Advanced No Limit

Anyone that tells you there is only one way to play a hand needs a wrench to adjust his poker thinking. There are myriad ways to play hands, and many of the factors that underlie the “it depends” kind of answer you get when asking a poker question are obvious.

Once you decide to play a hand in a no-limit hold’em game, your next decision is to determine how much to bet. There’s always a relationship, even if it’s hidden from your view, between your hand or the hand you’re hoping to make, and your opponent’s hand or the hand he’s drawing to.

Sit ‘n’ Go tournaments, which we’ll abbreviate from here on as SNG or SNGs, depending on whether we’re talking singular or plural, are really a creation of the Internet.

While everyone wants to be dealt A-A or K-K, the laws of probability say you’ll be dealt A-K four times for every three times you’re dealt A-A and K-K. Conventional wisdom says that when you’re dealt Ace-King, or Big Slick as it’s called by most hold’em players, you do one thing with it: Raise. While some players occasionally call, just to incorporate some deception into their game, most play Big Slick as fast as a pair of aces or kings.

While winning poker requires aggression, and betting and raising are the keys to aggressive play at the poker table, successful players always have a wide variety of tools at their disposal. Relying solely on hyper aggressive play can lead to money lost unnecessarily, but tempering a tendency to lean too heavily on betting and raising by calling every now and then can provide a good tactical balance to aggressive play.

Everyone who sits down in a poker game has a table image, regardless of whether they’ve taken steps to cultivate a specific image, or it just develops organically from the player’s personality and playing style. Images aren’t immutable either. They change over time, sometimes even within the course of one playing session.

Whenever an opponent raises it’s time to rethink the hand you’re playing. Any card can sound an alarm or be a cause for joy and celebration. It all depends on whether your opponent’s raise tells you his hand is better than yours, or he’s doing just what you hoped for; he’s betting right into your monster hand.

You’ll find a wide variety of styles at most poker tables, and it’s natural to ask whether each style has merit or whether one style is significantly better than any other.

It’s never fun being short stacked, especially in a tournament. Being short stacked in a cash game is no fun either, but you have an easy out. You can always reach into your wallet and buy more chips. Of course you might have deliberately bought in to a no-limit cash game for a relatively small amount of chips so that you won’t have to make a decision for all of them, because all of your chips represent a sizeable amount of risk every time you play a hand.

Heads-up tournament play requires varying your play and the application of practical psychology, as well as having an intuitive feel for just how much you can extract from your opponent when you know you have the best of it. That’s only half the story. You also have to make sure you lose the least amount possible when your opponent has the best hand. Much of this falls into the art of poker, rather than any measurable, formulaic approach that you can commit to memory and apply in some rote fashion.