How Good Is Your Poker?
STARTING THIS MONTH I would like to add a slightly different flavour to our month ly quiz. So far we have covered mostly limit hold’em, but from here on I would like to test you on other forms of poker, and this will include actual hands I have played on my sponsor’s site, Sportsbook Poker. The hand this month takes place at a $0.5041 blind no-limit hold’em ten-handed table online. With a $100 maximum buy-in and several players deliberately playing a short stack, this was never going to be a hugely profitable game, but this hand was very illuminat ing just the same. The low-stakes full ring games on sports book com are pretty tight and most play ers don’t get out of line, and the ones who do only do so occasionally. In this hand it was folded to me in the cutoff seat (one to the right of the button) and I held the 84-7A.
The players to my left had the following stacks:
- You have $116. Come on now, what is your play? A. Raise B. Limp C. Fold
- The flop comes KV-96-3+ and both blinds check to you
- The turn card is the 24, giving you a flush draw. Both blinds check to you. What is your play?
- Both opponents check to you again, and you are sitting there with basically nothing. What is your play?
In this situation, there is nothing-. wrong with folding, as you have a hai that needs implied odds to be profitable unless you can outplay the opposition. is for this very reason that limping alor. is the wrong play as it is unlikely that yc will either flop the monster or create tl-. multi-way pot that you are after. Yc could easily get raised by the ‘button c-your left after what is a very weak limp. I can understand the fact that you a, trying to hit a big flop, but the overall ca fibre of play in NL100 games is not j poor as you may think. They may not be the Sportsbook Las Vegas A. Stars, but they are not there just to throw money at you. But because your hand relatively weak, folding is still awarded with eight points here.
But I like to try to create errors by rr opponents – errors like calling my raise and then meekly check-folding the flo-. whenever they miss. I also like to explore:- players who are easily pushed off the blinds.
Those blinds may not seem much, but those uncontested 75-cent pots add ap over the course of a year. But I also select hands that allow me the opportunity to make a big hand just in case I get played along with. This allows me to try to exploit another potential error – getting someone to overplay a good second best hand. It also needs to be mentioned that short stacks tend to be very tight and tend to play really condensed ranges, and the big blind fits the bill perfectly here. If your analysis and reasoning went along similar lines, then reward yourself with a nice big fat 10 BONUS POINTS! You decide to open-raise to $1.50 and the button folds, but both blinds call your raise, making a $4.50 pot.
