I've picked up several small adjustments over the last couple of days that I've already incorporated into my game. They've all resulted in profits.
1. In heads-up games, you can start to narrow your opponent's range because you know the button is opening looser than he's calling. This topic was brought up in a Two Plus Two Magazine article titled "Responding to frequent continuation bets in heads up play."
The essence of the article can be summed up from this paragraph:
"There's a fairly easy way to think about this. When a flop comes with two or more cards above eight, you, the caller, are more likely to have hit a pair or good draw than the raiser is. When the flop comes two or more cards below eight, the raiser is more likely to have hit a pair or good draw than you are."
This general guideline makes it easy to evaluate flop textures and incorporate more check-raise bluffs and value plays.
2. CardRunners' pro CTS points out in his latest 10/20 6-max video that he's returned to 3X raises preflop rather than 3.5X on PokerStars. He says it gives him more room to fold against short stacks while also allowing a little more postflop play. It's a small thing, but I'm finding that I also like 3X raises preflop.
3. Mixing up bet sizing can be an effective way to encourage your opponents to make mistakes. I've seen pros use strange bet sizes, like $147 or $52 or whatever, but I never knew when to use those odd-looking bets.
A recent CardRunners article titled "Advancing Past Fundamental Poker: Manipulation Theory," explains the benefit of marketing your bet sizes to look like you're either trying to extract value or push your opponent out of a hand.
While each opponent will react differently to bet sizes, I find that I often benefit when my bet sizes cause my opponents to make moves they wouldn't make against a normal bet. It's amazing how quickly I've been able to pick on player reactions to varying sizes and then later take advantage of them.
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4 comments:
"There's a fairly easy way to think about this. When a flop comes with two or more cards above eight, you, the caller, are more likely to have hit a pair or good draw than the raiser is. When the flop comes two or more cards below eight, the raiser is more likely to have hit a pair or good draw than you are."
Very interesting - never thought about this directly like this, but it makes a lot of sense.
"A recent CardRunners article titled "Advancing Past Fundamental Poker: Manipulation Theory," explains the benefit of marketing your bet sizes to look like you're either trying to extract value or push your opponent out of a hand."
This is a credo I live by.
Nice insight as always Gnome.
How much weight should this form of manipulation be given at lower stakes NL (5/10 and below) with 100BB stacks? In other words, how useful do you think it is to make "odd" bet sizes in such games?
Good question, Shrike. I think it's probably still useful to mix up your bet sizes at lower limits because it's likely to confuse your opponents. They'll start asking, "what is that shrike guy doing? why did he change his bet size?"
Once they start trying to draw conclusions about what your bet size might mean, they could misinterpret what you're doing and make a huge error.
I play mostly 25nl, with some shots at 50nl, and I only really mix up my bet sizes against known quantities. Against unknowns at this level I usually just bet big to extract as much value as possible from my hands. I'm not totally sure that most players at 25nl, or lower, will notice a subtle bet sizing change whereas I don't want to let them drive to their lousy 5 outer for any less than they're willing to pay anyway. So I'm not totally convinced that subtle bet sizing changes have a place at the microstakes, but I can definitely see that they'd make a difference higher up!
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