If you make a statistical analysis of a series of typical limit hold ‘em players, you’ll find that the aggression factor - as defined by PokerTracker, meaning the ratio between betting or raising and calling - goes down the further into the hands we get. Good limit hold ‘em players rarely just call preflop, for instance (unless they’re in the big blind) so they have a very high aggression factor (AF) there. Calling on the flop is a bit more common, but the AF will still be high. On the turn, with the bigger bets, players tend to slow down and on the river, there’s a lot of checking and calling going on.

This is a fairly basic concept that is cause for a slight - but important - misunderstanding that I want to clear up.

Unlike no-limit and pot-limit games, there’s little you can do to control the pot odds in limit poker except tricky stuff like getting innovative with checkraises or waiting until the turn to raise. This means that draws - even fairly weak draws - will often have correct odds to call and there’s exactly nothing that you can do to prevent that.

This is entirely true.

“He Probably Has a Set”

If you’ve ever said or thought “my opponent probably has a set” you’re likely to have some holes in the way you read hands. I hope I can plug at least one of them today.

Reading hands isn’t about putting your opponent on a single hand. It’s about putting your opponent on a range of hands and narrowing that range as you get more information. Exclusion. Most people get this right; they start excluding things from their opponent’s likely holdings based on his actions. The sentence “it seems unlikely that he has AA since he didn’t re-raise preflop” is an example of this. We can surely discard a whole lot of unlikely holdings much the same way, especially after we see how they act on the flop.

Do you fold enough? Statistically, you probably don’t. In fact, I can probably count on my fingers the number of opponents I have played that have suffered from the problem of folding too often. Some of these very rare people simply don’t keep up with the aggression of shorthanded games (I play chiefly 6-max) and they fold a lot of profitable hands. Still, they tend to be winning players because the edge they get from playing tighter than the rest of the table is enough to churn out a profit.

But how about you? Do you fold?

This post is not intended as a bad-beat story. I’ve helpfully marked the bad-beat whine with italics, so you can skip that if you’re not interested in what exactly happened. In short, I lost a bunch of money at poker. Boo-frickin’-hoo.

I’ve had a tough week at the tables, losing a little over a third of my bankroll. A large part of it was taking a shot at 10/20 and running really bad, but I had “budgeted” for that, so while unfortunate, I was okay with it. Time to rebuild, and then give it another shot. Then I had a few bad days at 5/10, but nothing out of the ordinary; lost a few more hundred dollars. Unfortunate, but it happens. I was now down a little over $1200 in a few days’ time, but I could live with that.

Profit in poker comes from playing better than your opponents do - this is the “skill” part of the game. Often, playing better is not enough to show a profit because even if you’re a favorite going in, you will many times find yourself losing at showdown. Of course, you will sometimes be on the other side of that coin and be the one with the worst hand going in and then get lucky and outdraw your opponent. It happens. For the better player, it doesn’t happen quite often enough to say “it evens out” because the better player won’t get “lucky” as many times as he or she won’t take a race with the worst of it as often as a worse player. But that doesn’t matter much; poker isn’t a game of equality, it’s a game of winning money. And the better player wins more money.

Do you play online for money instead of fun? Something to consider that can - or even should - play more of a role in the decision making in tournaments is the fact that the profit doesn’t occur until after the tournament is over: Winning the money in two hours means that your hourly rate is twice as big as if you had finished it in four hours. For a cash game player, this is automatic. Whenever he feels like getting up and leaving, he takes whatever profit he has made. The tournament player is “stuck” at the table until he’s out or has won. In fact it’s even worse, because he’s missing out on money for every minute that he sits there.

It’s been a long while since I wrote down my first lesson learned at NL, but for various reasons I discontinued my NL career and stuck to limit for another six months. Now I’m back and playing both about as much.

As the title of this post implies, the lesson I’ve learned now is that folding the flop when you don’t have much of anything is a really good idea. Of course, this goes hand in hand with the first lesson; the fact that I have fold equity is because people (correctly, and sometimes not) fold on the flop. Now, I didn’t “struggle” with this concept. In fact, I immediately started happily folding flops at the no limit hold ‘em tables like a champ. What got me thinking was about all those hands I “peel one off” with at the limit tables.

The hand:

$100 NL Hold ‘em. You have AsQs and raise to $4 in middle position. The big blind calls. Effective stacks are deep: $200.

Flop comes Ks9h8s, giving you the nut flush draw but not much else. Big blind bets $5. With stacks this deep, you decide to call.

Turn comes 2c. Pot is $18. Big blind bets $14.

Now, before I ask the question, let’s look at some options for what the BB is up to:

1. He’s betting a decent, but not great, hand. Like KQ.
2. He’s betting a draw. Notably a flush draw (which is then lower than yours) or a straight draw.
3. He’s betting a strong hand, e.g. two-pair+.
3. He’s FOS and is betting a nothing-hand.

6-seater SnG tournaments are a very profitable game to play. They take an average of around 40 minutes to finish, making for a very high hourly winrate if you are successful enough with them. They differ from full 9- or 10-handed games in that you are hit by the blinds more frequently (once every 6 hands as opposed to every 9 or 10 hands) and you have to adjust your game accordingly in order to survive. You no longer get to play premiums only like you would 10-handed, and will have to rely on good hand-reading skills for the final stages of play.