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Feb 20th – Sometimes you should use oversized chips to bet. It allows your opponents to keep track of pot size thus allowing you to value bet more.

Recreational players do not keep close track of pot size. This becomes really evident when you see players make small bets in proportion to the pot, especially on the river. In fact, in some games, a $500 bet into a $2,000 pot represents a huge hand – not a one-fourth pot blocking bet as it would online. Part of the reason why players have so much trouble tracking pot size is due to the large amount of small denomination chips that are in play. In most of the southern California games at $5-$10 and below, casinos use only $5 and $100 chips. This leads to gigantic clusters of yellow ($5 chips) in large pots. If players aren’t doing the math street by street it is virtually impossible to tell the exact size of the pot. People have trouble making good estimates when things are in clusters. We tend to see piles as big or small – just like the way people judge poker pots.

Most of the money we make in lower level cash games comes from value betting, not bluffing. That means that when a good player gets involved in a big pot they usually have the best hand. In order to maximize your winrate you want to make the biggest bets possible that will be called by inferior holdings. This is where the technique of spiking the pot with large chips comes into play. If I make my bets with $100 chips it is much easier for my opponent to actually recognize the correct pot size. If, on the river, there are eight white ($100) chips and a small pile of yellow I can make a $700 bet and our opponent will recognize this as less than pot. If, however, I have been betting with small chips my opponent will only see a large pile and have no idea how my sizing correlates to the size of the pot.

The best way to spike the pot is to do so early as you start to bet on the flop. If you want to bet $75 instead of doing so with $5 chips throw in one $100 chip and declare “seventy five.” The dealer will then give you back $25 in yellow. This leads to a bigger bet that you can make on the turn. Let’s say you now bet $150 with two white chips. Now, on the river, the pot has been spiked with at least three of your $100 chips and hopefully some of your opponents’. You can now bomb away for value and the villain has a better idea of the size of the pot.

You can actually be a little crafty and use the opposite of this technique when running a bluff. Use your smaller demonization chips on early streets so that betting less on later ones looks bigger.

Feb 21st – Delayed continuation bets are useful tools against tight players.

A delayed continuation bet refers to the preflop raiser betting the turn after checking the flop. It is very difficult to make a hand in hold’em and a lot of times a bet on the flop will show an immediate positive expectation. But we can sometimes risk less by waiting until the turn to bet.

Delayed continuation bets are useful tools against tight players who have a very low bluffing frequency. Instead of betting on the flop we can simply check and see what our opponent does on the turn. If they check again we can go ahead and bet and usually take the pot. This is especially useful on boards that should hit our preflop raising range very strongly.

Let’s say we isolate a tight limper in a $5-$10 game to $40 with 5 6. We get it heads-up and the flop comes out A K J. The limper checks to us. What should we do? At first glance it looks like a great spot to make a bet. That board should hit us a lot and we probably can get the limper to fold everything but an ace or maybe K-Q. However, we know that if we check back the flop all of the hands that would have called our bet will bet the turn. The hands that would have folded to our flop continuation bet will still check. We can see then that actually checking back the flop and waiting for our opponent’s next move is the most optimal play.

We can use delayed continuation betting out of position as well. Say we raise A J under the gun and a tight player calls on the button. The flop is K 7 7. If we bet, we will get everything but a king or seven to fold but if we check our opponent will only bet a king or seven. The right play then is to check, and, if our opponent checks, to bet any turn.

Continuation betting is one of the most important aspects of increasing your winrate in no-limit hold’em. There is an entire episode of Deuce Plays Premium titled “Cbets” that covers this topic in depth.

Feb 22nd – Usually small flop raises are indicative of top-pairish type hands. Use this to your advantage.

One of the easier things to spot in live no-limit games is the predictability of hand strength through raise sizing. Small raises on the flop, especially on wet boards, are almost always indicative of top-pairish types of hands. You can use this information to your advantage, especially facing a small check-raise on the flop in position. After you call and then face a small turn bet, if the river is checked to you, you can almost always bet top pair/good kicker for value. A lot of the time, especially if the draw misses, you will get paid off.

Let’s look at an example:

In a $2-$5 no-limit game with effective stacks of $800 we open raise to $20 in the cutoff with K Q. It gets folded to the big blind who is pretty loose and he calls.

Flop: K 5 4. He checks and we bet $30. BB check raises to $70, we call.

Turn 9. BB bets $85, we call.

River 7. BB checks. What is our play here?

A clear cut value bet is in order and expect us to get looked up by a weak king a lot. This particular situation gets misplayed all the time by inexperienced recreational players. Once the pot gets big, low stakes players like to go to showdown especially in position. They always fear getting check-raised on the river, when, in fact, the frequency of check-raise river bluffing is almost zero.

One of the most identifiable patterns of live players is their transparent bet sizing in these types of situations. If they flop big, like two pair plus, especially on wet boards, and choose not to slowplay, they will raise big. Players like this, especially if they are tight, are always scared that they are going to get sucked out on, so they bet to protect against the draws. The chance that the villain has a set of fives or deuces in the above example is very small with the opponent’s small bet sizing.

Some would ask then, why we would not reraise the flop or raise the turn if we think that we have the best hand? There is a simple answer to this question and it is a concept called “way ahead way behind.” You never want to put so much money in the pot or take such an aggressive line where everything that is weaker than your hand folds and only stronger hands continue on. If you reraise the flop or bomb over the top of a turn bet, your hand looks incredibly strong – strong enough where top pair/medium kicker may very well fold. By calling the flop and the turn, especially on wet boards, our hand looks like a draw and we can value bet the river to death. ♠

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Follow Bart for daily strategy tips on twitter @barthanson. Check out his podcast “Deuce Plays” on DeucesCracked.com and his video training site specifically for live No Limit players—CrushLivePoker.com. He also hosts Live at the Bike every Tuesday and Friday at 10:30 pm ET at LivettheBike.com