6 Card Poker

In deep stacked situations in no limit Texas Hold em then you are often better off releasing marginal hands on the flop if you get raised. Let us look at an example here to show you what I mean. It has been folded to you in the cut-off and you open raise to $1.50 in NL50 with the Qc-10s. The button calls you as does the big blind and the pot becomes $4.75. The flop is 10h-9h-3s and the big blind checks. You bet $3.25 and the button raises you to $14. The big blind folds and now the action is on you.

The button’s stack size is $67 while you have $61 and so both of you are over 100 big blinds deep. Many players call in situations like these but I feel that the correct play is to fold unless you have a very powerful read on your opponent. If your opponent is on a draw then you may only be a very marginal favourite and if they have a pair plus a flush draw then the hand could be very marginal indeed. But you easily be beaten here and beaten badly and this is the real downside to playing on. There is $22 in the pot and it is going to coast you $10.75 to call so your expressed odds are roughly 2/1. This may sound appealing but there are other pressing factors here and one is that you could be risking your entire stack.

The combination of marginal pot odds, being out of position, having a very marginal hand and a high percentage of the stacks still to play makes a fold the best play. These situations are what trap inexperienced players. However in high stakes games or very aggressive games then the picture isn’t quite so straight forward. Middle stakes levels and high stakes levels are full of players who are adjusting and readjusting constantly. This is one of the big differences between middle and high stakes levels and the lower levels. At the lower levels of play then simple solid play often gets the money and simply not making big mistakes will get you a long way.

This is because weak players pass you their money in enough quantity for adjusting and readjusting not to be necessary. You simply play your hands very well and avoid big errors. But at the higher levels of poker then the players are better and so will simply not make the same mistakes that the lower level players make. But in this previous example is one such case in point. If you call then your stronger opponents will be using that as a sign of weakness and attacking you on the turn or value betting you when you are second best. Re-raising is not that attractive either because you are risking a very high percentage of money. So either way then you are in a tough spot and if you are ahead and your opponent is on a draw then your opponent still has very good equity even then.

A few years ago I wrote an article about cheating in poker. Actually I write an awful lot of articles about cheating but this is simply because it is such big business. But over the last couple of years and even recently there have been cheating scandals involving Holdem poker online and some of the big names that are associated with the game. I am not going to name any names in this article simply because it is all too easy to Google this subject and see who these people are for yourself.

But there is one undeniable fact with regards all of this and this is that when vast numbers of people see top players cheating in this way then they are going to be left with the conclusion that the best way to make money with play online poker is to cheat. You also need to ask yourself one other important question. Which takes far less time to do, learning how to cheat in order to beat poker or learning how to be a good player?

The answer is simple and obvious and cheats can become winners at poker in a fraction of the time that players take to become good. Even if a player becomes a bad poker cheat then this still does not prevent them from trying. If you try and become a cheat and you end up still losing money then you simply become a better cheat by not making the same mistakes.

Unfortunately it is all too easy to cheat in online poker and another counter argument put forward is that people would only cheat at stakes that were meaningful. But surely that comes down to definition. I am still waiting for someone to tell me what “meaningful stakes” actually means. The answer is that it means different things to different people. Anyone who had only played $10 games would think that $200 games were serious bucks. But yet a player who was playing $25-$50 games where the buy in is $5000 would think that $200 games were pitifully low.

So it is one of definition and players with small bankrolls will cheat at smaller stakes. This is like saying that the only people who ever steal only do so for meaningful amounts of money, if this was the case then there would be no such thing as petty theft. The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of thieves and criminals are small time just like the vast majority of poker players in the stakes that they play. There are far more cheats in low-stakes games simply because there are far more players.

The cheats in the larger games are far less in number because the player pools are smaller but the amounts that they take dwarf the amounts of the low-stakes cheats. It is a bit like having 1000 people steal an item of clothing worth $50. The total amount stolen only comes to $50,000 despite the fact that it has taken 1000 instances to reach this total. But one person commits fraud to the tune of $1 million and robs a rich businessman and the figure is twenty times greater but it has only taken one event to do it. This is exactly the same thing with poker.

Bluffing is part of poker. It is one form of deception used to provoke opponents to fold even if they have the more superior hand. Players who don’t bluff are easy opponents. When your opponent is not a bluffer, then don’t call his bet unless you have a very good hand.

Another form of deception employed in poker is slow playing. This is the opposite of bluffing. When you slow play, you bet weakly whenever you have a strong hand. When you utilize both bluffing and slow playing, opponents will never know how to play you.