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March 12 – If you only have a limited amount of hours to play pick the best times during the week.

This may seem relatively obvious, but a lot of us, even those playing poker primarily for profit, do not play full time. The longer you are around this game the more you realize that it is much healthier to diversify your time with other things and to play poker as a part time venture. I have had the opportunity to do a lot of private coaching and to start my own training site. I love the theory of poker and it keeps a good balance in my life plus prevents me from getting burnt out behind the table.

Since running CrushLivePoker.com has become almost a full time job for me, I have had to divvy my time up between my business ventures and playing. Nowadays I try to get in three sessions a week for a total of 20-to-25 hours and my goal for each month is to play 100 hours. Many of you are in similar time restrictive situations. If you have the flexibility to pick the times of the week to play and you can find the best times to do so, you can drastically increase your profitability. This is very similar to game selecting the best tables. The simple fact of the matter is there are better times of the day to play than others and better days to play than others. 

I personally take into account traffic patterns in Los Angeles, which is why I love to play on Sundays outside the football season. Sunday is literally the only day where traffic is light coming from where I live in the city towards the casino. And that extra 45 minutes that I save is extra money in my pocket and less stress from sitting in traffic. The other times of the week that I go in are normally Friday and Saturday nights as expected, although sometimes you will see me sneak in a morning session during the week if some of my scouts tell me that a game has been going over night. By the way, this is another thing that players should actively work to improve upon — their game scouting abilities. You meet a lot of different people in the casino and it is relatively easy to start a tit-for-tat relationship and inform each other about what is going on in your local room so that you can plan out the best times to come in and play. When you have a limited schedule to put in sessions, increasing your winrate by 20-to-30 percent based upon the quality of the games will quickly add up. Treat your poker playing like a business. It makes sense to do everything possible to add to your profitability. 

March 16 – There are many reasons why side bets — even when neutral EV — can be highly profitable at the table. 

Depending on where you play, most rooms will have some sort of capped buy-in on games at the $5-$10 no-limit level and below. This can be incredibly constricting, especially when playing games where the buy in is restricted to 100 big blinds (BBs) or less. The simple fact of the matter is that in these shorter-stacked games, especially in a full ring environment, most of the time you have to make the best hand in order to win. This can become very tedious and boring especially if you are correctly not flat-calling preflop raises with implied odds types of hands when the effective stacks are not deep. Certain rooms are strict and certain rooms are loose with their rules. Most fall somewhere in the middle when it comes to enforcing the cap strictly. 

One of the ways to get extra money on to the table while following the strict capped rules is through neutral expected value (EV) gambling. Whether you make side bets on black or red flops or a basketball game that might be going on in the background, if the other players don’t complain and the casino allows it, whether you win or lose the neutral EV wager does not matter as long as you continue to top off your stack if you lose. Usually the other players will not complain about what is going on, as it adds a sense of gambling action to the game. I would certainly recommend clearing this with the room and making sure that the other regs will not complain first, however. Anything to get extra money onto the table in capped games is going to be better for the more skilled player and a great way to do this is to make it look like you like to gamble.

On a completely different note, I will directly credit 2+2 legend and Crush Live Poker coach Limon with the following bits of wisdom. People bet with their hearts not their brains when it comes to politics. Back around the time of the 2008 election, when Nate Silver’s 538.com predicted Barack Obama’s presidential campaign to win with over 90 percent certainty (due to complex county and district polling as it related to the electoral college) it was easy to bet staunch republicans even money at the table on the election. I saw it happen many times. It was kind of crazy because the same people would not give extra points betting on their home NFL team, yet they were huge political gambling fish. This imbalance also existed in online sportsbooks where you could wager on Obama and only lay 3-to-1. I have a feeling that a lot of the general public caught on to this “arbitrage” and it will not be as easy going into 2014. But keep your eye out for these lucrative political side bets that can make you extra money at the poker table, especially as we approach the next general election. Remember our presidential election system is based upon a state-by-state winner take all electoral count, not a direct popular vote.

March 5 – Probably the most important factor when considering continuation bet (c-bet) bluffing is the number of opponents within the hand.

There are a number of different variables that go into making a good c-bet bluff spot. Even though, at the lower levels of no limit, most of your money is won through getting maximum value with the best hand, probably the most frequent situation that occurs in no-limit comes from being the preflop raiser and missing the board postflop. 

Because hold’em is a game of two cards, most people will actually not connect with the flop. The very good players know exactly which situations are good to c-bet bluff and on which boards they may be able to fire multiple barrels. I go over a number of these factors in the podcast titled “C-Bet Bluff Matrix” on CrushLivePoker.com, but I want to briefly review what I think is the most important factor and probably simplest variable here — number of opponents in the hand. 

In general if you are new to c-bet bluffing, the more players in the hand the harder it will be to get through everyone with a bluff. The sweet spots for c-bet bluffing are when the pot is heads-up or you face two players. Once there are more than three players in the hand, the sheer number of cards that your opponents hold lends itself to situation where a bluff will be unlikely to get through. Now this is not always the case as a lot of board textures are not the same. You also can sometimes look stronger when you bet into a multiway pot because it seems like to your opponents think that the pot is “protected.” If you have the guts to fire twice, especially into more than one opponent on the turn, you look even stronger.

However, if you are entirely green to bluffing postflop do not forget that the most important factor in c-bet bluffing is the simplest — number of players in the pot. If you find yourself commonly trying to bluff more than three people after the flop, then you are probably doing something wrong. ♠

Follow Bart for daily strategy tips on Twitter @CrushLivePoker and @BartHanson. Check out his poker training site exclusively made for live cash game play at CrushLivePoker.com where he produces weekly podcasts and live training videos.