Saturday, January 14, 2012

Poker gems, #446

Bill Rini, in his blog:



How many times have you heard someone complain that they want to move up in limits where people respect their raises? Well, if you can’t beat the total fish you don’t understand the game well enough to beat people who do respect raises.

Poker is a game of adjusting to your opponent. If you’re playing against a guy who has never met two cards that he wouldn’t see a flop with or will call a big river bet just to see whether you’re bluffing, and you don’t adjust your game to exploit that, you really aren’t a very good poker player to begin with.

You can bluff into this guy all night long and complain about how everyone on 2+2 agrees with your line or pull out PokerStove and empirically demonstrate that you made the mathematically correct move, but you’re still going to end up losing pots to this guy. Not because he’s a better player than you, but because you’re employing an ineffective strategy against that type of opponent.

3 comments:

Rob said...

This sort of reminds me of an observation I've had in making the transition from limit poker to no limit. Always at limit, you hear things like, "No one respects a raise in this game" or "You can never bet anyone out of hand at 2/4"

Well guess what? Now that I'm playing more and more 1/2 or 1/3 no limit, I am just astounded by what people are calling raises--and BIG raises--with! Sometimes I think you can't bet anyone out of a hand there either!

So clearly one key is to find the players who have very loose calling standards and instead of trying to bet them off a hand, bet in a way to take their stack.

unaha-closp said...

I changed my game from profitable to break even by watching HSP and reading 2+2 whilst continuing to play $1-2 at my local.

Aussiesmurf said...

I'ver never understood the logic of people claiming that they could beat a 'better' game, but these players were so 'bad' that they were losing money.

Ummm...VALUE BET, VALUE BET, VALUE BET.

I'm strongly reminded of Grump's classic post 'Me and My Brain'. Why engage in five-level thinking when the guy across the table will call you with any piece of the flop?