The PokerAcademy.com - Strategy Frequencies

If you have read my past columns, by now you are familiar with the idea that you need to be using your chips as weapons on a steady basis in poker tournaments. Today, I want to talk about some of the fundamental differences between the various strategies.

The general idea of using your chips as weapons is that you win pots with your chips by causing your opponent to fold. I would venture to say most people don’t think past that point when they are considering betting without a good hand, but really there are two cases where your opponent is folding. The first is when they don’t have much of anything or have missed. The second case is when they have a hand that has value, but they are likely to fold to your aggressive action. It is important that you understand the difference. There are two distinct strategies and each is viable if done correctly, but the frequency and situations with which you use each is different.

I like to break down the idea of using your chips as weapons into two parts: Making Moves and Bluffing. I use making moves to describe the situations where your opponent naturally should fold a large portion of their range, and bluffing to describe when you are trying to make your opponents fold hands that have value. Sometimes a strategy you employ will have more than one aspect to it. This may include your hand having some continual equity in the pot.

Let’s first look at preflop play. When we raise a wide range on the button, what can our opponents do to counter this play? They can fold more, but that only helps us. They can call more liberally, but that puts them out of position post-flop with a wide range of hands.Not a good situation for them. What if they increase their three-betting range?

Might this cause us some trouble? The answer is, it depends. If they three-bet with hands they used to call with, then no. We get the same fold rate, which is the primary factor that makes our play profitable. If they suddenly are raising a lot more and still calling a decent bit, then we may have to make a couple of adjustments. (Very few players actually take this approach). We should four-bet and call the three-bet with a wider range of hands. Overall, the idea of raising a wide range on the button is a strategy that is hard to counter, so we should implement it very often.

Let’s look at a post-flop play now. I wrote an article about expanding your draws. Basically this play is betting a third flush card on the turn when you defended the big blind and called on the flop with a straight draw. This play gets value from three different things. Some value comes from when your opponent may have missed and made a continuation-bet (c-bet), in which case they will likely fold (naturally folding, or value from a move). You realize more value when your opponent has a one-pair type of hand and folds (a bluffing element). And finally, you gain some value from the ability to still make a straight and win the pot when you are called. This type of strategy is viable, but is easy to counter if you are using it too frequently. Your opponent simply needs to not fold as often. That makes this more of a situational strategy and opponent dependent. Against an opponent who doesn’t c-bet all the time, you won’t get as many folds as you would from someone who c-bets regularly. Against an opponent who likes to get to showdown with any pair, you won’t get as many folds from what they consider to be value hands. And against an astute opponent who observes that you make this type of play, you may get called more often or occasionally raised and forced to fold, giving up your equity in the pot.

Once you start to understand that using your chips is important, you have to develop two things. The first thing is an understanding of what to look for when you are trying to use your chips to win pots. This may be a spot when your opponent has to fold at a high rate because they don’t have much of a hand or a spot where a normal opponent would fold a hand with value. Sometimes it is a combination of one or both of those ideas as well as the chance you’ll improve your hand to a winner on the turn or river.

Once you have found a spot or situation you like, you then have to figure out how often you should implement that idea. Some ideas are hard to counter and others are easy if your opponent thinks you are messing around a lot. For each person, the frequency with which they use a strategy should vary. It will depend on the robustness of the strategy, your history with your opponents, and your natural betting patterns. The important thing is to find a frequency that you are comfortable with and that works well for each of those strategies. ♠

Rep Porter is a two-time WSOP bracelet winner and is the lead instructor at ThePokerAcademy.com, whose mission is to help poker players achieve better results through better decisions and that is done by teaching poker in a way that makes learning easy and enjoyable with high quality courses taught by professional players.

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