You probably are very careful when planning your finances. You plan your career, your wedding, your vacations, your kids' education fund, and your retirement. Playing hands is also a case of trying to make prudent investments, but for many players, planning seems to be the furthest thing from their minds.
Planning your play is one of the major themes of my new book,
Advanced Limit Hold'em Strategy, available from www.CardPlayer.com. I believe that you must make a plan and keep it clearly in your mind so that you know which plays to make and why you are making them.
Overview: Although you should have some objective in mind while you play preflop, your real planning begins after you see the flop, because you know 71.4 percent of your final hand. Even before anyone bets, think about where you are and how you want to play.
Ask yourself the standard questions:
• Do I have a made hand, a draw, or nothing?
• Based on the betting, what are my opponents likely to have?
• Do I want to build a pot or keep it small?
• Do I want to keep opponents in or eliminate them?
There are also some less standard questions you should ask:
• What sorts of hands can I represent?
• How likely is a bluff to succeed?
• How likely is it that my opponents will bluff at this sort of flop?
• Do I have or can I gain the lead, so that opponents have to react to my plays?
• Shall my overall approach be active or passive?
Detailed analysis: When you are in early position before the flop, you are really in the dark. All you know about the players yet to act after you is that they have two cards.
After the flop, even if you are first to act, you have far more information. You saw the action before the flop and have some idea what it means. The better you know how your opponents play and what they raise or call with, the better judgment you can make. But before you act, you should estimate not only where you stand, but what is likely to happen.
Judge the probabilities that you have the best hand and/or a reasonable draw. Also, estimate how the hand will play out. Using that information, make a plan.
Before you act, decide what you are trying to accomplish with your play. Are you trying to win the pot right away? Protect your hand? Gain information? Bluff? Build a pot? Trap a bad player? Get a cheap draw?
After setting your goal, establish a plan to achieve it. Ask yourself: What is the best way to meet this objective? Consider the alternatives and select what you believe will be the best play. Then, do it!
You always should know why you bet, or checked, or called, or raised: Your plan must be fluid, and may even be way off the mark, but having some idea of where you are and what you are trying to accomplish is critical to making and saving bets.
Here are some factors to consider when planning:
• Number of opponents
• How they play
• Nature of the flop
• Size of the pot
• Opponents' likely hands
• Your position
• Your hand
Number of opponents: If you have multiple opponents, the chances that someone has a small to very large piece of the flop go up considerably. Against one opponent, that chance goes down. Of course, you may not have much, either.
In addition, having more opponents means that the average winning hand goes up, since there are more ways for everyone to make hands.
How they play: To some extent, your plan will depend on how your opponents play. It is easier to play against predictable opponents and passive ones. Predictable ones often will let you know right away if you are ahead or behind. Timid players can be bullied or played for free cards.
If you face predictably aggressive opponents, you can decide to play off them, allowing them to take the lead, or get them to help you by raising to thin the field.
Nature of the flop: Evaluate how many draws appear on the flop and how plausible the draws are. A flop like Q-J-8 is considerably more dangerous than a flop like 6-5-2, even though both have the same gap size. Q-J-8 is much more likely to hit typical players than 6-5-2. If you are holding A-8 in the first case and A-2 in the second case, your A-8 is practically worthless, while your A-2 easily could be the best hand.
Big drawing flops make players want to raise and reraise. You need to anticipate this in order to make sure that you are not caught in the crossfire.
Size of the pot: If I were writing this column for beginners, I would put this topic first. Pot odds and implied odds always should dominate your thinking. I list it here because I assume that you already think about this. If you do not already know how many bets are in the pot when it is your turn, please start counting them immediately. Poker revolves around positive expectation, and if you do not know the reward, you cannot compute the risk-reward ratio.
If the pot is small, you may be able to steal more often, but you also must play fewer draws and long shots. You also may wish to take chances to increase the size of the pot.
When the pot is small, you gain tremendously if you induce your opponent to put money in with terrible odds, even though he sometimes gets there.
Gambling to gain extra bets in small pots when you have the lead often can gain you more bets than the whole pot was worth originally: If the pot is large, stealing becomes harder, though much more profitable. Protecting the pot by eliminating opponents and even distorting your betting to look for chances to limit the field must become part of your plan.
Conclusion: I hope that you see how important planning is, and how setting objectives and making plans to achieve them can improve your play. In the next issue, I will discuss the remaining elements and tie them all together.
Barry Tanenbaum, author of Advanced Limit Hold'em Strategy, and collaborator on Limit Hold'em: Winning Short-handed Strategies, offers private lessons tailored to the individual student. Please see his website, www.barrytanenbaum.com,
or write to him at [email protected].
