Tips to improve your general play at Texas Holdem - Betting EDGE & Position

www.tru-grinderz.com




Betting Edge

A key to success in poker is highlighting edges and exploiting them. The simplest and best way to do this is to use Betting edge. Out of the options you have in poker, checking, calling, folding and betting/raising, only betting or raising can either win you the pot or add value to favourable situations. Try to develop a preference to bet or raise over the other options. This is not to say that sometimes, usually on the river your best option may be to call or fold.

View betting edge as this, by betting or playing aggressively you are giving yourself a 2-1 edge in terms of chances to win a pot over someone whose preference is to call. By betting you can win the hand by inducing an opponent to fold, or if called you can win by having the best hand. The caller only has one way to beat you, in that he has to match your bet and have the best hand. You can now see that betting not only has the benefit of gaining all of the wins where your opponent elects to fold, but also adds value when he calls you and you have the best hand.

There are of course scenarios when you may not want to bet. Let’s say that you have made 2 pair on the river and there are 3 suited cards and the board could have made your opponent a possible straight. Your opponent checks to you, what should you do? This is a scenario where you may want to check behind. You actually have the fourth best type of hand as you could be beaten by a flush, a straight or three of a kind. By checking you remove the risk of being raised and potentially folding the winning hand. If a player had top pair top kicker he may have called you down to the river, he perhaps observed that there is a possible straight and potential flushes and may have chosen to check raise you to represent a stronger hand than he holds. If you bet and he raises you, there is no way your two pair is going anywhere other than the muck. You will end up folding the winning hand.

Position

In most forms of poker there is what we call positional advantage. The importance of position cannot be stressed highly enough to you. From reading the section on the mechanics of Holdem, you will know that there is a dealer button , a small blind and a big blind. The dealer button represents the best position to play from in a hand of poker. After the flop, or after the first round of betting the player on or closest to the dealer button acts last. This allows you to have the privilege of observing all of the other players decisions before you consider what to do. In short you should play the majority of your hands in late position.

Lets say that you are playing a pot against one person and you have position. He has raised preflop with say Ace Jack, you have called him with two random cards. The flop comes 10-7-5 rainbow (this means three different suits, making flushes very unlikely, he contiues to bet and you call him. The turn is  a 6, making the board 10-7-5-6, your opponent checks. Now without knowing what your cards are, or without needing to know, you have a great chance to use position and take this pot down. As a result of his check, you bet three quarters of the pot. It is now highly probable that he will fold. He has ace high, no pair no draw. The best he could hope to hit is an ace, the jack could complete a stright so it makes his river decision even harder. Any reasonable player has to give up.

In the example above you can see the power of position, he had a resonable hand preflop, continued on the flop, checked to you on the turn because he didn’t like the call on the flop. Had absolutley no reason to call or raise you once you took the lead by betting his check and he gave up and folded. Your cards didn’t matter, think of this expample as showing you how to play the man not your cards, in fact we could have beaten him blind here (I didn’t once consider what our cards were). This is called a float play, it is when you call someone in position with the intention of taking the pot away from them later on in the hand. Make this type of play a big part of your armoury.

Get into the habit of playing a tighter range of hands, or better starting hands from early position. Slightly wider range of hands from middle position and your full range of hands from late position. Reffer to the starting hands chart included in this welcome pack to give you a framework of what hands to play. The image below shows the different positional sectors on a 9 handed table.

Tru Grinderz Deal of the Day

Lock Poker (US Friendly) 200% Sign Up Bonus (up to$4k) + 36% rakeback -Bonuscode: THEFUTURE

Download Lock Poker