Hot answers tagged cash-game
11
The standard straddle is, in general, a losing proposition. You're trading 2BB for the right to play last preflop. You'll end up playing larger pots out of position, which is a bad thing. You have to have a huge edge against your opposition to make up for the positional disadvantage.
Some special situations, where straddling makes sense:
Trying to build ...
10
I think the only realistic options for villain are a missed draw or Tx. I think he'd have gotten more aggressive earlier if he had you preflop. Your line looks a lot like an overpair to me, and as such, he would want to get value out of you if he had trips or a full house. As such, I don't think he shoves the river here if he wanted a call. He knows you ...
8
First, a look at ranges: I think he has AA/KK/Tx/88/33 here no more often than he has JJ or a busted draw (to the straight or the flush). And sometimes he'll turn up with utter crap. So if we say it's an even money bet, we're getting good odds on a call.
Second, let's look at history: You noted in the comments that Villian has not let a pot check around. ...
8
Of course it is. If you're a player who knows the game, then having a big stack will also give you a crucial psychological advantage. Your opponents will fold to your bets and raises much more often, this will allow you to make much more effective bluffs. They know that the guy with the big stack is able to go all-in without a significant risk to himself. ...
8
Is there an inherent advantage/disadvantage to having a larger stack than your opponent in a cash game?
No. There is no advantage nor disadvantage, because you play for his stack, not yours. If you have 75 BBs and he has 40 BBs, the maximum you can win is 40 BBs, the rest of 35 BBs being returned to you.
I would think if you expect to have a skill ...
7
If you are a better player than the rest of the players at the table, you want a stack as large as everyone else at the table so that you maximize your winning hands.
Having $1 or $1,000,000 more than everyone else at the table makes no difference in terms of the game itself (but might make a difference psychologically).
6
Generally, as stacks get shallower, cards matter more. As stacks get deeper, game dynamics and player tendencies matter more.
Shallow
When playing with short effective stacks (<50bb), you need to play hands that will make the best hand a lot of the time. If you are playing against people with larger stacks, you will have less fold equity, so you will ...
6
Disclaimer: I am a cash game player, so you might consider my opinion to be biased.
Cash games tend to run deeper than tournaments. This in turn leads to more post flop play in cash games than in tournaments, as a general rule.
Post flop play in a deep cash game, even one that is only 100 BBs deep, can be very difficult. Given that we play against ...
6
Shoving with a straight+flush draw is a pretty standard play for NLHE in my book. You typically have enough equity to be even money against your opponent's calling range. That means you could call their shove and see a profit due to the dead money in the pot.
Almost any time that you could call and be even money, a shove is better, and the more money in the ...
6
Theoretically, no. For every dollar you and your opponent add to the pot, you stand to win your dollar back plus some of his, regardless of his hand. However there are a few practical edge-cases worth considering.
Trusting the game
If this is your first time playing in a home game, there are a few ways this could be a mistake. The first is cheating; ...
5
The more players, the more money on the table. The rake is less noticed.
Be aware that:
The rake is increased together with the number of the hands. If you play HU and on the first hand you both go all-in, the rake will be minimum. If you play many hands, the total rake is increased (and of course, the amount of money is decreased).
If you play in a full ...
5
Typically, live play will mean you're seeing between 30-50 hands per hour. In your case, this will mean that you've seen somewhere in the region of 7,000 hands. This is an incredibly low number to make any significant, reliable assumptions about the StDev of your win-rate. The data set simply isn't large enough to be approaching what we'd consider a normal ...
5
The only time you can consider folding AA preflop is:
You are on the bubble in a tournament, and
More than two players are all in, and one of them WILL bust, and
Your stack is such that you could bust out if you call, and
If you fold, you are guaranteed a place in the money.
ALL of these things MUST be true to make folding AA the right decision. There ...
5
You characterize the villain as very tight so with that in mind, his range is narrow and rarely includes any bluffs, if any at all. I'm guessing you think the same.
That said, I'd split his range into two parts, his core range and a secondary range.
His core range is likely [AQx, KQx, QJx, KJs, KTs].
His secondary range is likely [JJ ,TT, 99].
If i'm ...
4
Someone who never took insurance would do better in the long run than somebody who took insurance.
Ultimately it's a subjective question since you are losing EV. Only you can answer if the juice is worth it to you to reduce variance. It's easy to construct hypothetical situations in which I would take insurance in real life, given a large enough pot. That ...
4
However I would say cash game is more complicated, that's not the point.
The point is, they need different skill sets;
in tournament play,
you deal with a ton of preflop problems, which is far more easy to learn and doesn't need good logic at all.
You just need a lot of work, knowing which stack size you can do what. This is all you need basically. (Sure ...
4
I would argue that both games take a similar amount of skill in order to achieve expert-level play. However, to achieve average-level play, tournaments require less skill.
The reasoning behind this is, as John Dibling stated, cash games require more postflop play. That complication is forced into the game much more than any of the complications of ...
4
Since you didn't engage any money yet if you call you would do $2 but the minimum amount for a raise there is $4 since the $2 is from the max amount that was bet in the table and the next amount you can place is $2(max bet)+$2(BB).
Answer:$4
Some casino's might have some rules and sometimes they aren't the same as in other casino's.
4
If it is your strategy to be playing these marginal hands in the first place. you probably need to have a more subtle strategy for letting their value come forth when you hit a gin draw like this. betting more of your stack than would be mathematically valid for a flush draw, even with the guarantee that everyone calls you all in when you make it, puts other ...
4
There are quite a few things we need to address here. I'm going to do my best to break them down point-by-point.
First off...
AK is not favorite to win against so many players, is it really profitable in the long run? What should i look for in this 2 situations to decide if it's profitable on the long run? Should i consider play AQ as well in this ...
4
My suggestion based off my own personal experience with house games is start with small buy-in tournaments. As the experience and comfort level grows, you can then either. Up the buy-in of the tournaments and/or transition into cash games. You can set the Buy-in caps of the cash games to limit the loss and keep the games friendly. To keep players from ...
4
Well, obviously like everything in poker, the answer is: "it depends".
Let's strip it down to its core: Pocket pairs are good because if you go against an opponent that doesn't have a pocket pair, he needs to hit the flop/turn/river somehow in order to have showdown value. You don't have to connect to the flop to do this, because you already have a pair.
...
4
Flop If its rainbow, Thats a decent sized bet. I guess you could argue for $28-30 being out of position, but your sizing helps your opponents make more mistakes calling with bad aces and kings.
Turn I like this small bet size cause it keeps aces in. AND, on a river brick, you can continue your 'ace' line betting tiny to instigate a reraise from trips as ...
4
Strategy itself is a fluid thing, and although the flow of a game and the effective strategy to beat it will constantly change, the fundamentals of good strategy don't. Wherever you play poker, it's still the same game, play money or real money!
Simply put, if you let the type of game interfere with what you believe/know to be an effective strategy, then ...
4
The general formula for the minimum pot size that is worth a call goes like this:
Break-even pot size = Probability of losing / probability of winning * price of call
In the worse case (you opponent is holding 65s), the numbers are:
Break-even pot size = 23 / 77 * aa = 0.3*aa
where aa is the amout of the all-in.
The pot is worth aa + blinds, which must ...
4
Is there an inherent advantage/disadvantage to having a larger stack than your opponent in a cash game?
It really depends on the other stack sizes at the table. If you buy in for the minimum and everyone else at the table is lower then its fine. If there are people with max buyins then you need to buy in at that.
You want to be able to maximise your ...
3
Using PP's solely to flop sets isn't a winning strategy.
(note: I'll stick to talking about open-betting pre-flop and not cold-calling which
leads to similar post-flop situations, but infers different ranges for all players
involved. Also, I consider small PP's 22-88; mid PP's 99-TT; and big PP's to
be JJ-AA. JJ is a special case. Closer to being a mid ...
3
The number one consideration here is your opponent's tendencies. Are they the type to be scared away, or are they the type to make a crying call? Also, what was the action prior to this point and what does that lead you to believe your opponent holds? What was the preflop action? How large were your bets? Exactly what community cards are we talking about ...
3
Disclaimer: All of what follows applies only to winning players. For non-winning players, none of this matters a whit.
I'm not going to discuss actual, hard numbers as most people familiar with StdDev in poker will declare something that can be interpreted as "StdDev is completely useless until you have 100k+ hands," -- a sentiment I disagree with in ...
3
This varies based on a number of factors. In many places, straddling is legal, but the straddle is not live - that is, the straddler does not buy position. In such a situation, a straddle is obviously a negative-EV move, since the straddler is giving up their opportunity to look at their cards before acting, in return for nothing.
In some cases, the ...
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