I tend to play a squeaky tight-aggressive style in the typical $10/20 and $20/40 stud games I find at Foxwoods, the nearest public poker room. I make most of my money by squeezing money from the loose-passive bad players I face in those games. It's a style that's worked well for me there and in the low limit no limit hold 'em games I play in, around Boston.
But I found myself in an atypical game. A local poker club owner organized a $20/40 stud game- but one with the same guys who played on other nights in his much bigger games. They brought their rampaging big game style to this $20/40 game.
Though my bankroll was sufficiently large for this bigger action $20/40 game, my instincts had me running for cover at first. With guys typically capping the betting on third or fourth street -my reaction was to tighten up. Unless I was virtually certain to be in the lead, I'd fold.
I was safe -- but sorry. When I finally did catch decent starting cards and raised, they all folded, knowing I had a superstrong hand. They were wildly aggressive but not blind. How different from Foxwoods where I could typically find at least one player to call me down when I became aggressive with a strong starting hand.
Here, I had to give action to get action. I threw my strict starting standards out the window - planning to use my read of their hands and a selective hyper-aggression to win me enough on my strong hands to more than compensate for my relative looseness early on.
So, for example, if I had a couple of high cards and someone raised or even re-raised with a card lower than both of my high cards, I'd re-raise sometimes - just hoping to catch a pair on fourth or fold to any action. I'd slow play premium pairs - violating one of my cardinal rules of stud play -planning to check raise on fourth street if I remained high on board, or reraise if someone else initiated the betting. Many times, if I had any hand at all, I'd use hyper-aggressive bullying to limit the field on third, fourth, and fifth street - hoping to turn loose and wild early money into dead money.
My strategy worked. I got action when I had strong hands. Though I frequently was competing without the best hand at the moment, the combination of my chances of winning and the dead money already in the hand gave me positive expectations - even when I was behind.
This is a key concept. You can have positive expectations even if you are behind. Think about an extreme example of this. Imagine a pot in a $20/40 game that is engorged with $10,000 by fifth street. Even if you're a 20:1 underdog to win the hand by the river, you have very positive expectations in the long run because of all of the dead money already in the hand. My style of play recognized this. More realistically, if I could create a pot with a lot of dead money, I could chase with a hand that might be a 35% underdog. My keeping myself out of hands when I was hugely behind, and by learning to contrive bets to drive out other players after they had already put money in the pot, I adopted a winning style of play for this game.
I wish I could end by saying that I won for the four-hour night of stud. I didn't. I finished down $150. But that was insignificant in the scheme of things. The bottom line was that I had adopted a winning style of play for this game - one I'm eager to return to.
