An Exercise To Improve Your No-Limit Hold'’em

How do you get fit? You do exercises. Want stronger arms? Pick an exercise that targets your arm muscles and do it repeatedly.

How do you get better at poker? You do exercises. Want to play the flop better? Pick an exercise that targets flop play and do it repeatedly.

Most poker players do virtually no exercise to improve their games. And most players don’t improve. Just playing isn’t enough. You have to think about what you’re doing, and targeted exercises are most effective.

Here is an exercise I’ve used to improve my no-limit hold’em game. This exercise is useful for all no-limit hold’em games, but it’s particularly valuable if you play online 6-max games — like the new online poker 2.0 games in Nevada.

What’s Your Flop Range?

Let’s say someone open raises from the cutoff for $12 in a $2-$4 game with $200 stacks. You call on the button, and the blinds fold. The flop comes K 8 2. The raiser bets $18. How often are you going to call? How often are you going to raise? Do you know?

Most people don’t know. If pressed, they can go through a list of hands and say what they’ll do with each one. But they can’t just tell you their calling and raising frequencies.

This is backward. The frequencies are the most important parts of your strategy. Deciding which hands to put in which category comes next.

Even if you don’t know what your frequencies are, you can make a guess of what they should approximately be. There’s a $24 pot on the flop (ignoring rake), and the raiser bet $18 or three-quarters-pot. The bet shows an automatic profit if you fold 3/7 of the time or more. Therefore you should likely fold somewhat less often than that — maybe between 30 and 40 percent of the time. This means that you should not fold — that is call or raise — between 60 and 70 percent of the time. Are you doing that?

This is your exercise. Every time you play a hand like this one where you call a preflop raise (either in or out of position) and your opponent bets the flop, write the hand down. Then do the following:

Write down every possible hand that you could have to call with preflop on the button.
For each hand, write down whether you would tend to fold the hand to the bet, call with it, or raise it. Don’t worry about that 60-to-70 percent frequency just yet. Just write down what you’d tend to do as your typical play.

Count how many hands you’re folding, how many you’re calling, and how many you’re raising. The proper way to do this involves use of combinatorics. Remember that there are six ways to have any pocket pair, four ways to have any suited hand, and 12 ways to have an unsuited hand. There are 12 ways to have top pair with a specific kicker, nine ways to have two pair, and three ways to have any set.

Calculate the percent of all your hands that you’re folding. Are you folding too much? Too little?

Next pick fixed frequencies for folds, calls, and raises. Say you pick 30 percent fold, 50 percent call, and 20 percent raise to start.

Go back through your list and decide which hands should go in which bucket such that you meet the frequency requirements while also playing as much as possible to the strengths of each hand.

Let’s go ahead and do this exercise for the above example. Recall, a player open raised for $12 in a $2-$4 game with $200 stacks, and you called on the button. What hands will you call preflop? Say your range looks roughly like this:

Pairs deuces through tens, A-Q to A-10, A-9 suited to A-6 suited, K-Q and K-J, K-10 suited, Q-J suited to 5-4 suited, Q-10 suited to 8-6 suited.

That is, you’re calling with pocket pairs (except for the big ones that you three-bet), big card hands (except for the very best of them that you three-bet), and suited connector and one-gap hands. The number of hand combinations corresponding to each comma-separated group above is 54, 48, 16, 32, 4, 32, and 20, respectively.

Summing, this represents 206 total hands. Since there are 1,326 possible starting hands, this is 15.5 percent of all possible dealt hands.

When your opponent bets a K 8 2 flop for $18 into the $24 pot, let’s assume as a first approximation that you want to fold 30 percent of these hands, call 50 percent, and raise 20 percent. That means you’re folding roughly 62 hands, calling roughly 103, and raising roughly 41 hands. Which is which?

K-K, 8-8, and 2-2 are obviously hands you’re sticking with. That’s nine combinations, and we can put them for now in the raise category.

K-Q and K-J are the next strongest hands. That’s 24 combinations. If we put these also in the raise category, there will be no room for bluffs which should represent roughly half of your raises with these stack sizes. So let’s say we raise with K-Q and call with K-J. That adds 12 combos to get us to 21 value raising combos versus 41 total raising combos.

K-J is then a call, the first 12 combos for that option. K-10 suited is also a call for three more combos. Unfortunately, we’ve run out of top pair hands, but we still need to find 88 more combos to call with. If this is roughly where you’d stop calling, you fold way too much.

Which hands to add from here is a bit of a judgment call. We’d like mostly hands that can win a showdown unimproved or hands that can catch a pair and win. Let’s start with 10-10 and 9-9 for 12 more combos. I’d also add A-8 suited, 10-8 suited, 9-8 suited, 8-7 suited, and 8-6 suited for 15 combos. We still need 61 more.

You could also add A-Q, A-J, and A-10 for 48 combos. Now we need just 13 more. Candidate hands might be A-9 suited, A-7 suited, A-6 suited, Q-J suited, Q-10 suited, or J-10 suited where the suits match one of the board cards for a backdoor-flush draw. That’s 18 combos, and we need 13 of them. This is right around our target.

We get to fold the rest — except we need 20 more combos to bluff-raise with. 10-9 suited, 9-7 suited, and 7-6 suited where the suit matches a board card are decent options. These are backdoor-straight and flush draws that could turn into something on the turn. If you didn’t call with J-10 suited, that’s also an option to bluff-raise.

We’re close enough to our targets now — it doesn’t have to be exact. On dry boards like this one, you can also raise fewer (or no hands) and call with them instead.

Does this strategy look like your flop strategy in this scenario? Likely not. Do this exercise as many times as possible and you’ll see the changes you need to make to become a better player. ♠

Ed’s newest book, Playing The Player: Moving Beyond ABC Poker To Dominate Your Opponents, is on sale at notedpokerauthority.com. Find Ed on Facebook at facebook.com/edmillerauthor and on Twitter @EdMillerPoker.