Barbara Connors

by Barbara Connors

In a game where aggression reigns supreme, raising with a good hand (or even a not-so-good hand) has become almost automatic for some poker players. Whether your hand is good, bad, or indifferent, it’s always easy to think of reasons to raise: to thin the field, induce a better hand to fold, charge opponents a high price to see the next card, gain information, enhance table image, and of course, the daddy of all reasons, to get more money in the pot when you believe you are favored to win.

by Barbara Connors 

The Gap Concept is a term coined by poker author, David Sklansky, to describe the difference in starting-hand standards between the type of hand you need to call a raise, as opposed to the type of hand you need to put in a raise yourself. This concept has become famous as a fundamental part of tournament poker strategy, but the basic idea behind it can apply to ring games as well.

 When you are the first player to raise, there is no evidence yet that anybody else at the table has a particularly strong hand. Moreover, being the first player to show aggression gives you two ways to win the pot: either by making the best hand, or by pushing your opponents out.

by Barbara Connors

The continuation bet is one of the most powerful plays in poker, because defending against it is so difficult. Any player who is failing to defend against a continuation bet is letting his opponents run all over him. But there are two sides to every coin, and defending too often is tantamount to throwing chips out the window. When you consider that a sizable portion of continuation bets that come your way will inevitably be continuation bluffs, the ability to find that middle balance and sniff out at least some of the counterfeit c-bets is critical.

by Barbara Connors

Poker is a game of tough decisions. At their core, most of them can be boiled down to one cosmic proposition: Should you play it safe, or should you take a risk for the opportunity of making a greater profit? Figuring out when that extra risk is worth taking, or whether discretion is the better part of poker’s valor, is one of the great challenges of the game. A good example that illustrates this concept is the thin value bet. While technically this bet can take place on any street, generally speaking, a thin value bet is made on the river when your final hand is rather lightweight—perhaps a hand like middle pair. It’s far from the nuts, not strong enough to be bet with any real confidence, and yet it’s not completely worthless either.

by Barbara Connors
 
It’s an unusual concept in a poker game: money that isn’t wanted. Poker players have a reputation as being ruthless sharks who would sell out their own grandmothers for a little extra profit. But watch any given poker game and inevitably it happens, the bizarre spectacle of a pot surrounded by apathetic players who check, check, check. These unwanted pots—where nobody has flopped much of a hand or shows any real interest in winning—are commonly known as orphan pots.

by Barbara Connors
 
Everybody knows about tilt. You’re playing poker, doing fine, winning at your usual rate— and then trouble rears its ugly head in the form of bad luck. A series of tough losses or one soul-crushing loss at the hands of an obnoxious moron can be enough to make the wheels come off. Desperate to win back what was so unjustly taken away, you begin to make impetuous calls and hopeless raises. Whatever the original trigger that brought it about, a bad case of tilt is powerful enough to wipe out years of hard-won poker skill and knowledge—not to mention a good-sized chunk of your bankroll.

by Barbara Connors
 
Tripped Up Flops that contain a pair are always tricky to play. Assuming you weren’t fortunate enough to match one of your hole cards with the pair showing in the middle of the table, what do you see when you look at a paired board? Do you see a great opportunity to bluff because you know how unlikely it is that any single opponent holds one of the two matching cards that remains in the deck? Or do you see impending doom, feeling certain that one of your opponents must have flopped trips or a full house, and whatever meager hand you hold cannot possibly still be good?

 When the flop comes with a pair, is the poker glass halffull or half-empty? The answer, of course, is “it depends.” Like most everything in poker, the correct way to play a paired board is highly situational. This is true whether you flopped trips or didn’t—but for the sake of this discussion let’s say you didn’t make trips. All things being equal, tripless poker players will typically view a paired board as either a prime bluffing opportunity or a reason to fold. To navigate the path between foolhardy bluffing and imagining monsters under the bed is mainly a matter of thinking things through.

by Barbara Connors
 
Defending against a continuation bet is a tricky proposition. The c-bet is a powerful play because it tells a good story. By raising before the flop and then leading out on the flop, the bettor consistently represents a strong hand across two separate betting rounds. Problem is, we all know (or we should know) that the flop will usually miss any two starting cards, and since premium pairs are rare that means the c-bettor must be betting with air a goodly portion of the time. So how do you know when to play back at the c-bet, and when to give it some respect?
 

by Barbara Connors
 
If ever a concept appeared to be a perfect fit for the game of poker, it’s schadenfreude. A German word now commonly used in English, there’s no precise translation but essentially it refers to feeling pleasure from the misfortune of others. Schadenfreude is the opposite of compassion—instead of experiencing pity and a desire to help when we witness a fellow human in distress, we feel a secret (or not-so-secret) sense of delight.

by Barbara Connors

In a game where we strive to misdirect, obfuscate, and confuse the players on the other side of the table, few things can cause an opponent to knit his brow in befuddlement like acting in the dark. Simply put, acting in the dark means you commit to your next action—be it a check, bet, or even shoving all in—without the benefit of actually seeing the next card dealt. And while it is technically possible to make the move preflop, practically speaking players who act in the dark almost always do so on the flop or later, and the dark action is almost always destined to be a check.