Strategy

Most poker players know they can’t bluff too much of the time and they can’t hang back and never bluff either.
 
If you bluff too frequently others will quickly become aware of it and call with any hand that stands a chance of winning. They’ll also take shots at you by raising with nothing. They’ll do this because they figure you bluff so much of the time that you frequently don’t have much of a hand when you come out betting and therefore aren’t able to call a raise. When running a bluff and raised, most players accept the fact that they’ve been caught speeding, and fold their hands.
 

We finished figuring the probability of pocket aces and pocket kings among ten players at a hold’em table in our last column, finishing with the table shown below. The probabilities of each possible way to make two or more pairs with aces and kings sum to 0.00230.

In our search for success in real-life or in poker, we often stray from the path because of little annoyances or unfair happenings. Life’s road will be a mite bumpy at times, but it’s how you react that determines success or failure. Do you moan and complain about life’s complexities or do you meet the challenges head-on with a positive attitude?

I sometimes wonder how I can handle various poker situations and maintain my sanity. We all hope to hold big hands such as pocket aces; however, we hate to be put into a situation where the best results of a session are the hands we made good folds on.

Mike and I were talking the other day and he quoted a phrase, verbatim, from one of his books, Caro on Gambling. “Adventurers prance about the ladder of success, fearing less the sensation of a great fall than the humility of hanging idle.” Wow, that is powerful!
 

If there was one, single word of advice I could offer regarding bluffing the short stack, it would be… don’t!

We continue figuring the probability of pocket aces and pocket kings among ten players at a hold’em table. The first table (not shown) shows the known cells and the remaining five cells for which we obtain these probabilities.
 

There’s a hierarchy of thought in poker... ascending Levels of thinking about the game. Not surprisingly, typical suckers are only able to think on the first level. An intelligent game of poker doesn’t even begin to exist until you reach Level 2, but truly skilled players should be able to think at least up through Level 4.

In hold’em, there are only three made hands before the flop: A-A, K-K, and Q-Q. They can win without further improvement much of the time, although Q-Q is on the cusp. If an ace or king falls, pocket queens become chopped liver. Most playable starting hands are drawing hands that must improve to take the pot. We are assuming that you bluff only when circumstances permit, which is infrequent. In limit hold’em, most pots are won by the best hand at the showdown.

In Texas hold’em, if one player begins the hand with a wired pair and his lone opponent holds two overcards both larger than that pair, this is said to be a coin flip. Before the flop each player has about a 50/50 shot at winning the hand. Something like 9-9 versus A-K would be a very common coin flip scenario. But if the pocket pair is deuces then any two unpaired cards—provided that one of the two cards is not a deuce—in the opponent’s hand would produce the same result.