Win at Online Hold'em | Sit-n-go Strategies Part 1

I wanted to start my game specific tips on how to win at hold'em with some sit-n-go strategies. Sit-n-go tournaments have quickly become the most popular form of online hold'em. As far as tournaments go, they can also be the most profitable. True, you can enter a large standard tournament and win a large amount of money, but how often? Even in the WSOP, for a pro to win two tournaments in a season is a big deal. The best pros will maybe win one bracelet and cash a few tournaments and that's about it. With online sit-n-goes, your odds of winning go way up, therefor so does your profits (if you are good). Sit-n-goes are also a very important part of winning at hold'em, because they give you an opportunity to practice your “final table” strategies. Most sit-n-goes have from 1 to 5 tables (although there are bigger ones out there), so you will see the final table often. Great practice!

Let's start off with the stages and how should should change up your play according to the stage of the tournament you are in. When deciding which hands to play before the flop, you can be anywhere from super tight to super loose or anywhere in between. Super tight means that you are not willing to play any hand except premium hands (AA, KK, QQ, AK, and maybe AQ). Super loose means that you are willing to see a flop with any 2 cards (sometimes even calling raises with hands with little to no post flop potential). When you have decided whether or not you want to play your hand, the way that you play you hand will determine if you are playing aggressive, weak, or somewhere in between. A weak player will limp in pre-flop, check/call or check/fold the flop if they don't hit. An aggressive player is the guy you see that is always betting, raising, and re-raising. He is the one who is always putting pressure on his opponents. There are times in hold'em to be super tight and times to be really loose. Most of the time, you will be playing somewhere in between. No matter where you are on the tight-loose scale, you need to always play aggressive! YOU need to be that player that is always putting the pressure on your opponents – forcing them to make the tough decisions. There are times to play a little weaker (like if you are trapping another player when you are holding a monster), but in Texas hold'em the poker gods reward aggression.

Whether you decide to play tight or loose is going to depend on several factors:

Position:
The later your position, the more hands you can feel good about playing. The earlier your position, the less likely you should be to play any but the most premium of hands. See my previous post on poker position for more information on position

Tournament stage:
As a rule with sit-n-goes, you should play very tight in the very beginning of the tournament and open up your starting hand selection later on. In the beginning of a sit-n-go (especially the low buy in ones), a lot of people are playing a lot of garbage hands very aggressively – looking to get a big stack early. Usually it is best to stay away from them this early, unless you have a monster. If you do wake up with a monster early on, you can usually play weak and let them bet into you for most (or all) of their chips. As the tournament gets towards the later stages, the blinds will be much higher in relationship to the stack sizes. This is where many people tighten up their play. This is EXACTLY where you should open yours up.

Stack size:
In hold'em, especially in sit-n-goes, stack size is king. If you have a huge stack in relation to the other players at the table, you pretty much have a license to bully. You will get played back at from time to time, but you can always sit out a few hands and wait for a good set of hole cards, hope to get played back at and win the hand at show down. Win a couple of hands at show down and you get your license to bully renewed. If you are shot stacked (10 big blinds or less), you don't have many options. You are pretty much just looking for spots to get all of your chips in the middle in the hope of taking the pot down pre-flop or doubling up.

Table image:
In the lower buying sit-n-goes, most of your opponents will not be thinking beyond the cards in their hands. They are not paying attention to your table image. As more and more people are getting better and better at online Texas hold'em, you will run into more and more opponents that are paying attention. Regardless of whether you think your opponents are paying attention to your table image or not, you should be paying attention to yours and theirs. If you see that the player to your right is often raising your big blind and you think he is raising with any two cards, you can feel okay about re-raising him with your pkt 8s or suited KQ. On the other hand, if you are the one constantly raising the blind of the player 2 positions to the left of you and he raises, you need to, at some point realize that he has you pegged as raising with any 2 cards and adjust accordingly. Basically, you need to adjust your play to compensate for the patterns that you find in the play of your opponents as well as to keep your opponents from using your table image against you.

To sum it up – if you want to win at hold'em sit-n-goes, you need to vary your hand selection from tight to loose, depending upon your position, the tournament stage, your chip stack, the chip stacks of those around you, your table image and the image of your opponents. Whether you are playing tight or loose you will ALWAYS be aggressive. I will go more into detail of how to vary your play according to the conditions I mentioned in the next few articles. Stay tune for more on How to Win at Hold'em!

Poker Tip #2 | Position in online Hold’em

In today’s poker tip, we will discuss position. In poker, your position is where you are seated in relation to the “button”. I will be focusing on Texas Hold’em here, as some forms of poker are a bit different.

There are 3 basic terms to describe, in general, your position: early position (EP), middle position (MP), and late position (LP). Let’s look at a nine person table. EP is generally considered to be the small blind, the big blind and the next seat after them (called “UTG” or “under the gun”). It is true that the blinds are late position pre-flop (last to act), but once the flop is dealt, they become the first to act, making them EP for the flop, turn and river play. MP is the three players that are to the left of the UTG position. LP describes the final three players to act. They are the Button, the “cut-off” (just to the right of the button) and the player just to the right of the cut-off.

When playing the lower-limit hold’em tables online, you will find that few players pay as much attention to their position at the poker table as they should. This is a tremendous advantage for you, if you play good position poker. Now, some of you watch poker on TV and see Daniel Negreanu or Phil Ivey playing all kinds of hands in all kinds of positions. Trust me that Daniel and Phil have a strategy for every hand they play, and position plays a very big part in that strategy. It should for you, as well, if you want to be a winning poker player.

Being in late position is a huge advantage in Texas Hold’em, as it does in most forms of poker. It means that you get to see what everyone else does before you have to act. This allows you to have greater control over the hand, as well as the size of the pot. Let’s expand on this by showing an example. We will assume that I am playing an 18 person, 2 table sit-n-go. There are 9 players left on one table and everyone has roughly $3000 in chips (just to take stack size out of the equation). I am dealt J-T off-suit (J-To) and I am on the button. 1 player limps in from middle position and everyone else folds around to me. The blinds are yet to act. What do I do? Well, unless the limper has a history of limping in with big hands, I should assume he has a weak hand, but with some post flop potential – like 6-7o or maybe a K-7 suited or something like that. I only have 2 players to play after me, who will likely have garbage, so this is a great time to raise the pot and try to take it down right there. If one of the other players calls me, I will have the advantage of position on the other betting rounds. If I get re-raised, I can call with the intention of using my position and outplaying them on the flop, or I can fold without loosing too many chips. I could re-raise on a bluff (or re-bluff, as the case may be), but that can be a scary proposition if you are up against a strong hand.

Let’s say that I get a call from the middle position player. That is what we call in poker a “tell”. Since he limped in to begin with and just called my raise, he is almost certainly holding a weak hand. Let’s say that the flop comes a Kh-9s-6d. Now I get to see what he is going to do before I have to act. If he checks, I will bet about 2/3 the size of the pot and he will almost certainly fold. If he bets out ½ the size of the pot or less, I will raise and he will likely fold. If he bets big, I can decide whether to play the hand, or let it go. The important part is that he either needs to check (show further weakness), or risk his chips without knowing where he is in the hand. If you keep in mind that your opponent will miss the flop 2/3rds of the time (well known poker fact), playing just about any hand in early position can be very hazardous to his poker health (as it is for you). This is one reason why I rarely limp into a hand out of position. If I limp, there is a very good reason for it, and that reason is almost never because “I have an okay hand and want to see a flop”. That kind of thinking will get you in a hand, out of position with a hand that can get you into trouble. That is, unless you get lucky and flop a monster. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t happen enough to me for it to be profitable. I play poker very tight in EP, and open my game up in late position where I have much more control.

Hope you enjoyed this little poker tip on playing hold’em in position. See you for the next one. Oh, and tell Daniel and Phil I said Hi.

See you at the poker table! :)

Poker Tip #1 - Bankroll Management

Being profitable at online poker requires that you have money to invest. The money that you are willing to invest is called your “bankroll”. In poker (Texas Hold'em) bankroll is King. Your bankroll is the total amount of money that you have that is dedicated just for playing poker. Seeing as my biggest stumbling block when I first started playing online poker was bankroll management, I figured I would dedicate this first article to that principle.

Poker is a game of ups and downs. You win some, you loose some - that is the nature of the game. Most good poker players have winning streaks and loosing streaks. Unfortunately the loosing streaks are usually much more prevalent. That is why bankroll management is so important. Early on I caught myself making the same mistake that I’ve heard of others making a lot. I would start playing at low buy-in sit-n-go’s that I could easily afford until I hit a loosing streak. I would figure that I was “due” for a win and would go to a higher buy-in tournament that I could not afford, trying to make my money back. Guess what happened? Yep, bye-bye bankroll! Sure you can try this if you want, and you will get lucky sometimes (yes, there is some luck involve in poker). You will find however that most of the time, that one tournament that you absolutely needed to win, will be the one that you will inevitably be the first one to be knocked out of.

Yes, it is true, there is luck involved in poker. There is also a great deal of skill involved. First rule of poker: Poker is won by short-term luck and long-term skill. This means that no matter how much skill you have, you will get unlucky. Some “donk” will call your pre-flop raise with 6-3 off suite, flop the nut straight and you and your pocket Aces will be on the rail. If you’ve played more than a hand-full of poker games, you know this to be true. Good bankroll management is what is going to make sure that you have enough money left over to fight another day.

I have a very simple rule for managing your poker bankroll. It is geared towards beginners playing low-limit cash games and small buy-in tournaments. It is called the 5% rule: You never buy-in to a tournament for more than 5% of your bankroll. For cash games, never buy-in for more than 5% of your bankroll and never have more than 10% of your bankroll on the table. For instance, if you have a bankroll of $200.00, your maximum buy-in for any tournament is $10.00 (this includes the rake). In fact, on large, multi-table sit-n-go’s and large tournaments, I recommend no more than 2.5%. In a cash game your max buy-in would be $10.00, and you would leave the table if you got $20.00 in chips. You can bounce right back in to your seat at the same table, but only with a $10.50 buy-in.

This system is the same one that Chris Ferguson used to go from small buy-in tournaments to a bankroll of $10,000 playing online Hold'em in 6 months. Hopefully you will see similar success. That’s it for poker tip #1. Enjoy!

Winning at Online Poker

Welcome to How to Win at Online Hold'em. This site provides tips and techniques for making money with internet poker - specifically Texas Hold'em. Please feel free to leave comments with any questions or topics you would like covered in regards to playing winning poker.