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The official No Limit Texas Hold 'Em thread

T

thizzSantaCruz

Bluelighter
Joined
Apr 22, 2006
Messages
406
Thats right, the NLHE thread is here. Discuss all your poker strategys, beats, stories and anything else you can think of.

Nothing is more satisfying than raking in large amounts of chips and stacking them.
 
I will start it off. I have been playing live a lot recently and am focusing on reducing the number of tells I give off. I have noticed that the good regulars I play with have been able to pick up on uncomfortableness when I try to make moves. I have been attempting to loosen up and not get so tense when making moves. I also have been trying to work on my reading skills and have been trying to concentrate more on opponenets playing patterns. I am also starting to pick up on weakness from tell boxs.

I played last nite and it went well. I ran a nice bluff by a fish that was a calling station but he was showing so much weakness I knew I could steal the pot. He min reraised my pf bet. I bet out and he called. I checked the turn and he paused for a second and looked pretty uncomfortable. Finally he reached for some chips and I raised his bet all in, forcing him to lay it down.

Made some good plays throughout the nite. Layed down AK with a K high ragged flop to a raise of my bet, turns out opponenet had a set so I saved a bunch of money.

Stacked an opponenet in a multiway raised pot. The flop came all hearts but gave me a set. First to act bet out and I raised about 5x his bet basically forcing him all in, he had barely any money behind him if he called my raise. He called and my set held up to his top pair/nut flush draw. SHIP IT.

I had another opponenet that was acting a little bitch all nite and we had been having some conversations slightly on the side of being hostile. He lost a pot and I made a comment on it that probalby was kind of out of line. So he makes it 2 to go live and I said something about why he would do that, it will just bite him in the ass eventually. I look at my cards and tell the guy he screwed up because I just woke up with aces. I call his 2 dollar live bet and he reraises. I push over him and he insta pushes his stack at me. I laughed called and flipped over my aces. He got pretty butt hurt after that but I did not rub it in after I won the hand. I love felting assholes though...

I wonder what he was holding there, I shouldn't have showed my cards allowing him to muck but I was too excited.

Overall it was a good nite, I finally hit some cards.
 
i've been working on position and patience.

i've been really focusing on my position play and paying real attention to it both live and online. it's really paying off. i've turned the $25 in my online account in to $340 and the trend is upwards. i tend to stick to 6 or 18-seat sit'n'gos but i've been dabbling with cash games too.

my traditional pattern of play is to play well, build a stack and then blow it all when i get impatient in the later stages of the game. i've been working on calming down and playing for the win and that's paying off too.

alasdair
 
i play at absolute poker..i'
ve been able to make 100$ into 450$ in a couple weeks lol. there's alot that i've learned, and still have to learn from online poker that i never knew about. i'm far from a good player, but i'm trying to better my game . ah..a big nuisance of no limit hold'em for me is the noobies chasing the flush draws. yes yes, i know, they pay me off very well when they pay off alot of money for a draw and fold when they dont hit, but when they do hit it's horrible, because its hard to put them on any hand unless they have a bet to talk for them.
 
i dont play online but i play about once a week offline at a decent sized tournament (about 4 tables or so generally going) with just one buy in and no rebuys... i can't stand rebuys. unless theres just one rebuy, that's fine.. but when you can just keep gunning it and buying back in for a long period of time it just makes the game so long and ridiculous... a place i used to play at frequently did that and it was next to impossible unless you had the money to keep forking into the pot.

i have to work on my patience though and need to figure out a way to keep myself alert the entire game. i generally go to bed around 8/9 and we don't start the game till about 7 and i run out of energy fast... thank god for energy drinks :) anywho.. enough of my babbling
 
do you think there's any truth to suggestions that online poker is rigged?

i generally don't believe it but then i'll hit a seam of games where it's just astonishing bad beat after bad beat after bad beat. one and two outers, people calling with absolutely nothing and catching runner runner hands, etc.

i play a lot on the kitchen table and in the casino and, while i see crazy bad beats once in a while, i never see successive hands of appalling beats the way i do online.

is it just because online we play so many more hands we see so many more bad beats?

alasdair
 
i personally think online poker is a huge scam, which is why i never play it
 
I'm inclined to think that it's just because we play so many hands online. Also that people play looser, so there are probably more people in the hand, with worse cards, making it more likely that a good hand will get beaten.

Plus, I think its human nature to remember when things go against us (e.g. last night I got 'em all in preflop with KK, heads-up against 88, and of course he hit an 8 on the river. I remember that, not the many hands where JJ beat 99, etc).

I can't see the logic in rigging the games - the sites get paid no matter what, because they're taking a rake from each player.
 
^ if the winner of the game is a shill, a rigged game is of huge benefit to the site.

alasdair
 
Good point. Do we see any evidence of this happening, though? [meaning that in the tone of 'I'm asking a question for debate' not 'I'm telling you that you're wrong' :)]

Also, it would surely be more beneficial to let one player see what cards the other players had - he could then win consistently without having to hit improbable two-outers. And no-one would ever notice (assuming he made sure not to win all the time) - he'd just look like a good TA player.
 
I highly disagree with online poker being rigged. The only thing I personally would worry about is not being able to cash out of small poker sites. I have heard some horror stories of people not being able to withdraw your roll. Also people installing keyloggers and hacking into other peoples account has been reported. Just today apparently someone hacked into Greg Raymers account and chimp dumped over 2000 dollars.
 
Sim0n said:
I can't see the logic in rigging the games - the sites get paid no matter what, because they're taking a rake from each player.
Click to expand...

Exactly, the sites make their money from the rake and while I highly doubt they are rigging the game in favor of a loose player over a tight player--or in favor of someone who is actually on the payroll for that site--I do believe that they have a system in place that increases the odds of maximizing the rake on every hand.

Ways they could do this are by increasing the frequency of starting hands that are deemed "playable" by most players, as well as enticing running cards, ie suited cards on the turn and river to give backdoor flush possibilities or a board pair on the river to give the trailing player a boat.
 
Anyone with any sort of statistic tracking program could point out these anomalies. I know plenty of people with over 100k hands and the stats all look completely in line. Personally my databases are all on my old computer, if they were still accesible I would post screenshots showing how accurate the deals are. Everything from hole cards, to sets flopped % start to become dead on around the 50k hand mark. I would so confidently tha tonline poker IS NOT rigged.
 
I played many hours of poker live and online and I don't notice any difference at all. Except players play looser online. My opinion on online cheating / setups is that they don't exist. Here is my reasoning: These sites are making a killing as long as they are up and running. So keeping the games as clean and cheater free as possible is good for business. Why risk a multi million dollar site if someone discovered the cheating? GL.
 
beer you really think people play looser online? In my opinion the games that I have played live have usually been a lot more loose than online. At the casino that I go to it is a regular donk fest wtih around 3-5 players in every hand. To try to isolate I find I usually have to raise very large. Since the maximum buy in is 50BB this usually forces me to be pot committed pre-flop to isolate. It could just be that casino though. Its the only one I have every been to. This is why I like spreading my own home games. Short stacked poker takes out a lot of the fun in it for me, it winds up becoming too mechanical.
 
On rigged games: I tend to play tourneys/sit and gos, so those games wouldn't be rigged in the sense that Bauer suggests (there's no rake, just an entry fee).

On tactics: anyone familiar with the Sklansky method? I read about it yesterday and employed it to good effect. It came about because a casino owner wanted to give his daughter the experience of playing in the WSOP. But she'd never played before. Sklansky had a week to teach her, and came up with this method:

1. Always either fold or go all-in.
2. If someone has raised before you:
2.1: Re-raise all-in if you have AA, KK, or AK.
2.2: otherwise fold.
3. If no-one has entered the pot:
3.1 go all-in with: any pair; AK, Ax suited; any suited connectors except the very low ones.

The idea is that top players will not want to commit their chips on a coinflip or worse, so they will fold unless they have AA or KK. So you will steal many, many blinds before someone stands up to you. Even if they do call you with a big hand, you still have a chance of winning, and hopefully by the time they do call you have such a big stack you can afford to lose a hand.

I used basically these tactics in a 1700 player MTT and came second (OK, it was a freeroll so the quality was poor).

I doubled up first hand with 44 vs A3o. Then basically didn't play a hand for an hour. Stole a few blinds, eliciting comments of "it's too early to go all-in".

Then things got weird. I hit a lot of monster hands - I probably had AA, KK or AK 10 or 12 times in a few hours. I kept jamming, and people kept calling me. I probably only won a couple of uncontested pots. Every other hand, someone called with worse cards, and I won. I couldn't believe that no-one realised I was only playing big cards.

I mixed it up when we got down to the last 18, started stealing blinds and playing my opponents, and that worked well and got me 2nd place.

Anyone ever used this method? It's like playing ABC Poker; maybe just A Poker. The most extreme possible way to play TA: all-in or fold. I do wonder what would have happened if I had picked up lots of suited connectors or low pairs - I would probably have run into a bigger pair and lost. But certainly, given the cards I got this seemed like an effective strategy (and it improved my discipline, because I threw away a lot of AQo hands in EP - I tend to over-value AQ).
 
I have heard of this method but I have never used it before. There is a table you can get that tells you the odds you are getting dependant on effective stack size with any hand. Using this you can tell when it would be appropiate to go all in even if your opponenet knew your hole cards. The thinking behind this is you would at least break even from stealing the blind money and that would make up for the times you will be behind.

The only draw backs to this strategy is smart players will be able to catch on to this, it is a fairly well known theory in the poker world. It is also boring as hell and does not require a lot of mental thought. I would say it is definantly good to know for situations in tournaments. When stealing the blinds becomes essential at the late stages it is a good idea to steal at any oppurtunity when pushing becomes favorable in your position. These tables can tell you when that is the case.
 
Report on the home game tonite. I really feel like my game is progressing. More and more I am becoming intune with peoples physical reactions to certain aspects of the game that can lead me towards the right play. What I need to work on is my focus. When I am not in the hand I try to guess my opponenets hole cards and guage their physical reactions to the board and plays made by other people in the hand. The only problem is after a while I soon lose intrest in even this and get distracted by table talk, the TV or whatever else is going on. All in all I think I still need to work on stopping my tells and mixing them up so people cannot rely on them.

To the meat: 20 dollar max buy in. .10/.20 blinds. The game is no limit hold 'em. 8 players.

I only played for 2 hours and I will recount the important hands. First hand I play I raise in ep to .80 with QQ. I get 2 callers behind me. Flop comes J74 rainbow. I check to my opponenet who I have a history with. Hes an average player and is capable of making moves. Me and him have tangoed with some ridiculous hands before where multiple bets go in with Ace high hands etc so I prepare for anything. I check to him since I am out of position and he fires a c-bet of 1.80 which is pretty standard. I raise his bet to 6 bucks. He stares me down and bumps it up to 12 dollars and I shove the rest of my stack at him. He flips over KJ and I proudly turn over my QQ but the poker gods have another plan for me. The K hits on the turn and I hand over a large portion of my stack.

GODDAMNIT.

Very next hand I get dealt QQ again and double up and increase my stack to a puny 7 dollars.

From there I re-buy to a full 20 and fold a bunch of hands. I think I picked up maybe 1 small pot in the next hour, I was running pretty card dead.

Next hand worth mentioning I raise after 1 ep limper on the button with A5o. Junk hand, I am looking to pick up some dead money but the ep limper calls my raise. I figure I am sitting good, this opponent is your typical weak-tight player and I have position on him. The flop hits AJx and he checks to me. He is looking pretty strong and not giving off any tells that he usually does but I fire out a small sized c-bet hoping to take it down. He calls and the turn hits a ten. Now he is starting to look a little uncomfortable and I decided to play my position against him. He checks it once again and I put out a little over a 1/2 pot bet and he calls again. I 3/4 pot the river on a blank and he thinks about it for a long time. Thinking aloud he goes over the large amount of hands that beat him, 2 pair, straight yada yada yada. At this point I thought I was good but eventually he calls saying fuck it, I think you have me beat but I can't lay it down. I was shocked. If he thinks I had him beat he should have folded but it was a nice call.

At this point I was 2 buy-ins deep and I called it a nite. I felt like I made good plays but the cards did not turn out right for me. What can you do.
 
^
What did he have? AQ or something? A9?

I think you're right about the Method. It's definitely boring (I always know what my plays will be, I never have to worry about post-flop play). And a good player would kill it (well, maybe it would take two good players, so that whichever one acted before me raised, to force me to fold).

But I think that following it rigorously is helping my play. I'd started getting too loose, limping into pots with Ax or KJs in LP. The Method is reminding me to only play good hands, and to wait. And wait. (I did OK with it tonight, 27th in a 315 player donkfest on Full Tilt, and in the top 3rd of a 1500 player on Absolute, but only because I hit KK against AA - and I'm going broke there no matter how I play. Weird hand - someone else had QQ).
 
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