14 Oct 2024 Intermediate This article is for medium-skilled players limp moving up stakes multi-way pot position Poker can feel like a very hard game, and to many it can be a very expensive hobby. But there are five ways to make the game substantially more profitable and a whole lot easier. Read this topic if you want to significantly improve your win rate. #5: Stop Betting Huge in Multiway Pots Coming in at number five, we have stopped betting huge in multiway pots. So a lot of players see a board like ace of spades, seven of clubs, eight of clubs, holding a hand like ace king, and their immediate impulse is: «I need to protect my hand». There are a lot of players that could be drawing, and so they bet like the full pot into four or five players. This strategy is bound to get you killed in the long run. It's just way too easy for the field to play almost perfectly against you when you're choosing sizings this large. If you're somebody out in the field that knows that you tend to play like this, and you tend to be weighted too much towards value (in particular value that is vulnerable), it's way too easy to only continue here with two pair or better, or very strong draws. This is the death knell for a hand like ace king on a board like this, because it's too hard to be making money when the draws have significant equity to beat you, and everything else is crushing you. So the way to play this spot is to stop overvaluing protection of your individual hand, and to start valuing protection of your range, and protection of your stack. The way to do this is to use a smaller sizing when you choose to bet. This will allow you to thin the field more profitably, because now you can bet more hands for this smaller size. You no longer need to go so big with part of your range that really can't hold up against this many players. So what are you going to do multi-way if your only poker strategy is bet huge to protect my hand, or to check? Well, you're going to have to do a lot of checking, and this is undesirable. So we'd rather give you a strategy where you can bet small with more of your range, deny equity to the field, who have to worry about the other players involved in the hand, so they can't continue as liberally with a lot of these draws anyways. And then you thin the field, get hopefully heads up, who are only against two players by the turn, and you have a lot more visibility into what you're really up against, and you can continue on favorable turn cards. So it's this type of mindset of using the flop c-betting to thin the field, and then get more information from our players, and proceed accordingly on later streets, rather than tipping the strength of our hand with a large bet on the flop. #4: Value Your Short Stack Coming in at number four, we have stopped hunting off your short stack. So what I see so often from players is they're having a night that just isn't going their way, and they get to their final bullet, and they don't have enough money to buy back to the full buy-in level. So rather than playing seriously with a half stack, or just calling it a night, what a lot of them like to do is punt off this remaining stack. The thinking is: «Well, send me home guys, I'm either doubling up, or I'm going home with nothing». And you're almost treating it like a tournament, and not valuing this remaining piece. It's actually a very significant leak. Take a 2-5 player who does this, and say ordinarily they're a $25 an hour winner. Well, say they're down to their last 500 bucks. It's problematic because now we're putting $500 in the middle, which is essentially 20 hours of work. This is a major uphill slog. You can't overcome a leak like this if we're just consistently not valuing our money on nights where things aren't going our way. It will be much better to either play this money seriously, sit down and grind the short stack with your normal discipline, or accept that you're just not in the right place, right frame of mind, and it's time to go. This is not a tournament. The blinds are not going up. It is NL2-5 like it always is. There's no reason to play with this level of speed in this spot. #3: Stop Open Limping So coming in at number three, we have to stop open limping. It is 2024. Why we still see open limping at the table is beyond me? It’s one thing to limp behind another player, especially in a late position. When you have a hand, leg, a low pocket pair, a suited ace, something that's going to play well at a higher SPR, and you already have position, it is quite another thing to limp in from an early position and give up all of your advantages in the hand. So when we limp, we are giving up our card advantage because we're often in there with mediocre cards that aren't as good as cards that would have raised. We're also giving up our initiative because when you limp, you are no longer the one who can make the continuation bet post flop, then a lot of the time we're going to limp call raise and have to check fold to a c-bet on the flop when we miss our hand. We can't represent strong hands because we've limped in and we're not telling a convincing story. We also end up out of position a lot of the time. So we're going into flops with absolutely no advantages in front of us other than our desire that we want to play this pretty looking or mediocre looking hand. So it's this type of trimming the fat that is one of the easiest ways to improve your win rate in poker. It's something that I talk with my students all the time - you’re going to have to play a raise or fold game from nearly every position at the table, except in late position when you can sometimes limp behind a cascade of limpers, and doing this will allow you to retain the initiative, retain the range advantage, and really have a skill advantage over your opponents because now you have visibility into what they're playing. You know when they are capped. You know the cards that you can apply pressure on. #2: Flat Call Less Raises So moving on to the number two way to significantly improve your win rate, it would be to stop flat raising as much. A lot of players would be better off if they literally never cold called a raise from any position other than the big blind or maybe the button. In the middle position when you're calling a raise, you're often in this sandwich where anybody behind you can squeeze, and now they know you probably didn't have a very good hand because you didn't 3-bet, so now you're extremely vulnerable no matter what you do. If you fold the money you put in already, well that's a negative outcome. If you call this three bet with a capped range, well that's usually a negative outcome as well. So just avoid the situation in the first place. Often taking a 3-bet or fold approach for the middle position is going to be better for most players. There is a time to have a flatting range, but it requires a little bit of sophisticated range construction. If you just want to make your life simpler, easier, win that low hanging fruit, which is what this video is all about, give up the flatting range from middle position, and definitely give up the flatting range from the small blind. This is where I see way too many people flatting with hands. Where you're in the small blind and you have the worst position at the table, you have another player left to act behind you in the big blind that could easily squeeze you off the pot, or call and now you're out of position against multiple players, it's going to be very hard to steal the pot from this position. It's also going to be hard to make the best hand and get value when you're out of position and you need to tip the strength of your hand with bets into multiple players. So I'd highly recommend players play a 3-bet or fold strategy from here. The only two spots where it's really okay to do this would be the big blind because you're getting such a good price to call and you're closing the action, or the button because you're guaranteed position. Everywhere else, this flatting habit is bound to get you into trouble, and it's really just like that extra fat in a diet that we need to learn to trim out. #1: Stop Paying Off in Under-Bluffed Spots Coming in at number one, the easiest and maybe the most significant way to improve your win rate long term would be to stop paying off players that are simply not bluffing. And there are players like this in general, but there are also situations like this in live poker that are significantly under bluffed where you just don't need to look up the spot out of curiosity. I'll give you an example. Let's say a tight player opens from an early position, and the player is playing roughly 10% of hands, so it's a range that looks like sevens or better. It looks like the suited broadway hands, ace king, ace queen, and a few wheel suited aces. And let's say you're in the big blind with a hand like king of spades, queen of hearts, you decide to defend. Let's say we get a board, and it comes like king of hearts, jack of hearts, deuce of clubs. And your opponent bets two thirds of the pot when you check to him, you decide to call. Now let's say it's the type of opponent that when they size up like this, when they choose a c-bet that's a little bigger, it means that they are not betting everything in their range. So this means that they connected with the board in some way. They're probably not betting hands like sevens through nines for this big of a size on this board because it's not going to be profitable to do so. So really what they're betting are hands like good value, like a king or better, or they're betting draws like gut shots, open enders, and flush draws. So you decide to continue with your top care, totally reasonable up to this point. Let's say we get a turn card that's a blank, like the four of clubs. You check, your opponent now bets the full pot. So again, we need to filter the range again. Opponent is probably not betting his gut shots for this size if he's like your typical tight opponent. You know, some players will know to still do that and still have some of those hands in their range. But let's say this player, once he bets full pot on a board like this, you know he's got ace, king or better. So ace, king, he could have king jack suited, he could have sets, or he's got a good draw like an open ender or a flush draw. Okay, so you're up against that range. You decide to call and the river completes every single draw he could have. Let's say it's the nine of hearts river. You check and now he goes all in for the full pot. So think about how this hand has played out and whether you can beat anything in your opponent's range. A lot of players know this intellectually, but they get caught up with their own hand in this point. They look down at their hand and see: oh, I have the queen of hearts. That's a good blocker. That means it's unlikely my opponent is likely to have a flush. It's unlikely he's going to have, you know, the straight, the queen ten straight because I blocked that. So, I call. This type of lazy thinking costs you so much money at the poker table. Only thinking about your own range and not thinking about the fact that your opponent had a value range of ace king plus coming into the river, he also had draws which have all improved on this card to beat you. He's probably not betting hands like ace king anymore anyways, and those still beat you. So what is he betting here? He's probably betting sets. He's probably betting straights. He's probably betting flushes. All of this beats you for this all-in jam once you've checked to him. You can find a very snug check fold. It's these spots where the opponent's range just has no air in it because the player has structured in a way that is going to leave him with no bluffs by the river. Because he's not opening that big of a subset of hands, he’s not barreling the turn with gut shots. Some players can be like: oh, he could have an ace queen here, ace of hearts with a queen. That's literally three combos of hands that are bluffs. Opponent probably isn't even betting all of those on the turn anyways. His value range significantly outweighs his bluffing range, and you need to find a snug fold here. So these spots are super important. Finding these good folds, finding this preflop discipline with less flats, less limps, treating your remaining stack with the appropriate discipline it deserves, and playing better in multiway pots. This stuff is the low-hanging fruit that I continue to see so many players getting wrong even in 2024. We don't need super advanced GTO to beat the game, guys. We don't need all these advanced check-raising strategies. We just need to be doing these simple things a little bit better if we want to improve our win rate drastically. GL! This article was written by Dennis «Dennis_Stets» based on a video from the PTO Poker channel.
