The Supplemental Kick

All online poker players make mistakes sometimes, even the pros. Learning what the most common mistakes are and avoiding falling into these pitfalls will improve your poker online game and profits. One common mistake is to simply play your cards by the book and not attempt any bluffs. It makes you too easy to read and people will not call your bets if you only play good cards. Look for a few opportunities to put out a naked or semi-bluff when the betting is low and you can go to showdown fairly cheaply to show your bluff. Another common online poker mistake is to place too much value on a hand that is only top pair. Sure, this hand does win sometimes, but is easily beat also. When holding top pair, always be alert to the fact that another player could be betting two pairs or a set. When you raise in No-Limit poker, be sure not to under-bet the pot. You want those who are on a draw to have pay a high price to see another card. Under-bets breed bad beats. Don’t be a calling station and donk off your chips. Recognize when your hand is beat. When you go up against a calling station, don’t even attempt to bluff. Instead put out value bets to build the pot. There is tendency to tighten up toward late stages of tournaments. Instead of going on the defensive with tight play, look for opportunities to aggressively steal pots from tight players. Avoid telegraphing your hand with tells – little clues that indicate whether you are strong or weak, like reaching for your chips after seeing your pocket cards. Do look for tells from other players, and even use them yourself consciously to deceive your opponents.

I’ve noticed something as I delved into the microstakes of .01/.02 5NL, and it’s some things that many of you can considerably take advantage of when or if you start to play poker there. First, If you’re using any kind of tracker, you’ll notice that the pre flop raise percentage is nearly nonexistent. No my friends, this is the calling station level of online poker play. All of them just want to see a flop. So here’s a tip. When you raise with a big hand, raise big. Forget the whole 3bbs or 4bbs. I’m talking raise it up 10bbs at the least. Because the majority of these players live to call. So why not make them call your strong hands with more money. It’s simply a positive expected value play. Second, I’d like to point out that a lot of these guys really like to play casino games for fun and not to win. So they love to go to showdown. If you’re planning on going to showdown, make sure you have a hand that at least has some showdown equity. Finally, there’s the Any Ace theorem. Quite simply, you will not get the majority of these players to fold any ace. They’ll chase it down to the river if need be, no matter how hard your betting. However, there is one way to counteract this. The All-In. It’s a move that scares these people. Remember, the majority are playing for fun, so by making them lose their stack in one fell swoop, you’re not making it fun anymore.

When you are in the small or big blind in a full ring poker game, you find yourself at the mercy of seven other poker players. They have all seen their cards before making a move, and you are in the precarious position of having committed money to the pot without having looked at your hole cards. This is a very matter-of-fact way of looking at a familiar situation you deal with countless times every time you play poker. In a friendly game, you may defend your big blind often, but if you are playing in a serious poker game, you should take more consideration before playing the hand.

The blinds are meant to induce action, and when you defend your blind to a raise with a weak hand, you are giving action in a situation where you otherwise would have probably folded. Your opponent knows this, and knows the likelihood of you having a strong hand is small, so he will relentlessly continuation bet you, leaving you with the same decision to make every time you miss the flop. Calling from the blind is a very weak move, and is a losing play in the long run. Only multiway pots give correct odds for you to call a small raise preflop from the blind. It leaves open the possibility of check raising and trapping opponents in the middle when you do make a strong hand on the flop. Heads up situations from the blinds are incredibly difficult to play profitably, as you are out of position against a preflop raiser who will follow up on their aggression, leaving you in a difficult spot. Either reraise a preflop raise with a monster hand, or tell a story and run a bluff this kind of raise. If not, just fold your blind and don’t get involved.

If you are going to mix it up from the blinds, play aggressively and have a hand worthy of showdown, because more often than not you will have to show it down against an aggressor. Playing out of the blinds is very difficult to do profitably over the long run, so do not hesitate to fold preflop and wait until you are in position against a blind, and then go for the kill.

Oh, how fun it is to pick a favorite poker hand out of the air! Say like 6-3, which you one time happened to win a really big pot in that cash game when you flopped a boat from the big blind and won a big pot against somebody slowplaying aces. So from then on you just can’t get over the idea that 6-3 is the jail breaker, and you’ll play that hand for a raise and reraise, because, man, that hand just works wonder for you.

And yeah, while it’s fun to play random poker hands and see what becomes of them, in the long run sticking in too much money on hands that got built up in your mind out of chance or superstition is a class A ticket to losing money.

One of the great examples of this kind of play is Doyle Brunson’s 10 – 2. How many times have you heard a good old boy recount the story of Doyle winning the World Series of Poker two years in a row by pushing all in with that safe cracker? They usually fail to mention that both times Doyle ended up making a boat with it, and had been a huge underdog on the hand. But it’s the way you remember the big hands, the weird cards that somehow made it, that will get your brain tied to hand that is hardly even speculative, and just needs pure gold 1 in 400 kind of flops to be worth anything at all.

Of course, you’ve got to have a little gamble in your poker game now and then, but do it in the right spots, not just out of habit.