Winning Wisdom -- Gavin Griffin

At only 27 years old, Gavin Griffin already holds one of the most impressive collections of poker's most prestigious titles: World Series of Poker, European Poker Tour, and World Poker Tour championships.
Now, Card Player is giving its readers a chance to send questions directly to the poker prodigy.

Poker fans can send Griffin their questions to [email protected]. The questions can be about anything from poker strategy to his opinions on certain aspects of poker or his life as a poker pro traveling the circuit. The best questions will be answered by Griffin and published in Card Player. If your question makes it into print, we'll send you a free Card Player T-shirt.

Gavin:

Playing by the book, one would play only the top premium hands from first and second positions. The problem with this strategy, of course, is that it means you are playing with your cards practically faceup, because opponents can accurately put you on a very narrow range of hands. On the other hand, if you vary your game by playing mediocre starting hands from those same early positions, you tend, on average, to lose money on those hands, because you usually don't have the best hand to start and you're having to play from out of position. How do you balance these two dilemmas so as to maximize profit with the big hands and minimize loss with the ones you're using to mix it up, when you're in the one-spot and two-spot? If your answer is different for cash games versus tournaments, please elaborate. Thank you.

- Bob Woolley

Hi, Bob:

You pose an interesting question. Early-position play is tough because of a lot of the problems you mentioned. It's hard to play when out of position, and you are often out of position when you play hands from the first two spots. Usually, the way to counteract this problem is to play premium hands so that the issues that arise when playing out of position are balanced by the strength of your hand. If you get pegged as being tight from early position, people will have more information when playing against you, enabling them to make better decisions and therefore make more money against you. So, what do we do to counteract this? There are a few possible solutions; let's take a look at them.

First, as you said, you could just open up a little and play a few more hands from early position. Don't play from under the gun like it's the button, but sprinkle in a few non-premium hands like 10-9 suited or 6-5 suited. I would still recommend folding K-J and A-J when under the gun, because of the possibility of making a trap hand. Smaller suited connectors play well because if you don't make a big hand or a big draw, you get away cheap and if you do make a big hand, nobody will expect it. You can also represent a big ace when one flops, and get others to fold better hands than yours. Of course, this strategy adds a bit of variance to your game, but it can also add a weapon to your repertoire that can win you pots and chips that you otherwise wouldn't have won.

Second, you can play from under the gun a little looser and limp sometimes from early position with both your premium hands and your weaker hands. You certainly have to have a lot of feel for the game and the strength of your holding deep in hands to play this way. You need to be able to get away from aces when the flop is low and coordinated, or when a tight player is putting in a lot of action. If people notice that you are limping a lot from early position, they will start to try to raise you off your hands, and that is when you can throw in a reraise with your premium hands and with some of your weaker ones, as well. Once again, you can't reraise with just your premium hands; you need to do it with a few other hands, as well. If you don't, you will be telegraphing your hand to your opponents, and they will be able to play against you with more information than you have on them. This is never good.

The last, and best, option is a long-term strategy, and should not really be employed unless you are going to be at a table for a long time. Setting up an image and then exploiting it takes time and awareness. Your image makes a difference in all kinds of things, and you should always be aware of it. So, how do you go about setting it up? You play a standard, tight game from early position, and when you have shown down several premium hands, you sprinkle in a few more hands like J-10 suited, 10-9 suited, small pairs, and so on. This is better than the first option, because you have already created an image that you are exploiting, and not just randomly playing more hands. You have credibility from your earlier play, so you will get players to fold stronger hands than perhaps they would have folded if you didn't have this image. If you are going to be playing with the same people for a long time, you can use this strategy. This is also probably the best strategy for loosening your early-position standards in a cash game. You spend a lot more time with the same people in cash games than you do in tournaments.

There are definitely many ways to open up your game from under the gun; the ones I have discussed here are probably the best, and can all be used in different situations. Be careful not to get too out of hand, and you'll add an extra weapon to your game that will propel you toward greater success and more money in the poker world.

Hey, Gavin:

My name is Jake Dennehy. I'm from Needham, Massachusetts. I play mostly online, in that the closest casino is Foxwoods, an hour and a half away. I have encountered this problem on multiple occasions, and it is especially true when playing a turbo tournament. OK, you have an M of about 7 or 8 (you have 10,000 in chips and the blinds are 400-800 with a 100 ante), which is too big to push all in preflop, and you have A-K in early position. If you raise three times the big blind, you'll put in about one-fourth of your stack, and if you miss the flop, which most of the time you will, you are stuck either calling all in with no pair or pushing all in with no pair. I was wondering how you would play this situation. And this is more amplified when the blinds are going up and your chances of seeing a good hand before you have to commit all of your chips are slim. Thanks a lot for your time, and I hope to hear back from you.

I get this question a lot, and would like to address the thinking behind the question rather than the question itself. What is the problem with just open-shoving A-K here? You have 12 big blinds and a premium hand. If you shove and win the blinds and antes, you gain 2,100 in chips at a nine-handed table. This improves your stack by 21 percent. This in itself is a great result, and if you get called, you are almost never in bad shape to double up. Why allow yourself to get pushed off the hand when you miss the flop, and sacrifice a big chunk of your stack? When you are short-stacked, you are looking for opportunities to double up or to win what's in the pot right then. A-K is certainly a hand that wants to see all five cards, so shove and get all the money in there, and double up or go home. Good luck in this situation in the future.

Gavin Griffin is a member of Team PokerStars. Visit his website at www.gavingriffin.net.