Crushing Live Poker With Twitter

November 15 — When playing deep and the pot is small, sometimes you are forced to play your hand straightforward. 

Occasionally, you get into a situation where your action is so strong, it is almost impossible for you to be bluffing. This especially is the case when you are the preflop raiser and make a raise in a pot where there is a ragged, one-card straight on board.  
The following hand went down last week at the Commerce Casino $5-$10 game. The Villain in the hand was a total unknown to me. He had just come from a broken game, late on a Saturday night, with about $6,500. I had had a nice session and had built my stack up from $1,500 to about $3,800. It got folded around to me in the cutoff and I raised to $35 with 9 8. Everyone folded, except the Villain in the big blind. The flop ran out 6 5 4, giving me a gutshot straight draw and a backdoor flush draw. Surprisingly, the Villain led out at the pot for $50. This is rare, as usually people will check to the raiser heads-up, even on ragged boards. I decided to call given our stack depth, position, and the ability for me to represent the flush draw or overcards. A case probably could be made for raising as a semibluff, but I decided to take the less aggressive route.  

The turn card came off a magical 7, giving me the absolute nuts. Again, the big blind bet out at me, this time for $100. So with the board reading 6-5-4-7 with two spades, you can see what I mean by basically having to announce the fact that I had at least an eight. If he had a set or two pair, it was unlikely that he would have folded anyway, and this deep, I absolutely needed to get more money in the pot against just a bare eight. Sometimes you have to get lucky that your opponent has something along with you. Now, if my opponent had been bluffing when I raise, he is very likely to fold. So we might not get a final bluff bet out of him on the river, but that really does not matter. It would be a disaster if our opponent checks a scare card like a spade at the end with an eight, where he either calls or, even worse, folds. So, even though we have an almost nil bluffing range when we raise the turn on a 6-5-4-7 board, we still have to raise with this type of stack depth. I ended up making it $450, and unfortunately, he folded.  

November 12 — If you want to maximize your hours, sometimes you have to leave a good game.  

Recently on my training site, CrushLivePoker.com, I set myself up with a playing challenge. I wanted to see what it was like to play a continuous full-time poker schedule, as I had not played “full time” in years due to my business and poker media ventures. So I set out on Oct 1st of 2015 to play 450 hours of live poker by the end of the year.   

At the time that I write this article, I am about 300 hours into the challenge with one month left. The goal was to report back on some things that I had experienced and to inform people about what it takes to treat poker as a full time job.  

Besides the fact that you have the ability to play more patiently when grinding a lot of hours and not having to force things, I was surprised to realize that it was hard to keep a regular schedule if I was always staying around when the game was good. In fact, if I did not keep to a regular schedule, I found it much harder to reach my goal hours for the week. Basically, what happened in the first few weeks of the challenge is that I would stay in a good game late into the night. Then I would either not sleep well or wake up late, causing me to miss the entire next day. And what I found was that missing those hours the next day, even if the game wasn’t as good as the late night game, cost me money.  

Let us say that in your game, on average you can make $40 per hour. In a very good game you can make $80 and in a bad game (which are rare) you only make $20 per hour. One day you decide to play an extra three hours in a game that you figure you can beat for $70 per hour. However, staying this extra time causes you to miss the entire next day. So you make $210 on average in these extra three hours. But you miss out on the $320 that you would have made the next day. Do you see how sometimes leaving a good game is actually worth it for the sake of keeping a playing schedule?

November 18 — Pay attention to short stacks that you think may move all-in preflop so that you can size your raises accordingly, allowing you to force other out of the hand.  
In most card rooms, including where I play in Los Angeles, they use the 100 percent rule when determining whether or not the betting can be reopened. What this basically means is that if I raise in a $5-$10 game to $40 (a $30 raise) and a short stack moves all in for $70 or more, when the action gets back to me I can then reraise versus anyone else in the hand. If he moves in for any less than $70, he has not completed the full raise of $30 (from $40 to $70) and the action is not reopened.  

It is very important to pay attention to the stack sizes of the short stackers, especially if you want to drive others out of the hand.

Last week, the following hand went down at the Commerce $5-$10 game. The short stack was in the big blind and started the hand with $350. The action folded to me and I raised on the button to $30 with A-Q offsuit. The small blind, who I was $1,000 effective with, reraised me to $60 and the big blind called. The action got back around to me and I had a sense that if I again reraised and the small blind called the big blind would just put the rest of his money in. So I calculated how much to reraise the $60 to, so if the small blind called and the big blind moved all in I could then reraise and drive the small blind out of the hand. This number was exactly $200 (a $140 reraise). Sure enough, the small blind called and the big blind put in the rest of his money, which was $290 (a $150 raise). This then opened the action back up and I was able to move all in, putting maximum pressure on the small blind. He tanked for a long time and finally folded 10-10 face-up. The board ran out rags and I won the main pot with ace-high vs the big blind’s K-J. The small blind was not too pleased.  

If I had not been hyper-aware of the stack sizes and had raised it to $210 instead of $200, the action would have been shut down as the big blind’s raise would not have been a full 100 percent of the previous raise and I would have lost the pot!! ♠

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.