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July 25 — Be aware of players buying the button, posting dead and kill pots in live games. There is a lot of money out there to steal

Whenever someone comes to me for a general “game plan” of preflop strategy I often tell them that it is OK to limp in from the first few positions with hands like small pocket pairs. However, in a nine-handed game, once the first two players fold, usually I tell my students that they should open raise or fold. The simple fact of the matter is the fold equity that they gain from opening instead of limping in this position against the dead money in the blinds usually makes a raise more plus expected value (EV) than a limp.

This is certainly the case when players buy the button or post dead behind the button. In the former case you only have to get through one player in order to pick up the dead money in the blinds and in the latter you are in the more lucrative position of being able to steal three separate blinds. So, in these situations, especially versus players that post dead, I think that we should change our strategy and almost always open raise with a hand that we are going to play and being first in the pot. The extra money that we can win without seeing a flop makes it worth it.

If you are paying close attention to what is going on around you can also exploit someone that you suspect is “stealing the dead money” just like a later position open raiser. I played a simple hand a few days ago where I was the button and a player to my right posted in front of me. The game was $5-$10 $1,500 cap and the action got folded to the hijack, an aware player. He opened the pot to $40. The player in the cutoff (CO) folded, along with giving up his $15 that he posted, and I decided to three-bet to $115 with K 4 on the button. Both the blinds and the initial raiser folded allowing me to pick up a quick $70. Because I was paying attention to what was going on, I knew that the raiser in the hijack had a wider opening range in this exact situation and my play needed to work only about 65 percent of the time for it to be profitable. I also knew that the player to my right respected me and I doubted that he would ever flat call my three-bet from out of position. If he took this situation one step further, he may have considered four-bet bluffing me, but normally the frequency of that happening in live poker at $5-$10 is rather low.

I have the same attitude about preflop play when I am at the $75-$150-to-$100-$200 Omaha eight-or-better game that is becoming more and more popular at the World Series. There, any time someone scoops a pot after a flop they have to “kill” the hand. That means that they have to put out an extra $100 blind and the stakes of the next hand are played at $100-$200. Because there is no monetary minimum for this kill, about 50 percent of the hands are played at $100-$200 with this extra blind. Similar to the reason why I attack the extra blind in no-limit, I will usually adjust my play and almost always open raise with a hand that I will play if the pot is killed and it has been folded to me. Stealing the blinds in a limit game actually has much more value than it does in no-limit, as the stakes are bigger and players are getting immediate odds, especially in Omaha-8. In fact, even if you took the best possible starting hand in O/8, A-A-2-3 double suited, you would still rather have the BB fold than have him call with a random hand. This is much different than hold’em, where you certainly want the blinds to call when you have a premium holding like aces or kings.

July 22 — When you are on a multi-session heater be careful not to get overconfident. This creates a cycle of unnecessary downswings after big upswings

Luckily for me I have never really had a problem with what people consider “normal” tilt. Very early on I realized that I could not control the cards that came out after I made my decisions and that even when I was a big favorite, usually there was still at least a 10-to-20 percent chance that I would lose in a particular spot. A lot of people don’t realize that A-A loses to K-K all-in preflop about 18 percent of the time. In fact, when you win in an all-in situation and your opponent was not drawing dead, you are actually running above expectation.

Typically, these are the situations when people lose it mentally. They get a bad beat, they get angry, and the overall quality of their play drastically decreases. However, there are times where winning over long, extended periods of time also cause us to play not up to our best. I call this (and I am not the first) “winner’s tilt.” Why would we possibly tilt when we are winning, you ask? Well it definitely is not the same tilt as players with steaming problems. But when we win we tend to get a little bit cocky and overconfident. We take chances because we feel invincible and we do not realize that we might actually just be on a variance heater. We also might be willing to put our money in with the worst of it because the loss might not hurt as much because we have won so much in the short term.

In took me a long time to get out of this vicious cycle. I remember a few years ago looking back at my records it was almost to the point where I dreaded having extended heaters because I knew that it would be followed by a period of bad play and a downswing that was not necessarily attributed to variance. Now, I did not really “dread” the heaters but I realized that over other periods of extended time I had actually won more money when I did not have a crazy upswing. I realized that when I had more even, stable results I never had a downswing that was attributed to bad play.

With recreational players I see this more as a short-term problem. It could even be as short a time as one session. Sometimes players win a lot or get lucky in the beginning of the day only to get recklessly aggressive and cocky later on. These players usually end up dumping the money that they first won and inevitably end up in the red. Add to the fact that if they have bad loser’s tilt the tilt now is compounded because they are even more upset that they are down because they were up so much earlier on.

Now there is nothing wrong with being proud of yourself for good play and a solid session. And I have talked in other columns about how I think that these are the times that you should extend your sessions because of your likely good image at the table. But this good image does not give you the excuse to make sloppy, dumb, unprofitable plays and you must be wary that you do not fall into this common trap. ♠

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.