Slow Playing Your Way to the Poor House in Texas Holdem
I bet you didn't know that this technique is probably one of the most misused and abused of all strategies. When done correctly we define Slow Play as: The art of representing weakness with a passive betting style in order to throw off or deceive your opponent to achieve a greater pay off. Often it turns out to be the art of representing weakness with a passive betting style in order to encourage marginal hands to stick around to outdraw you so that you can lose the hand. Lets get started with you on the button and you get dealt pocket rockets. A couple of players limp in and you decide to call-SLOW PLAY IT!. This is a huge mistake. First of all, to raise from the button is a fairly standard play and is commonly referred to as a position raise. Most people that know anything about the game don't head for the hills because the button raised. In fact, there is more bluffing from the button than any other position. This means that you aren't necessarily giving up information, particularly from that position. The second mistake is that you let the big blind in for free and the small blind in for half a bet. Sit and watch the $100/200 limit game and keep note of how long you have to sit there before you observe an instance where the Big blind plays for free. I make it down to Foxwoods twice a month. If geographically feasible I suggest you do the same. The 4/8 and 5/10 limit games are pretty soft and so far have been very beatable. This is what happened my last visit to Conneticut. I had just won two decent hands in a row(always nice) and am now in the Big blind. I get dealt real junk, 6/8 unsuited. To my surprise everyone limps and I am going to see a flop. Well, the flop comes 10c, 8c, 8s. I just flopped a set. I have not put anyone on a big pocket pair, never mind Aces. I am sure you can appreciate that I have no business being in this hand. Yet, I'm 99% sure I am in the lead. The irony here is that I now slow play my trip 8's and check. The player to my left bets and there are three other callers including me. The turn produces a miracle 6c. I've got a full house and am praying that someone hit the club flush just as long as he is not holding the 79c. I bet the eight and the player to my left makes it 16, the button pushes it to 24, I cap it at 32, the two raisers call and we have a very nice pot in the making. The river produces a rag and I lead out and everyone calls, I win a nice pot. The player to my left had limped with AQc and the button limped with AA. What happened here happens quite a bit. The AQc player should have raised in early position trying to get as many out of the pot as possible. AQs are nice cards but has problems particularly in an early seat. The button's AA should have also raised as the button often raises due to position as discussed earlier. The point being that both players did everything possible to throw away the hand. The funny thing is that the slow player(s) got slowplayed. When I'm dealt AQ, particularly in early position, I come out flying. You do this because you want to play this hand heads up, or better still, win it right there. For what ever reason this player assigned greater value to AQ than he should have. AA is consistently over valued and as a result is played incorrectly. I'm always fascinated by people's reaction when their aces get cracked. It's as if they've lost track of the fact that there are still 5 cards to come. Not to mention that these same five cards are shared by the opposition. When people play draw or stud there isn't anywhere near the disapointment when their aces don't hold up. Always try to focus on the fact that 71.4% of your cards are community cards. To state the obvious the button should have raised his bullets and only got fancy if the third ace is produced on the flop. He had two problems with that flop; the board paired and the clubs potentially offered the flush draw for someone. The value of his aces took a big hit and he clearly was oblivious to this shift evidenced by his raise on the turn, making it three bets. When the third club came on the turn and he faced a raise from early position it should have sent off an alarm that his aces were beat. Unless I'm playing heads up or with two other players I never slow play the early betting rounds with AA or KK. It makes no sense to let the BB in free with rags for the shot at outdrawing you. Effective slow play takes place after the flop and to a greater extent at the turn when there is high % of certainty that you not only have the best hand, but that any improvement on the part of your opposition will not beat you. When your opponent hits his hand on a dead draw is the optimum outcome for you to get paid off. Try it this way. Your win/loss relationship will vastly improve! John Ruscio has been playing winning poker for 29 years and offers Free Texas Holdem Instruction, expert articles and hosts Freeroll Tournaments with Cash Prizes. Check it out: http://www.holdemheights.com/ |
Other Poker Bonus Articles
NFC East 2006 Previews and Projections NFC Eastern Division:1) Dallas: Head man Bill Parcells is in his 4th year with the Boyzzz and over the past three seasons has compiled a 25-24 straight up and 23-24-2 ATS record which is not too shabby when taking into consideration that these Cowpokes had only won 15 games total in the three years prior to the Big Tuna’s arrival. Dallas ...How to Become an Early Riser - Part II Last Monday’s post How to Become an Early Riser obviously struck a chord with many people. That post has generated more links than I can count, sending more new traffic to this site than any other post or article I’ve written. And the traffic logs indicate that the surge was decentralized (not attributable to a mention in any one major source). ...Casino Games History Or How People Have Learnt To Count Cards Part 4 Technocrat: Another little known name of great influence on blackjack Keith Taft. He was an engineer, computer specialist and inventor, he created his first blackjack computer in 1970, before Ken Uston appeared on the stage, just four years after the publication of the second Thorp’s book that encouraged him for this work. This computer named "G ...Online Casino Bonus Review 2006-9-12 Action Online Casino BonusesAction Online Casino have over 70 games on offer, including blackjack although I was unable to ascertain which rules they played by. It is a software download casino which looks very pretty and has an interesting novelty of live dealer games where the game is controlled by a real dealer who ...Win Video Poker – The Only Way To Win Big If you want to win big at video poker you need to get the royal flush. The other hands simply wont help you win longer term you must hit the royal flush and this article will show you how to increase your odds of doing so.Increase Your Odds of Hitting the Royal FlushMany video poker players ignore the royal flush when they play, bu ...Roulette Tips – 4 Simple Tips for Huge Roulette Profits! Roulette is the perfect casino game it’s simple to play fun, exciting and for a game of pure chance the odds of success are good.The 4 roulette tips enclosed are all you need to maximize your chances of success in this great game so here they are:Tip 1: Play European WheelThe best roulette wheel to play is the European wheel ...Amazing Lottery Secrets - Just the Facts! When it comes to Lottery Secrets, we’ve discovered amazing and powerful information, that we feel anyone who plays their respective lottery should be aware of. Did you know that the greatest percentage of lottery players choose to “quick pick” their numbers?If you knew this bit of information you might want to reconsider. 80% of lottery ...Poker Player Profiles: The Rock Over the years, poker became very popular and the boom of online poker has added fuel to the fire. Also the need for poker books increased, so many have been written so far, some good and some not so good. But they all teach you one thing more than they should: they teach you how to play tight and tighter than others. Although being tight is goo ...Blackjack Tournaments: News More and more land-based casinos are offering blackjack tournaments. Before you enter a casino or download one of the blackjack tournaments applications on-line, it's best that you know the very basics of how to play blackjack under tournament conditions. Tournaments work like this. Every contestant is assigned to a table and every player will ...Casino Games History or How People Have Learnt to Count Cards; Part 3 Gladiators . Mathematical developments of the game pioneers and creation of simple and efficient counting systems incited the appearance of a great galaxy of professional players and experts of blackjack.Revere invented a new simple counting system and first described the method of reducing the current score to the real one. Stanford Wong ...Choosing the Best Sports Gambling Sites Choosing the best sports gambling sites to place a sports bet with can take a lot of research and SportsGambling4Fun.com has done a lot of the legwork for you. Our goal is to make sure you are playing with the best sports gambling sites possible. Being in the sports gambling industry for quite some time we have come across a number of quality s ...How are Betting Lines Made Typically there are 4-5 oddsmakers assigned to make lines for each of the major sports (college and pro football and basketball; MLB, NHL, boxing and golf). Each oddmakers bring unique opinions, strengths and weaknesses into the process.What Is the Line Trying to Accomplish?Commonly, people are under the misconception that point sp ...Bad Luck in Poker For a game where most players rarely consider luck, there are lots of superstitions in poker. When you mention that someone was lucky in that poker tournament they won, be careful of how you say it. For instance, if you mention that you were unlucky, your luck may never change.Ok, that may sound a bit ubsurd, but poker is a game loaded ...When Playing Cards at the Poker Table, Keep a Winning Attitude If you intend to have more chances to win a game of poker then you have to constantly try and keep a winning attitude. Be always rational and avoid emotions that can influent your game. Being optimist is the key no matter what. The tilting part is only the first step in developing a poker attitude that can actually help your game, or at least th ...Online Casino Bonus Money (Some Restrictions May Apply) Today, virtually every online casino will give new players a bonus to entice them to play. Some casinos offer No Deposit Bonuses; others may match your initial deposit giving you a 100% bonus. There are even a number of casinos that will give you 125%, 200% even 400% of your initial deposit. How do casinos stay in business while still giving aw ...Randomness, Probabilities and Odds The probability of a favorable result out of all chances can be expressed in the following way: the probability (р) equals to the total number of favorable results (f), divided on the total number of such chances (t), or pf/t. However, this is true only for cases, when the situation is based on net randomness and all results are equiprobab ...Internet Poker Bonus With the current popularity of playing poker online, there are many sites to choose from. As a way to compete for your business, many of these sites are now offering great bonuses for setting up an account and playing with them. You can receive bonuses of merchandise, cash, or both. Almost every site offers some kind of internet poker bonus. ...Online Texas Holdem Poker Strategy: Maintain Focus at the Poker Table There’s no doubt about it, some people are just better at poker than others. They appear to win consistently and seemingly at will. So this leaves many with a few questions which linger on the mind.Could it be that poker is only a game of chance with no other forces to play upon besides the fickle Lady Luck?What makes a good poker ..."Please Don't Tell My Wife!" says Huge Slot Winner "Please don't tell my wife and don't publish my name." said a very lucky L.A. man in March, 2003. He was talking to casino officials at The Excalibur Hotel and Casino, where he had just won 39.7 million dollars on a Megabucks slot machine. This huge winner only had to invest a mere $100. to hit his payday. For the next 25 years, Mr. "X" will ...Premiership Football - First Goalscorer Betting One of the most popular areas of football betting in the first goalscorer sector, despite the fact that bookmakers are less than generous via the compiling of the relevant odds. There is still money to be made however, though the following FACTS might surprise a few readers.Try not to look at the following stats first, and hazard a guess ...Spotting and Playing Against the Aggressive Poker Player Nowadays, a new kind of poker player is developing. They are the backwards players, tilted backwards and they have one significant attribute that can be appreciated because they have no idea what a nut means. These players are not inexperienced players. They will usually understand draw odds, they know the fact that on a high percentage all othe ...Winning Poker Hands: Aces Full and Full House Poker has very interesting terms for some of its many combinations of hands. For the beginner, sometimes these terms simply don’t make any sense, and most times as not, they have names which are easily confused. That’s because some of the named hands will have actual names of the cards in them, such as the hand ‘Aces Full’.Naturally with ...Online Poker Tips: Common Mistakes Players Must Avoid For those serious about their online poker experience, the following tips are designed to help the novice avoid the traps used by more experienced online poker players.1. Online Poker ChatThe online poker chat can be a valuable tool to shake the novice player. Experienced players use the chat feature to take the novice player off t ...Who Wins With Poker Promotions? Over the last few years, the card game of poker has turned into its own sport, with championship and world series games that are shown on television and covered in magazines. It would seem that a sport such as this which has so much media attention would not necessarily need promotional material, and yet there are a great number of poker promot ...Americans Can Still Gamble Online Legally Contrary to popular belief, the new anti-internet-gambling law does not make it illegal for Americans to gamble online. It only prevents credit card companies from transferring deposits directly to internet casinos. There are other methods of making deposits, besides using credit cards. When the law passed, some internet casinos banned U.S. citi ...What is Online Poker Online poker, as the name suggests, is the game of poker played over the Internet. Online poker has been responsible for a dramatic increase in the number of poker players worldwide. Thanks in part, to the proliferation of online casinos, the craze for poker is spreading beyond the mega-rich, business-suited elite, allowing everyone a fair chan ...Poker Games: Home Games vs. Casino Action People usually play poker at home or with friends for starters and the transition from their usual style they developed in these kinds of games and the style required if you play in a casino online or offline can be hard for some. The home games have always a simpler structure. Usually, all the players at the table ate a small amount. And then t ...Top Ten Best Poker Tips 1. Know when to hold’em, and know when to fold’emMost beginners play way too many starting hands; in fact top players typically play between 20-30% of their starting hands. When you're just starting out playing poker, you want to play poker, and that means staying in hands that aren't very good just to be part of the action. But playing m ...Slow Playing Your Way to the Poor House in Texas Holdem I bet you didn't know that this technique is probably one of the most misused and abused of all strategies.When done correctly we define Slow Play as: The art of representing weakness with a passive betting style in order to throw off or deceive your opponent to achieve a greater pay off. Often it turns out to be the art of representin ...
|
