Immediate calls tell you a lot. In my experience, they polarize someone's hand range to either super-strong or a vulnerable hand like a decent draw or top pair weak kicker. Most often, though, it will be a draw. In this $15-30 limit hand, the guy's immediate call lets you narrow his hand range a lot. I have [As] [Ks] and raise UTG. I get one fairly tight player calling me in the BB. He is ...
Silence in previously talkative guy equals discomfort
A few of us in the $15-30 game had been talking about the local school systems, with most of us even talking while we were playing hands. It was a kill pot, so it became $30-60, and this one guy who had been talking a lot, raised it under-the-gun. There was a slight confusion about something, and the floor was called to figure it out. In this interim, the raiser was completely quiet and seemed ...
Genuinely angry call means weakness
This post and the next few posts will be an assortment of behavioral poker tells that helped me in my last $15-30 limit session. I wanted to share them and also write about them in the interest of helping me use them better in a session. Sometimes I get good tells but I don’t fully know the best strategy to make the best use of them. ...
Betting motion behaviors in limit
I've been playing a $15-30 limit game, with a little bit of $20-40, the last few days. I had a few hands I wanted to talk about that pertain to betting motion speed and tendencies. Now that my book has gone to the printers, I've been having a lot of second-guessing and doubting of the way I phrased some things in the book. This is bound to happen, and I try not to beat myself up too much, because ...
Poker tells in limit hold’em: A critique of my book by Philip Newall
I’ve been reading Philip Newall’s book The Intelligent Poker Player (published by TwoPlusTwo). His book is about game theory optimal strategy, and is especially applicable to short-handed and heads-up limit Hold’em. I plan on writing a review of it soon, but in the meantime I’ll just say that I recommend it. Not only does he talk about strategy, he also has really good advice on playing poker for ...
Raising too much pre-flop against loose players in limit
The game I play most often lately is a $15-30 fixed limit Hold'em with a full kill (which makes it $30-60). The game is a very loose, aggressive game by average standards, far juicier than you'd find in an average Vegas game. There are quite a few fairly decent card players there, but even the better ones make some pretty substantial, simple mistakes. I'm going to write in this post and the next ...