Changes At Noted Poker Authority

We poker wonks tend to like to analyze individual hands. I had this and did this. Then my opponent did that. Then I did this, but actually I think doing this other thing might have been more profitable.

Then we write a thousand word article about the merits of doing this versus doing the other thing.

Analyzing individual hands has value, but if you do it too much you can fall into a bit of a trap. You begin to think of poker as a series of independently played hands. There’s a “right” way to play this hand, then a “right” way to play the next, and so on.

Poker doesn’t quite work that way. The hands aren’t independent. What happens on one hand can affect the outcome of a future hand. It won’t affect the actual cards dealt, of course, but it will affect how your opponents read your hand and react to your plays.

In other words, your goal isn’t to make sure that every hand you play is as profitable individually as it can be. Your goal is to have the most profitable overall strategy. You’d happily give up a penny on this hand if that would mean winning a dime on another.

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Here are some quick thoughts for this warm Spring morning.

• There’s a lot of money to be made on the river in the $1-$2 6-max no-limit games on Full Tilt. A lot of the regulars miss value bets a lot, and they fold too many hands to overbet shoves even if you aren’t really representing anything too plausible. So you can get a pretty good edge on them by value betting well and choosing your spots where they have a weak range to shove. To some extent the folding to shoves is an ok adjustment for the games because most of the players aren’t overbet shoving often enough as a bluff.
• I’ve installed the PokerTracker 3 Beta and have been using it. The HUD’s a little buggy, but the new features are really nice. The preflop 3-bet and fold to 3-bet stats in particular are immensely useful. It’s a lot easier to choose good spots to 3-bet and 4-bet light when you have those stats in the HUD. For some reason a lot of the 19/16-type regulars’ names run together in my head, and I had trouble remembering which ones liked to 3-bet light and which ones didn’t. The 3-bet stats make it a lot easier to remember.
• Stoxpoker has a new PLO coach, Ribbo, and his videos have inspired me to try to pick up the game. For the last week or so I’ve been playing in the $0.50-$1 6-max games on Full Tilt. I don’t know what a lot of the betting patterns mean, so I’ve gotten a little lost a few times. But it’s pretty clear that many of the other players (particularly at night) are really pretty terrible. For example, it’s common to see tables with 55% VPIPs. I don’t know much about PLO, but I know that can’t be right. So even though I suck I still feel kind of comfortable in the games. I can only imagine how juicy the games must be for someone who knows what they’re doing. If you’re a Stoxpoker member and have any interest in PLO, I definitely recommend checking out Ribbo’s videos.
• Oh, and don’t go too crazy with stone bluffs in those $0.50-$1 PLO games. It turns out that it’s actually pretty easy to make one pair when you start with four cards. And one pair is coincidentally some players’ requirements for stacking off.
• Apparently Leatherass pees in a bottle while he’s playing. I’m at a loss for words.
• If you’ve been living under a rock, you won’t know yet that the WSOP main event final table will be played in November, four months after the rest of the tournament. Interesting. When I heard, my mind immediately went to all the new and tempting ways the final table players could make secret deals, collude, and otherwise screw each other over. Then Elaine asked, “What if one of them dies in the interim?” An interesting question. Knowing poker players, the other final table contestants would naturally demand that the deceased be blinded off. Presumably this gimmick will help revive some new interest in TV poker. Honestly, I don’t care much either way because the chance that I’ll be at this year’s WSOP main event final table is zero. It’s hard for me to get too bent out of shape about tournament machinations. But if in some alternate universe I were to happen to be at that table… methinks it could be a really weird four months.
• Despite the final table shenanigans I’m definitely looking forward to the WSOP this year. I plan to play the cash games and have a lot of fun.

If you play online no-limit, at least at the $0.50-$1 level or above, you’re bound to run into the light 3-bet. You open for $3.50 on the button in a $0.50-$1 game, the small blind folds, and then the big blind makes it $12 to go.

Now that’s just a 3-bet. The “light” part is what hands they’ll make the play with. This 3-bet “should” be a big pair or a big ace. Maybe some big kings too. But the light 3-better will make the raise with all sorts of hands: A 6 , 3 3 , 9 8 . Sometimes they’ll even go lower. Recently I remember having someone 3-bet me in this button versus blinds situation with K 2 .

Getting 3-bet by someone who you know will do it light can be annoying. First of all, when you open on the button, your hand is a lot more likely to look like Q 5 than K K . So the 3-bet is usually going to be pretty threatening to you even if you know that the hand behind the play isn’t always top-notch because your hand is probably just as bad or even worse.

What to do, what to do. Well, the first and most obvious play is to fold. Folding is probably the best you can do against most light 3-bets when you yourself have junk. But folding is exactly what the light 3-bettor wants you to do, so sometimes you have to fight back.

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A couple of days ago I posted a relatively routine no-limit hand for discussion. I say it’s routine not because it isn’t important, but because it’s the type of situation that arises regularly. For reference, here’s the original hand.

I’m in the big blind in a $1-$2 6-max game with $200 stacks. I hold A Q .

A tight regular opens for $7 from two off the button. A loose player calls in the small blind, and I call in the big blind.

The flop comes A 9 6 . The small blind checks.

What are your goals for the hand? How do you plan things out from here? How does your plan in this hand fit in with your entire range of hands on this flop?

The discussion in the original thread was great, and there were a lot of different thoughts about it. There are numerous ways to play the hand and plenty of justifications for those ways. Here’s how I was thinking about the hand as I played it.

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This hand is a slightly modified version of one I played recently. It’s a routine situation that I think deserves some discussion. As with many hands, I definitely don’t think there’s one “right” way to play it, but that doesn’t mean we can’t talk about it.

I’m in the big blind in a $1-$2 6-max game with $200 stacks. I hold A Q .

A tight regular opens for $7 from two off the button. A loose player calls in the small blind, and I call in the big blind.

The flop comes A 9 6 . The small blind checks.

What are your goals for the hand? How do you plan things out from here? How does your plan in this hand fit in with your entire range of hands on this flop?

Read my thoughts in the next post.

Recently I was playing in a fairly loose $2-$5 live no-limit game. An early position player with about $300 limped. I was two off the button, and I made it $20 to go with A K . The button, with about $325 total, made it $75 to go. He was an unremarkable, if slightly loose player. The limper thought for a while and then called. I had both players covered.

1. How should I respond? Should I fold, call, raise a bit, or move all-in?
2. What’s my plan for the rest of the hand (should I need one)?

Answer those two questions for yourself before you read on.

I’ll tell you what I did.

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It’s been a while since I’ve reviewed the archive, so this review is way overdue. So let’s not waste any further time and get right to it.

• Bluffing in Small Stakes No Limit Games offers some helpful tips for players who feel totally lost in those loose, live $1-$2 games.
• With this year’s WSOP coming up, I bet a lot of people will be Switching from Online To Live No Limit. Generally speaking, it’s an easy transition because online games tend to be a lot tougher than live games on average. But if you are unsure of yourself, it can’t hurt to hear some advice.
• In the vein of the above article, here are Four Quick Live Game Tips For Online Players.
• Finally, check out Tilt and the Curse of Absent-Minded Mistakes

Stoxpoker has rolled out a couple of new features that I wanted to tell you guys about.

First, they have unveiled this amazing whiz-bang new widget that lets you watch Stoxpoker videos directly from Noted Poker Authority. If you’re already a Stoxpoker member and NPA reader, you can just cruise over to the Stoxpoker at NPA page and watch all the new videos.

If you’ve just tuned in to NPA and are wondering what all this Stoxpoker stuff is about, then definitely go check out the Stoxpoker at NPA page right now.

Second, Stoxpoker has a new hand history converter that will reformat all your hand histories into an easy to read format for posting on forums and blogs. I’ve been looking for a dependable hand history converter for a while, and I’m finally happy with this one from Stoxpoker.

So if you want to post a hand on the message board, you can now use the Stoxpoker hand converter to post it. Unfortunately, I can’t figure out how to get the forum software to recognize any tags or codes, so for now just use the Plain Text option in the converter.

So it appears I can’t handle playing six tables. I’ve always made quite a significant number of mistakes while multitabling due to time pressure, but I figured that if I practiced six-tabling I’d eventually get the hang of it. It’s probably true that I would/will eventually get the hang of six tables, but I’m going to cut back to four for the time being. I think four will be within my comfort zone.

A couple of days ago I hit multitabling rock bottom. I played the following hand:

Full Tilt, $1/$2 NL Hold’em Cash Game, 6 Players
Hand History Converter by Stoxpoker

MP: $509.25 (254.6 bb)
CO: $175.50 (87.8 bb)
BTN: $224.80 (112.4 bb)
Hero (SB): $217.15 (108.6 bb)
BB: $40 (20 bb)
UTG: $118.10 (59.1 bb)

Pre-Flop: Hero is SB with K A
UTG folds, MP raises to $7, 2 folds, Hero raises to $24, BB folds, MP calls $17

Flop: ($50) J 9 J (2 players)
Hero bets $32.50, MP calls $32.50

Turn: ($115) 2 (2 players)
Hero bets $75, MP calls $75

River: ($265) 7 (2 players)
Hero checks, MP bets $286, Hero folds

The thing that was remarkable about the hand was that I played it entirely unconsciously until the river. At that point, my unconscious brain escalated the hand to my conscious brain by saying something along the lines of, “Hrmm.. conscious brain, maybe you should take a look at this one on the bottom-left. My opponent doesn’t seem to have folded yet, so you probably have a decision to make.”

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