 Dear Clonie - I have a problem playing hands out of position when I don't flop anything. It seems like when I bet my oppponents always call and when I check they bet. What can I do to improve the way I play these hands? Brett P. Los Angeles Dear Brett - Most players, even many professionals have a problem playing hands out of position when they don't flop anything. Sometimes even when they do flop something! The thing to remember is that position is everything in poker. Try to avoid playing hands unless you will have position. If the hand is so good that you have to play it though, then be sure to play it aggressively. If you don't flop anything and you have already checked and folded once or twice, try a good sized check raise. If you play with opponents who recognize that you have check folded in the past, they will probably lay down a hand here. The key is to mix up your play. In order for this to work, you will have to show that you will also check raise when you have made a good hand after the flop. Playing out of position is tricky. Mixing up your game and never letting your opponents know where you are is the key to successfully playing these hands. Dear Clonie - I am currently primarily a No Limit Hold'em cash games player but I am considering playing more tournaments. What kind of adjustment do I need to make to be successful at this? Sara R. Denver Dear Sara - The biggest difference between cash games play and tournament play is escalating blinds. In a cash game it would not be a bad strategy to just wait for a good hand and play a very tight game. In most games this style would be a winning style. In a tournament though, the blinds increase on a regular basis which means that the amount of chips you have in comparison to the blinds and the antes decreases rapidly. In order to play successfully, at certain points in the tournament you will have to open your game up and play a wider variety of hands. I would suggest that you read as many tournament strategy books as you can find. These will give you a variety of differing strategies that you can use to become a winning tournament player. Dear Clonie - Some of the players that I play with on a regular basis are very good at reading people and finding tells. I never seem to have any idea when people are bluffing though. How can I become better at reading people? PokaJoe Dear PokaJoe - This will depend a lot on the types of players that you are playing against and the size of the game that you are playing. In a bigger game you are more likely to find tricky players who may give off false tells in order to try to trick you. You will rarely if ever find this caliber of player in the smaller games though. The best thing that you can do is try to pay very close attention to a persons demeanor when they make a big play. If they end up having to show a bluff then you will know what they tend to do when bluffing. Are they rigid and staring at the pot? Are they watching TV, talking to the waitress, or talking to the other players? These things are crucial and you will need to pay attention when you are not in the hand in order to catch these things. Practice putting people on hands when you are not playing the actual hand. It takes a lot of practice to do this but make educated decisions on what they might have based on the patterns that you are observing. The other thing you can do is figure out how you act when you are either bluffing or you have a big hand. Most players act the same way, this is the basis for the multitude of common tells you can read about in several poker books out there. Being aware when you are playing, aware of both yourself and your opponents, is the key to making winning decisions in poker. |
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