Improving your game by not looking at your hole cards

There have been a couple times in my reading that I've heard someone recommend playing while not even looking at your cards. They say it can help to improve your opponent reading skills, and will emphasize positional plays. My question is has anyone done this, and if so how? What levels did you play at, was it a SNG, tournament, freeroll, etc. Did it help your game at all?

The Norwegian player Annette Obrestad - who won a WSOP bracelet at the age of 18 - is said to have won a $4 buy-in 180 player online sit and go without looking at her cards apart from for one hand.

A player went all-in against her and she looked at her cards to decide how to react. She is said to have done this to emphasise the importance of playing your opponent and not playing based on the strength of the cards you hold.

It's certainly an approach that paid off for her.

I've tried it a couple of times and busted out early on both occasions. I think it's true - you do have to focus on your opponents and their pattern of play. But most of us need the safety blanket of knowing what cards we actually hold before we make a move.

I would suggest if you try this to do it with play money, or possably a freeroll. Position play and reading your opponet are good skills to have, but I wouldnt pay too much money for them.
Although I could see this being an intimidation factor in face to face games if you can win consistantly doing it...lol.

This has to be about the stupidest idea I ever heard.

First off, If you think you can do it and want to try...even if it is just for the hell of it, DONT EVEN THINK OF USING PLAY MONEY OR A FREEROLL. Opponents will call 5 all ins with 29off??? dont even waste the time. Second, It wouldnt intimidate anyone face to face, they would just figure luck. If you're online, noone knows that you arent looking at your cards, because if they did, they would play back at you everytime.

+1

I guess you could try it on freerolls or $1 tourneys if you want to try something weird...

It's not a safety blanket, it's critical to poker. You can walk and chew gum at the same time (observe your opponents and look at your cards).

Hand history replay available on Deuces Cracked, I think.

Improving your game by not looking at your hole cards

Sounds very challenging.
I will have to play a few Free Rolls and see how far I get.

I'm always looking for ways to improve my game.

Thanks for the post.


lol
Just tried it the 1st time.
It was crazy.
I didn't last long but I think I will experiment some more.

If you haven't tried this you have to give it a try.

First Feelings:
Helpless
Lost
What the?
Makes you take a step back.
Next time I will try and be more patient and get a better read on the table.


If I keep experimenting with this I will start a new thread.
I will Label it " I DARE You. " and challenge others to post there best showings.

Good Luck

fwiw at micro stakes this probably isn't a great idea because your approach should pretty much be showdown-based and getting people to call you with much worse hands. But if you're at like 25nl+ it's a good exercise. The problem with tourneys is a lot of the time in push-fold mode the correct move is so heavily based on your cards. In cash play however you're rarely in that spot so you can play deep poker and work on playing the player and applying pressure in position and win a lot of pots without showdown. Of course it gets into a problem if people see you bluffing a lot and just call a ton. The proper adjustment for you would be to just value-bet thin and bet your good hands hard. Obviously without looking at your cards you can't really make that adjustment lol.

fwiw there were a few CC tourneys last year I was playing without looking at my holecards. Was trying to record a video but the software I was using to cover up the portion of the screen kept breaking and I kept not being able to do it. Maybe I'll try it again soon .

Someone did this, and posted his hand histories here, like a year ago or something. Probably could be found by searching, but I don't remember who it was anymore.

Wow, what a strange concept...as RichKo says, it would be fruitless trying it on a freeroll or play money tables and even more fruitless online cos no-one can see that you are doing it!

My husband plays in a small 6 man home game once a week and one of the players does that all the time. Bets without looking at his cards but I think this is more arrogance and plain stupidity than strategy (I can say this because I know the person).

I dont think that I would try it as I believe that you should play your cards and the players!

what alot of people aren't getting is it's a training exercise not a strategy .
I need to try it for sure , my reading skills are weak . I am sure if you do it long you'd have to pick up stuff easier since it would be all you had to go on . like a blind person knows more about whats going on around him than a sighted one .



p.s I have software to practice with lol , no real money will be nessary .

i have tried part of this method in a few fun $10 games with friends. every now and again after bluffing a few times i would not look at my pockets and raise pre-flop. it usually gets a good number of people out and you can learn how the few people who play view the strength of their cards. the problem is, is that in order to get a good read on someone while doing this you really do need a few show downs to see what kind of cards your opponents are willing to play when they know your not looking at yours.

Blind raise is known as a straddle bet IIUC, strictly an action play (let's gamble!).

i'm pretty sure this is a live game technique. used to psyche your opponents. i've seen it done on the televised tournaments and high stakes poker.
to do it on the internet i think would be adsurd. who would know you weren't looking???????
i see a little bit of a point here on not relying on your cards and playing the opp, but you can still achieve this and look at your cards!!
this to me would be like playing russian roulette. peace

My first idea...what a stupid concept!!!
My second idea...as a training excercise can be interesting, even I dont really understand how to imagine the way to do. Online I have to put a poststrip at the screen in order to avoid seeing my cards? And the outcome is that I fold if I think the other has a hand and try to force him/her to fold if I think they dont have?
Anyway its gambling playing a hand without knowing what it is?
Saludos
muck

I watched a video (cardrunners?), guy doing the video played HU w/ holecards covered. the point was to emphasize aggression and hand reading skills and to demonstrate how big a factor they are heads up. he did fairly well if I remember correctly.

i heard a tip on the 2 plus 2 podcast once where a pro
( i cant remember which maybe Barry Greenstein )
said that your hole cards were the least important thing to consider
when deciding how to play a hand. Position, stack sizes, opponent reads,
etc. were all more important than hole cards pre flop.

I coudl see how this would train your reading skills but i think doing it offline in an actual game would benefit a bit more, i play a home game with a bunch of friends for whatever money we can scrape up i think I'm going to try it there a few times and see what happens.

A few things:

1. Jay's right, it's not a long-term strategy, it's strictly for hand-reading. Instead of playing your own hand it gets you to think more about ranges your opponent has, what you are representing, etc. No one's denying that without seeing your cards you are at a disadvantage and that if your goal is profit you shouldn't do it. But it can be a fun exercise to drop down and play a lower limit doing this

2. Some people saying who would know. That's kinda the point. If people know you aren't looking, it's kinda hard to represent hands. If they know you're not looking they'll just keep playing back and pushing all-in. Unless you want to start calling off a stack with literallly a random hand, you can't do anything about it.

3. No one's talking about straddles, people are talking about doing an entire session without once looking. It's not just one bet without looking then look, it's you play the entire time without looking at your cards. This forces you to basically win all your hands from your opponents folding (although I did actually watch one training video with holecards hidden where he made a call for value because he actually thought his range of ATC was better than his opponent's range, which he thought was composed of a lot of missed draws and no-pair hands).

I was just gonna respond about the same thing, I forgot who mentioned it above, but they misunderstood me a little. You have to do an exercise like this online. It's not supposed to be a brag, it is supposed to be an exercise in hand reading and betting. Its about playing the situation and not your cards. I think it's also about folding. If you play your hand aggressive, like you have a huge hand, you have to fold when you are played back against. Sometimes its hard to fold a big hand, but if you dont actually know your cards, you're gonna have to release. And the exercise is also not about just winning flips by going all in everytime. I hope one day I'm good enough to try this approach...not yet though.lol

Yeah I was talking about his idea not as a strategy to play poker, but just as a training exercise. Trying it in the free rolls or even just at micro levels wont really work either. Trying this in some of the MTT's might be a good idea or even some SNG's. I don't have the bank roll at all to try this in the levels where this could actually work. Jayfmc, what is the software that you are going to use to try this out? Any thing I can do to get better at putting people on hands would really be helpful, that is one thing that I really need to work on. Getting better at playing position would always help too

Wow, I can't imagine it helping my game at all. I see myself getting knocked out quickly. I'm a fish though, so I'm not planning on trying that anytime soon. Especially trying it online.

LOL

The first time it was hard to hide the cards.
This time I had a high tech solution: Post it note just covering the cards.
Allowing you to see your stack size.
Ok at this point I have not put a lot of effort into the hiding of the cards but the post it not does make in playable.




Free Roll:
I Knocked out 3 players.
Then
Final hand another player pushed All in preflop.
I knew they had been Bluffing and thought was again.
I called.
Peeled the paper back and I had K 9 s.
Other player 4 6 os
lol

Flop A Q 4
Turn 7
River 10

He wins with pair of 4's.
lol



It was not a bad exercise.
I sat and watched and watched before playing into a hand.
But as many have said Free Rolls?
Well if you get past some of the Donks.
Ok
Who am I kidding.
Donks are everywhere.

Either way it forces you to play the Situation not the Cards.

Good Luck at the tables


Roller:
Poker is Situational Nothing Else Matters.
(my opinion of course. wouldn't want to offend zachvac)

This does sound interesting. But what about not looking at your cards until it is your turn to act? This is how the pros on TV play. They watch everyone else before they look at their cards; they don't take a quick peak before it's their turn. I think this can help, because you won't be planning what you're going to do solely by looking at your cards, as can very easily happen when you like what you see. I think that is why players get in trouble with paint. They get excited and ignore what's going on ahead of them.

I've tried covering up my hole cards by pulling the window where my cards are down below the bottom level of my monitor and then back up when it's my turn. It's a good exercise, but you get tired on doing it after a while. When multi-tabling, stacking your tables is another method of accomplishing this. You won't see your hand until it is your turn and you can analyze the action in front of you without preconceived notions.

As a game improvement exercise, IMO, this would be a good one. It could get expensive tho.

So a place where this might be doable would be the higher buy-in play money sng's. Like the biggest buy-ins. Play money folks use pride to equate with bankroll, so they might play as if it were a 25 buck game.

You will learn nothing at the low level play money tables trying this.

Maybe a good training exercise, but impractical to play for any real money like that. Are you kidding? In the end, it comes down to the cards. You don't get any points or any money from correctly reading your opponent's cards if yours are worse.

Annette won that tournament by completely playing the position. which means she won most of her chips without a showdown; by reraising pre-flop or postflop whenever she felt weakness.

I think it's a great exercise. It def. wouldn't work on playmoney tables tho. Min 5 dolars is a must. I sometimes play with people who are better than me for practise purposes, and I really don't think 5 dolars is a lot if you'r gonna get something from it.

Yeah u do. If u read your opponent weak u obvs. raise and get him to fold and make chips that way.

One of the things that annoys me about online poker is that you see the cards before it is your turn to act.

When I play in the Casino, I never look at my cards untill it is my turn to play. Never. That wey I have watched everyone else react to their cards when they look at them. eg... The player accross form you looks at his first card as he gets it. You can tell if its good or not as he is desperate to see the next one or not. If he looks at his own or other peoples chip stacks. You can learn a lot.

Also - you get to watch and understand the betting before it is your turn to play. Say you have Poket 10s in the hole and online.. you are like... I want to play these...and it is raised and re-raised. What do you do? You might still play it. In the casino I can lay it down, I have no attachement to the hand at all. A raise and a re-raise, i am looking for 1 of maybe 3 hands to play and if its not them, i fold.

Easy.

"If I keep experimenting with this I will start a new thread.
I will Label it " I DARE You. " and challenge others to post there best showings. "


I started the new thread "I DARE You".

Everyone is welcome to come over and post your thoughts and results.

Good Luck at the tables.

The first one said it: Anette Ob. made that...
And it will probably help to improve your game!

This is not quite ignoring your hole cards but the sample clip on stox poker by Collin Moshman is one where he plays two SnG's, one where he completely hides his cards and plays push fold poker, and the other where he assigns a push range, then looks at his cards and plays accordingly.

While the results were bad, I think assigning yourself the ranges that you would make certain plays on based on your position will help emphasize position and lessen the importance of your actual hole cards which are generally overemphasized for the beginning poker player in NL tournaments.