I am working with a new poker student, one whose progress might be interesting to follow, because he and I will be putting in several hours of work together every week, giving me plenty of new material for my column.
My student is a middle-aged male who has almost no experience with no-limit hold'em, the poker form he wants to learn. He plays mostly online, at stakes anywhere from $1-$2 blinds to $5-$10 blinds. He owns his own computer company, so he is obviously a bright guy and is staying well within his poker budget. Unlike many of my students, he much prefers money games to tournament play. His poker background is reasonable, as he has been playing limit hold'em for several years, mostly at the $10-$20 level.
When I start working with someone, I first send him or her a quantity of written material. Then I start giving the person feedback on hands that were played. This student uses Poker Tracker, a computer program that takes your hands played online and replays them on command. It is a nice tool for teaching.
I watched him play a few hands, and saw a couple of things that made me happy. First, he always bought in for 100 times the big blind, which is exactly what I advocate. Buying in for the minimum would cut down on your fluctuation, but it will not teach you how to play the game well. I do not know a single pro player who is a short-stack specialist. The term "short-stack professional poker player" is in my opinion an oxymoron (a figure of speech that combines two normally contradictory terms).
The other thing I liked was that he was obviously a person of discipline who was trying to play the game correctly. I hate it when I have to tell a student, "I am a poker coach, not a psychiatrist. All of my teaching will go out the window if you disregard what I teach you as soon as you start losing."
One of the things my student had done before we started working together was make an Excel spreadsheet of starting hands for each position at the table. He took information from a couple of different sources, using it to compose a chart of playable hands. I looked this chart over and was not completely happy with it.
For no-limit hold'em, I am practically a fanatic when it comes to position. Drawing hands are especially difficult to play when having to act in front of an opponent. Any hand can become a drawing hand or a made hand, of course, but that does not mean that you can't tell what the likely character of your starting hand will be if you hit a playable hand on the flop. A-X suited and suited connectors aim at making straights and flushes. You are far more likely to have four cards to a straight or flush on the flop than all five, so do not build a draw from up front. I am aghast at some of the hands with which people are told it is OK to call from early position. As for the small blind, the worst seat at the table, calling with a draw-builder because you are halfway in will make you a certified bargain shopper, but a lousy no-limit hold'em player.
Another thing I did not like in his spreadsheet was that "small pairs" were treated as a single category. Deuces, threes, fours, and fives are considerably worse than sixes, sevens, eights, and nines. The difference between small pairs and low intermediate pairs is the difference between building bottom set and middle set. And the difference between which set you flop is not only immense when a set-over-set situation occurs, but also affects how confidently you can bet your set when it is the best hand. You flop a set a little less than one time out of eight. That's not very often. It makes no sense to me to put your dough on a long-shot flop, and then back off when you hit. If the big money starts going into the pot and you have bottom set, there is reason to be worried. With middle set, you are much more comfortable. First, only one hand beats you. Second, you in many circumstances are pretty sure that your opponent does not have top set, because if he had that big a pocket pair, he would have raised preflop. Third, there is a hand you can beat that would justify your opponent betting strongly - bottom set! I sometimes play small pairs, but I do not come in with them from up front, and seldom play them from middle position, either.
After I modified the spreadsheet to suit my taste in starting hands, I was ready to watch my student play some poker. When I first start to work with students, I notice that some show a pattern, such as being too timid or too aggressive. In others, the mistakes are more random. I could see that this student had a psychological problem that produced a pattern of a particular kind of mistake. When holding a solid hand, such as top pair with a decent kicker or an overpair, he was intent on finding out right away where he stood. Consequently, when someone bet into him, he put in a big raise. If reraised, or even just called, he usually shut down, assuming that he was beat. The end result is that most of the time, he made very little money with his good hands. True, he avoided any guesswork, but he did it by driving out every hand he could beat and giving a fair amount of money to the hands that were better than his. Furthermore, his raise nullified the exploitation of his good position.
Another problem with raising with a solid but not spectacular hand, such as an overpair or top pair with a good kicker, can be seen in multiway pots. You may be committing a large sum of money with live hands behind you that must be reckoned with.
Simply calling an opponent is much derided in poker literature, but a lot of that derision comes from the overly weak hands with which the call is improperly employed. The call made with a solid hand with position is a weapon that a hold'em poker player needs to use on occasion, especially when playing no-limit for deep money. My students are taught to use every tool in the poker toolbox.
Bob Ciaffone has authored four poker books, Middle Limit Holdem Poker, Pot-limit and No-limit Poker, Improve Your Poker, and Omaha Poker. All can be ordered from Card Player. Ciaffone is available for poker lessons: e-mail [email protected]. His website is www.pokercoach.us, where you can get his rulebook, Robert's Rules of Poker, for free. Bob also has a website called www.fairlawsonpoker.org.
