6 Card Poker

When I play no limit Texas Holdem cash games then I often see players get all in pre flop with at least one hundred big blinds with hands that are very shaky to say the least. I think that there are a combination of factors behind this and the first is that many players come from a tournament poker background. In this form of poker then you are often forced to play with small to medium sized stacks. Only during the early stages of a tournament do you play deep stacked but that is usually over by the end of the opening three levels or so.

So most players and in fact all tournament players are constantly playing in the short to medium stack category. So players who are used to playing tournament poker often then come into cash games without the necessary experience of playing deep stacked. Another factor is that players are simply not that far down their development road and are exhibiting less skill. There is an evolutionary road that you travel down in poker and taking coaching and education is a great way to improve your game.

Another huge factor in why players play hands badly in full ring is that they may be experienced at playing shorter handed games like six max for example. Here the average hand values are substantially different and this can be a huge factor into why players do the things that they do. It is still a fact that many players take their advice and education from what they see on televised tournaments. Everybody is aware of how these programs are highly edited and even when they are not then they still depict final table tournament action.

Even if the action is from a cash game then they are often huge cash games with big named players and huge deep stacks. Let me quote a couple of examples that happened to me recently to show what I mean. It had been folded around to the cut-off who opened for $3 in a NL100 game and the small blind three bet to $12. I was sitting in the big blind with A-A and decided not to slow play and four bet to $46. The original raiser folded and the small blind shoved all in for his remaining stack and I called. I was expecting to see kings or possibly queens but I was shocked to see nothing but an AKs.

This is once again another case of a player overplaying decent second best hands. I actually lost this pot but had a massive 88% equity in the situation. Another situation arrived where I once again had aces and this time I was in a 300 big blind pot pre-flop with two other players’ one of which had QQ while the other amazingly had J9s. I don’t know what the guy with the J9s was doing in the hand but it looked like he started trying to steal and just ended up gambling.

Poker is such a complex game that one of the biggest obstacles to a player making money isn’t the game itself or a bad technical game but the actual player themselves. There are so many factors to the game of poker that test an individual and there is one saying in the game and it is a saying that I first heard years ago and have never forgotten. That saying was “don’t become the leader of the gang that is out to get you”. The meaning behind that statement is obvious when you think about it. What it essentially means is that it is the player themselves who are the biggest enemy and your biggest enemy in the game is not your opponents around the table but the person that you see in the mirror.

Not many people realise this but winning a lot of money very quickly can end up having a negative effect. Novice players and even intermediate level players are the most vulnerable to this effect because they often do not see poker for what it really is. It is often said that experience is the true education when it comes to poker and not studying. I believe this to be largely true as there are so many factors that you absolutely need to be experienced in to really master the playing side of the game. But not really seeing poker for what it really is can be a huge reason as to why players tilt.

Poker is not a controlled game but a game that you can partly control. It is a bit like being the parent of a child. You can control their behaviour to a certain extent and what they do and how they behave in certain situations but you cannot be behind them all the time and so as a parent then you cannot control how your children behave at all times. Poker is like this and is a partly controlled game where you can control certain things but not others. However there are huge elements of poker that are chaotic and wildly chaotic at that.

It is this part of the game that tilts players but this gets back to what I was saying about the player themselves being their biggest enemy because it is how you react to bad events that is the real issue here. Another huge factor in why some players lose is a temporary loss of focus. This has nothing whatsoever to do with tilt but simply not concentrating. With every lapse of concentration then there is a loss of EV somewhere even though it is impossible to quantify. If it is just a simple one off then the damage is probably nothing to worry about.

However some players have huge issues with concentration and this is especially the case with regards to online poker. It is the mere act of playing poker on a screen instead of playing in a three dimensional live setting that causes this problem.