Author: max

In my last blog post we took a look at position and starting hands – when should you play which hand and how. In today’s post I would like to explain what we hope to see on the flop and how to play our hand from there. Please take into consideration that my whole Sit&Go strategy blog is geared towards micro limit SNGs as stated in my first post (Sit&Go Preparation). While some of the basic principles may be used in SNGs with higher buy-ins you will have to keep in mind that the game is very different at higher limits.

So we have decided to call or raise pre-flop. Our pre-flop raise will be an impressive one in the first few blind levels of our micro limit SNG. We don’t simply raise to three or four times the BB but for example to ten times the BB. In our virtual SNG with the 10/20 starting blind level and our 1,500 chip stack such a raise thus would be around roughly 200 chips. Our general strategy aims to build up big pots even pre-flop. Whenever there is a flop we want to get the most out of our opponents. Therefore the blog title Flop or Drop – we invest chips in order to help the pot grow quickly.

Let’s assume our pocket cards are QQ – according to our last article we will either raise (if we see no raise before it’s our turn), reraise (if a player raises before us) or fold (if there are two or more raises). So our raise here would be 200 chips. But how high would our potential reraise be? That basically depends on the value of the first bet on the table – we will count all the chips in play and reraise to twice the amount or slightly more. So if a player before us raised the BB to 200 we will reraise him to at least 460 chips (200 chips + 20 BB + 10 SB = 230 chips, therefore twice the pot amounts to 460 chips). Our reraise must never be below the sum of our regular raise (according to our rule above) and the current pot.

Example: Pocket cards QQ, 10/20 blind level, a player raises the BB to 50 chips – we won’t reraise to a mere 160 (50 + 20 + 10 = 80, 80 x 2 = 160) but our regular raise amount (200) plus the current pot (50 + 20 + 10 = 80), which equals a total of 280 chips. We will always use the higher amount when deciding which of our two rules to use (double pot or raise + pot). If the reraise amounts to more than half of our stack we can decide to either go all-in or fold our cards. Under no circumstances do you want to see two thirds or more of your stack on the table and then see an ace on the flop which pretty much hurts our QQ – at that point you’d already be committed and would have to play the hand to the end anyway.

What is a good flop for us?

Lets take a look at your potential starting hands and the according flops that we want to see:

• Pocket Cards: A Pair

Let’s assume your pocket cards are a Pair. Once you see the flop check for a third card for your Pair. If you don’t hit the Set the next thing you want to check is whether you have the Overpair. In both of these cases you have a strong hand that you should play accordingly.

• Pocket Cards: No Pair

You see the flop with AK, AQ, AJ or KQ – what should you hope to find in the first 3 community cards? Well, preferably your highest card – 3 times. Presumably your opponents will however drop out with your first best in that case. The next best scenarios would be – in declining order – Full House, Straight, Triple, 2 Pairs or 1 Pair. A finished Full House or Straight on the flop is of course much less probable than hitting at least a Pair. So when should you continue playing your hand and when should you fold and drop out of the current hand? If you don’t hit on the flop you will either check or fold. If you hit a Pair and it is not the Top Pair you will either check or fold. In all other cases you can basically go for it and build some pressure by betting or raising.

General notes: Carefully check the flop in order to see whether it might be dangerous. If there are 3 cards of the same colour or 3 connected cards (like 8-9-T) on the table you risk running into a Flush or Straight. In that case you will probably be better off to be on the safe side and fold your cards if someone before you bets – unless you have a card that gives you a Flush Draw or Straight Draw (or even better, you actually hit the Flush or Straight right at the flop yourself). If you bet after the flop your bet at your typical micro limit SNG should be around 2 thirds of the pot – at this limit most of the players should be tempted to call.

We hit on the flop – what now?

If you are lucky enough to have hit something like Four of a Kind or a Straight right at the flop you should try and play it slowly in order to not frighten your opponents. You want to keep them in the hand so they can help build the pot. With pocket cards of AK and a flop of AAA even the craziest maniac will probably fold if you bet half the pot or more. Instead you can decide to simply check and with a bit of luck one of the other players will bet, either in order to attempt a bluff or because he has a pair in his hole cards. You can still decide to play the hand on the turn (and even then still pretty soft) and hope for one or the other player not to believe you have the Quad.

On the turn we stick to the same principle as on the flop: First make sure that the community cards are not dangerous and bet approximately two thirds of the pot (or go all-in if your remaining stack is only marginal). We want our opponent to either pay us big time or fold his cards.

Usually most players will fold before a potential river because at some point they should realise that we have a strong hand. If you actually happen to see the river and lost to someone with two pairs (for example AA88) keep in mind that a player who is willing to pay that much pre-flop with A8 had a much worse hand than you and will end up losing that hand more often than not which means he is a losing player in the long run. This player will make this mistake again and again and he will end up paying you out considerable amounts of chips most of the times. Of course you may even end up losing with your pocket aces to someone with 72 but our aim is to become a long term successful poker player. Unlucky defeats and bad beats are just part of playing poker and there is no use crying over spilt milk. Just keep in mind that you did everything right and lady luck sometimes just smiles upon someone else.

As you may recall my last blog entry covered the preparation for Sit&Go tournaments – so now let’s get down to business. Let’s deal the cards for our hypothetical SNG!

Our SNG starts and every player receives a starting stack of 1,500 chips. The blinds are being raised every 10 minutes and the first blind level is at 10/20 (that means a small blind of 10 and a big blind of 20 chips). This and the next blind level will mainly consist of us focusing on our opponents’ playing style. Who hardly plays any hand if any at all? Who only plays from late position? Who likes to raise? Who hardly raises? Who keeps calling? Do we have a maniac (wild player who plays a lot of hands, raises a lot and possibly attempts many bluffs)? If we come to see a showdown who has played which hand and how? That is already a lot of information to be gathered and remembered and if it is too much at the beginning of your young poker career at least try filtering the players willing to play risky!

We will play a TAG style (as explained in my last blog entry Sit&Go Preparation). In order to effectively do so it is important to realise what position we are in. Position refers to where we are seated in regard to the Dealer Button (BU). With 10 players at a table you divide the position up as follows:

1. Small Blind (SB)
2. Big Blind (BB)
3. Under The Gun (UTG)
4. Under The Gun +1 (UTG+1)
5. Under The Gun +2 (UTG+2)
6. Middle Position 1 (MP1)
7. Middle Position 2 (MP2)
8. Middle Position 3 (MP3)
9. Cut Off (CO)
10. Button (BU)

The 2 player left of the dealer (SB, BB) are referred to as the Blinds. The 3 following players (UTG, UTG+1, UTG+2) are also called Early Positions. Seated after them are the players in Middle Position (MP1, MP2, MP3) while the final two players (CO, BU) are referred to as being in Late Position.

Why is the position so interesting? Well, the more players acting after you the bigger the chance that one of them has strong cards that we don’t know about yet. The position defines the order of betting in all betting rounds which makes the Button the best position because – with the exception of the first betting round, the pre-flop – this player will always be able to make his decision after everyone else. If a player is seated further to the right of the button than you, you “have position” over that player in the poker lingo. This is a great advantage because whenever you get to decide what to do you can adjust to what he did and act accordingly. Doyle “Texas Dolly” Brunson (a poker icon if there ever was one) noted in his famous book Super System: “In No Limit Hold’em position is… well, it’s the name of the game. It’s everything. If I had position all night, I could beat the game… and I’d never have to look at my hole cards.” We however will take a look at our cards and will make sure only to play the following hands in this early phase of the SNG:

Position and Early Hole Cards No Limit Texas Hold’Em

		Raises before you
Hole Cards	Position	None	One	Two or more
AA,KK	1-10	Raise	Reraise	All-In
QQ	1-10	Raise	Reraise	Fold
AK	1-10	Raise	Call	Fold
JJ,TT	3-5	Call	Fold	Fold
JJ,TT	1,2,6-10	Raise	Fold	Fold
99-22	1-10	Call	Fold	Fold
AQ,AJ,KQ	3-7	Fold	Fold	Fold
AQ,AJ,KQ	1,2,8-10	Raise	Fold	Fold

You will fold all other pocket cards during the first three blind levels! While this may seem overly conservative or even cowardly I strongly recommend that you stick to the table strictly in your early SNG career. To quote myself: “Wanting to be a winning SNG player in the long term we will have to make it our primary goal to be among the remaining last 3 players on the table.” We haven’t gained anything finding ourselves in an all-in situation with AQ and 8 remaining players on the table when an opposing player shows us his AK and takes us off the table. In a tournament your goal is to survive. Don’t let the fact that someone at the table already doubled his stack change your playing style. In the very next tournament this player might exit very early thanks to his playing style.

In my next blog entry Sit&Go – Flop or Dropwe will take a look at which flops we would like to see with our carefully chosen pocket cards. Until then I hope you will find a lot of aces under your pillow!

In my last blog entry I shortly introduced a special form of tournament poker, namely Sit&Go tournaments (SNG). Today and in the following blog entries I want to talk about things you should consider when trying to win money in SNGs. My main goal is to help the typical poker rookie being successful as quickly as possible. Therefore my guide will be aimed at low limit SNGs.

Taking a look at the payment structure of a typical SNG with 9 participants we will see that only the first 3 places will be paid (1st place 50%, 2nd 30% and 3rd 20% of the total prize pool) while the remaining players will end up with nothing at all. Wanting to be a winning SNG player in the long term we will have to make it our primary goal to be among the remaining last 3 players on the table. While this sounds like a very obvious thing to do, my experience taught me that a lot of players in the micro limits do not heed that and very few players actually approach their SNG game accordingly. As a thoughtful poker player you will thus be able to gather experience without risking a lot of money at the micro limit SNGs and you will more than likely have success very soon and quite easily. The key to success lies in the choice of playing styles. Here is a quick listing of the 4 main categories of playing styles:

1. Loose-Passive (lots of hands played – more calls than raises)
2. Loose-Aggressive (lots of hands played – more raises than calls)
3. Tight-Passive (hands played are well considered – more calls than raises)
4. Tight-Aggressive (hands played are well considered – more raises than calls)

We will play the tight-aggressive style (TAG). This playing style is the safest for inexperienced players and also most likely to end up in the money.

The next decision we will have to make is whether we want to play a Turbo/Speed SNG which is a very popular variation in all online poker rooms. Turbo or Speed refers to the blinds being raised quicker in this SNG than in a regular SNG which means that it will come to an end sooner. A tight-aggressive player will have an additional advantage here as Turbo SNGs with a low buy-in tend to be infested by poker players who display a lack of skill paired with very low patience which equals money for others. Seeing as how the TAG playing style demands good pocket cards I would nonetheless skip the Turbo SNGs for the time being and focus on SNGs with blind levels of 10 minutes or more. The reason is simple: I don’t want you to become one of the impatient players simply because you didn’t get any decent hand for the whole last blind level. At normal SNGs you will have more time to wait for good pocket cards and nonetheless find enough players at the table who are willing to commit with mediocre hands. The advantage of micro limits is obvious – you will find weaker players and they will not bother to assess other players’ behaviour on the table or simply don’t know how to do so. We will try and take the opposite approach and make it a habit of watching other players closely right from the start regardless of whether we are involved in a hand or not.

This leads us to the final step of the preparation for SNGs. The playing style I suggested and that I will focus on more in the following blog entries demands patience and a certain amount of concentration to be able to observe your fellow players. If you are new to the game of poker I strongly recommend that you play at one table only instead of various at the same time. Turn off the TV even if it may be nice at times to have some additional source of entertainment at times. If you want to listen to music while playing, fine – but make sure you manage your playlist before the game so you don’t have to rummage through your mp3 directories looking for ‘that song’ during your poker game. You can see where I am getting at. If you play poker, you play poker. Your whole focus and attention should be directed at your game. Otherwise you give away a big advantage over your opponents on this table, an advantage that you didn’t even have to work for – and it is not often you will come across those so make the most of it when you can.

Now that we know what and how we want to play and managed to focus all our attention on the table we will jump right into the action in my next Sit&Go blog entry that will be all about the early phase of SNGs and the choice of pocket cards that we will play according to our tight-aggressive playing style. Until then I wish you a lot of fun on the Max Poker Bonus website and lots of pocket rockets!

Over the time I have infected a lot of my friends with my passion for poker. For that reason I have felt responsible for them and wanted to make sure they will be able to enjoy the game as much as possible which includes having success as soon as possible. More important than that however was to help them avoid losing a big amount of money with a bad hand due to inexperience and thus losing interest. After taking a close look at some new players’ first steps I have soon come to a conclusion as to what I want to teach people who are new to the game of poker.

Texas Hold’em, Omaha, Seven Card Stud, Five Card Stud, Razz, Five Card Draw – these are variants of poker. If a professional player is successful in just one of them he will be commonly referred to as One Trick Pony by his colleagues. However you aren’t born a successful poker player and therefore should concentrate on one variant to begin with. We will decide to focus on the one that is most popular at the moment in order to find tables to play at any given time. That obviously makes Texas Hold’em the game to play. Texas Hold’em itself is played in several varieties, Fixed Limit, Split Limit, Pot Limit and No Limit. Based on the previous principle of going with the most popular game we will focus on No Limit Hold’em (NLHE). The final decision will be whether we want to play Cash Games (also called Ring Games) or Tournaments. I found out that for most new poker players Tournaments are more fun than Cash Games (additionally they are safer as you can only lose your Buy-In and the Tournament fee). And since fun is our main objective – even more so while still learning the game – we will play No Limit Hold’em Tournaments.

In my previous blog entry about bankroll management I mentioned a special form of Tournaments, the Sit&Gos (SNG). Buy-Ins for SNG Tournaments can range from a few cents up to several thousands of dollars. They don’t have a time schedule but will commence once a certain amount of players have registered for the Tournament. This amount can vary from 2 up to a few hundred players. A very common variant are the Single-Table SNGs. You simply register at a Single-Table SNG which usually will consist of 9 or 10 players. The Buy-In is for example $5+0.50 and ten players are seated at the table. That means $5 will go to the prize pool per player which makes it a total of $50. 50 cents per player will stay with the poker room as the so called Tournament fee (the equivalent to the rake in Cash Games). Each player now receives a set amount of chips – once you lose all your chips (stack) you are out of the game. The SNG is over when one player has won all the chops at the table. The pay-out structure will usually be 50%, 30%, 20% for the top three positions which in our example would amount to $25 for the winner, $15 for the second and $10 for the third place.

Let’s now look at a Multi-Table SNG in our next example. You are playing in a SNG with 45 participants. In this case this would mean 9 players per table on 5 tables. The Buy-In is set at $3+0.25, so the prize pool will be at $135. Again each player will receive the same amount of chips at the start of the Tournament and play commences. Once the first people start dropping out the remaining players will be re-seated every now and then in order to make sure the amount of players at each table will be approximately the same. At one point there will be 9 players left in the Tournament who will be seated at one table, the Final Table. Just like in the Single-Table SNG the Tournament will be over once one player has won all the available chips. Typically the pay-out structure for a Tournament like this would be $6 for the 7th position, $9 for the 6th, $12 for the 5th, $15 for the 4th, $21 for the third, $30 for the second and a nice $42 for the winner.

As beginner it can be a comfortable feeling to know that you will not lose more than a pre-determined amount of money instead of getting caught in a losing spiral in a Cash Game. This alone can (and probably should) be a reason to concentrate on SNG Tournaments early on. In the upcoming blog entries I will shed some light on what to keep in mind in order to successfully play this kind of Tournament Poker. I still enjoy playing SNGs very much and my results there have been very satisfying for a long time now despite my early mistakes due to a lack of knowledge. It took me quite some time to manage to get back to break even after a bumpy start into my poker life but now SNG Tournaments are part of a winning and fun poker experience.

And even though I run the risk of repeating myself: Poker shall be fun right from the start!

In my first blog entry I promised to give you some tips to help you prevent having the same bad start as a new poker player as I had experienced myself. If I had made a plan how to manage the money I put aside for poker (my bankroll) in a sensible way I could have avoided a lot of anger and frustration later on. Looking back I can say that the careless and sometimes even reckless handling of my bankroll was the biggest mistake that I made in my young poker career. For that reason I would like to write something about Bankroll Management today.

Chris Ferguson who in the year 2000 was the winner of the main event of the WSOP decided to take an interesting challenge in the year 2006. He wanted to earn $10,000 in the course of a year without depositing even a single cent. First things first: he successfully completed his own challenge. The hardest part for him proved to be the many freerolls he had to compete in in order to get a handful of dollars to enable him to build a bankroll in the first place. In the course of this experiment Mr. Ferguson set up the following rules for himself:

• I will never buy into a cash game or a Sit&Go with more than 5% of my total bankroll (exception for the lowest limits: I am allowed to buy into any game with a buy-in of $2.50 or less).
• I will not buy into a multi-table tournament for more than 2% of my total bankroll and I am allowed to buy into any multi-table tournament that costs $1.
• If at any time during a NL (No Limit) or PL (Pot Limit) cash game session my money on the table represents more than 10% of my total bankroll I must leave the game when the blinds reach me.

Please note that I used Dollars as a currency for these rules because I took them straight from Chris Ferguson and didn’t want to pretend he used Euros for his calculations. I will use Euros for the remainder of the article though.

Only 3 rules but very well thought through and in my eyes very user friendly for beginning players.

Let’s look at an example to make it clearer: let’s assume your first deposit in a poker room is €100 and you are planning on mainly playing Sit&Go. That means your bankroll is exactly €100 (unless you receive an instant bonus on depositing), 5% of the total bankroll are €5. Therefore you will play Sit&Go games with a maximum buy-in of €5. You are not able to find a Sit&Go for €5 or less, but one with a buy-in of €5.50 – are you still allowed to play?

Well, it is your bankroll and of course you can decide to play. If you want to know my answer however it is a clear and loud “NO!”. Despite you needing only €10 more (so you have a €110 bankroll) so you don’t breach the 5% rule with that buy-in of €5.50 I would still advise you not to compete in the game.

We have put these rules up in order to successfully manage our bankroll and we do not circumvent or overrule them when we feel like it. To be a winning poker player in the long term means that you have to have a lot of discipline. Even and especially when dealing with your bankroll. In our example you are exactly €10 short of being allowed to play in the €5.50 Sit&Go according to our rules. Play in €3.40 Sit&Go tournaments and compete there until your bankroll reaches €110 or more and then change your limit and try your luck in the €5.50 tournaments.

Let’s assume you haven’t played your best poker or were simply unlucky and lost ten of the mentioned €3.40 tournaments in a row. Your bankroll has been diminished to €66 and 5% of it would now be €3.30. You know what that means, right? 🙂 Exactly! Your bankroll doesn’t allow for €3.40 Sit&Gos anymore so you have to switch to €2.50 Sit&Gos until your bankroll is at least at €68 again (5% of €68 equals €3.40).

One of the main side effects of consequent bankroll management is that you will be able to find the limit that suits your current ability. You will change limits several times, I guarantee you that. The rewards for your discipline and consequence will be manifold:

• You will soon be playing at a limit that allows you to enjoy success and a sense of achievement.
• You don’t play for money you can’t afford to lose without even noticing.
• In the long term you will always play limits according to your skills.
• You do not risk losing your bankroll at once and the risk of losing it at all is reduced to a minimum.
• It is a fun and a great sense of achievement to realise you can beat a limit and are approaching a higher limit cent by cent and Euro by Euro.

The main advantage is that you can enjoy the game of poker much more relaxed with those rules. Poker shall be fun right from the start!