again for value against a weaker hand.

With top pair against an aggressive, tricky opponent, it becomes a little more difficult first on analyzing the factors and second on the actual implementation. Aggressive opponents make it difficult to manipulate the pot size because they sometimes raise with strong hands and sometimes with draws, making it difficult for you to distinguish between the two. That’s why I recommend playing for small pots against good aggressive opponents. They usually aren’t going to pay 100BBs to you with a hand weaker than top pair.

Playing small pots against aggressive opponents means occasionally checking behind on the turn with your top pair and then betting again on the river. This line is very common and recognizable but it still keeps the pot small and tempts your opponents to call with weaker hands. It also means sometimes checking the flop – a common scenario for checking the flop is after 3-betting preflop with AK and then spiking a king. Against certain players, checking top pair here is a correct way to play the hand (occasionally, not every time). The logic behind this is that good, thinking players can pretty easily put you on AK, therefore making a continuation bet from you unprofitable – they will fold worse hands, and continue with strong hands.

Of course you don’t want to get into the habit of defaulting to a certain line every time you play a hand against tough players. That would be easily exploited and therefore unprofitable. The best way to protect yourself against these tough players is to mix it up yourself so that they are uncertain of your holdings and less confident in their reads of you to push you around.

There are a thousand ways to play a weak-ish hand for a small pot so I’m not going to get into them all in this article. But I hope I have at least given you something to think about the next time you hit the poker tables. Once you get into the habit of thinking like this, your results will improve dramatically.

First-Blog-from-WPT-Marrakech

2009-10-11T15:54:34Z

Welcome poker fans and thanks for visiting. During the week please visit the special WPT Marrakech Live Reporting website for live tournament updates, video clips, photos and player chip counts. Furthermore, each day while we are here in the lovely city of Marrakech we will be using this space for blogging and rounding up a collection on photos to share with you all.

My first impressions of Marrakech were absolutely amazing, everyone is so friendly and the place has class. The pink city is known for it's snake charmers, magic potions, hidden palaces. So I'm really looking forward to having a good look around and sharing the experience with you. First stop this morning was at the Aeroport Marrakech Menara to pick up the 6 Poker Club players from all around France that qualified with Chilipoker. Each lucky player besides having all expenses paid (including hotel, flights and a €4,500 buy-in to the main event) was able to bring 3 friends, so in total there was 24 people to pick up from the airport.

Unfortunately one of the players missed his flight (we won't mention any names) hope that player will have more luck at the main event. Finally the poker players came made it threw the often hectic passport control and was greeted by the Chilipoker staff Ophelie, Alex Henry and myself. We said our hello's and all jumped in to the taxis to head off to the hotel.

Everyone (including myself) seemed really excited to be here and the car every one was having a laugh on behalf of one of the players who ended up "bubble boy" at one of the recent European Poker Tour Events.

Ophelie was giving a breakdown of this weeks events, including a shopping trip to the famous Souk Market, maybe some camel rides, a tour around Marrakech on quad bikes, a Chilipoker party and some action packed poker tournaments, side games, satellites and cash games. The players were surprised to hear about the structure of the cash games here in Marrakech, as they uniquely feature a 90 minute time window before any player can leave the table with any cash that he has won. An odd but interesting cash game structure.

On the way from the airport the scene outside was really interesting. Lot's of motorbikes zooming on both sides, the highest palm trees I have ever seen, olive trees, camels, horses and carriages and much more unusual architecture. The drive from the airport to the hotel took no more then 20 minutes. We all stepped out of the car to sign the players into the hotel room that we had booked for them.

As we waited for the rooms to be ready, I had a chat with a few of the players that will be blogging on the French WPT Blog and I was rather happy to find out that a few of the players knew me from the work I do on behalf of Chilipoker on social networking sites such as Twitter andFacebook. The players were interested (I was going to say happy but I don't think its appropriate in this case) to know that there was going to be a host of professional poker players at the invitational Pro-AM event being played on Monday including, Liz Lieu, Annette Obrestad,Antonio Esfandiari, Elky, Tony G, Fabrice Soulier and our very own Alex Dreyfus.

As a matter of fact as I am writing this blog, Roger Hairabedian and another popular French Pro Poker Player (forgot his name) is playing at a table right in front me.

The players seemed keen to go check out the venue Es Saadi Resort and the Casino de Marrakech, so we got together for a group photo and headed off to the Casino. Now it's time for a lamb and couscous I will be back later with another update from The Casino in Marrakech...

For the lucky players who qualified it's big money in Marrakech or Bust, so good luck and enjoy the ride!

The-Internet-is-Watching-You-Play-Poker

2009-10-06T19:29:35Z

I googled my pokername today and found my own poker profile.
Some find this intimidating. I don't just because I know better.

It's great to be part of a strong poker community.

I have some really good friends.

Thanks guys & gals.

See you in Marrakech!

...

Earn-a-spot-on-Face-The-Ace-and-win-up-to-1000000

2009-06-21T16:27:38Z

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Get started by clicking the download the free Full Tilt Poker Game Software. Follow the instructions to install the software, set up a free account, and you'll be ready to play poker and qualify for Face The Ace on Facebook.

The-Incredible-Edible-Poker-Hand-Distribution

2009-04-08T09:09:25Z

As every self-respecting poker degenerate knows, there are 1,326 unique starting hands in the Texas Hold'em universe.

When you peek at your hole cards at the beginning of a hand, all of the 1,326 combinations are equally likely. Your chances of seeing [AhAs] are exactly the same as seeing [7d2c]. That is, the 1,326 starting hands are isometric with regard to probability: each has the same chance of occurring. So when you stare down at the opaque patterned backing of your hole cards prior to peeking at their undersides, you're not looking at a specific hand. You're looking at a probability cloud containing 1,326 possibilities, one of which will manifest when your hole cards are formally observed.

Prior to observation, a given player's hand isn't a hand; it's a probability cloud containing N distinct possibilities.

We call this probability cloud a hand distribution or a hand range and far from being a recondite mathematical theory of interest only to statisticians and poker geeks, it's one of the most powerful weapons we have in the battle against incomplete information. Good players use this weapon all the time, consciously or unconsciously. Every time a player deduces a piece of information, however vague, about an opponent's hand, he's creating a hand distribution.

My opponent has either Aces, Kings, Queens, or Ace-King. Not sure which. He's strong, though.
My opponent has two cards (any two cards) of a particular suit, for the flush. Or he might be bluffing the flush.
My opponent either has a set or an overpair.
My opponent has top pair with a good kicker.

Each of the above statements can be expressed precisely by assigning the opponent a distribution containing or more potential specific hands. For example, if the preflop action convinces you that your opponent has Aces, Kings, Queens, or Ace-King, you've assigned him a distribution—a probability cloud—containing 34 distinct possibilities, each of which is a specific two-card starting hand.

A distribution can be as small or as large as necessary to countenance all the possibilities. If you know an opponent's specific hole cards (perhaps you caught a glimpse of them), that opponent has a hand distribution containing a single hand. The probability of him having that hand is 1.0 or 100%. This is a truism, but a necessary one in order to normalize the underlying logic. Everything is a distribution. If everybody folds to you on the button and you're considering whether to raise, the small blind and the big blind (since their cards are completely unknown) have a random distributioncontaining every possible 2-card holding. After you raise, of course, and the small blind re-raises, you'll have to revise his distribution to take into account the new information. But you're always working in terms of distributions. Every player's hand at the table can and should be thought of as a distribution containing one or more hands.

Distributions have enormous utility because pinpointing an opponent's exact hole cards is difficult. Even when we're 95% certain our opponent has a given hand, there's always that pesky 5% chance he's splashing around with something else. And usually we won't be 95% certain; we'll be 75% certain, or 50% certain, or an unqualifiable amount of certain. And this is where one of the most common and egregious mistakes in poker is made, namely:

Playing in such a way as to maximize your value against the specific hand you believe your opponent has.

The thought process goes something like this:

Okay, I'm pretty sure my opponent has such-and-such a hand here. Yes. He raised preflop, I bet into him on the flop, now he's raising...yep, he's got such-and-such. I might be wrong here, but I'm gonna go with my read. I'm all-in / I fold / etc.

There's nothing wrong with making a read and sticking to it; the problem is that the above train of thought is usually indicative of a read that is too specific—far more specific than the available information warrants. When we put all our eggs into one basket by making a very precise, possibly incorrect deduction about an opponent's cards, and when we base our betting decisions on that deduction, we front-load the difficulty of poker onto our (flawed) ability to extract (incomplete) information from a (loosely-wired) poker situation.

In other words, we fall into the trap of deterministic strategy. We play as if our opponent had a specific hand.

But until we actually observe an opponent's hand for ourselves, it's not a hand, it's a probablistic distribution of potential hands. Sometimes this distribution will coalesce, based on the available evidence, and we'll be able to say with confidence that the opponent is holding such-and-such a specific hand. But more often the distribution will contain a handful of possibilities. Our job is to play in such a way as to maximize our EV not against the single most-likely hand, but against the range of plausible hands an opponent could hold.

And in order to maximize our EV in situations involving multiple opponents with hand distributions, we have to know how to calculate our EV in situations involving multiple opponents with hand distributions, using available tools such as PokerStove and, of course, by writing code in our language of choice. Stay tuned.

Read the orginal post here...