Texas Hold'em tendencies

In My Humble Opinion
1

So I’ve gotten into poker lately, and there are various websites that sort of script out for you what to do e.g. if you start with KK.

I was wondering if the good people of Straightdope could tell me the tendencies with Poker? Handy tips e.g. checking = weak hand, calling = drawing, raising = strong hand.

2

Are you asking what you should do or what the actions of other people means? Either way, the amswer is “it depends.”

3

Mike Caro has a famous “Book of Tells” that discusses some of what you are talking about.

4

what I have always found interesting about casino poker (non-tournament) is that if everyone plays perfectly, everyone will lose. (That’s my theory anyway.) If all of the books that tell you what to do when were in agreement and everyone chose to play that way, then the only real determinant would be the rake and the house would ultimately have all of the money. Please tell me why i am wrong. (Obviously I am talking about the very long run.)

5

Because no matter how perfectly you play there is still a random element in the cards that come up.

6

Nonetheless, his point is fundamentally correct. If everyone had precisely equal skill and strategy, then everyone’s long term expected EV against everyone else would be zero… except for the house.
To even BEGIN to answer the OP’s question, we need to know at least two things:
(1) limit hold’em, no limit, or pot limit?
(2) tournament or cash game?
The only even remotely useful piece of advice I can give that applies pretty much no matter what is that the general consensus is that one should be what’s called tight/aggressive. “Tight” meaning, don’t play many hands at all. Fold pre-flop a LOT. Only play actually good hands. And “aggressive” meaning that once you’re playing a hand, generally either fold or raise. And raise a LOT. You can win a lot of pots just by raising. Call, call, call, call, call, call, hope to win is generally the sign of a losing player.

Can you ask some more specific questions?

7

Agreed. A skilled player makes money off of other player’s mistakes in the long run.

8

Here’s how to play:

  1. If someone raises pre-flop, they have AA. Fold.
  2. If you raise pre-flop and someone calls your raise, they have AA. Fold.
  3. If everyone checks the flop to you, bet. If someone calls, they probably have AA. Fold.
  4. If you have AA, don’t raise because everyone will know what you have. In order to hide your hand, you need to play as if you don’t have AA, i.e. check to the river and then fold.
9

Well sure, if an infinite number of players were playing an infinite number of hands or whatever, but for practical purposes I’m correct.

10

Good advice. We should play sometime at Bay 101 or something. :wink:

11

How about you cut the middle-man simply put all your money in the pot and leave?

12

The Lamar Mundane corollary - If I have AA, I fold, because I’m going to get rivered and lose a lot of money.

13

The only suggestion I can offer is never fold the nuts. If you have the best hand at the time, play it. If you don’t, and you know you don’t, fold. You should vary how you play the nuts, sometimes check to the river, sometimes raise, sometimes smooth call. The thing is you want to know what the others at the table will play and how they play it. Once you figure that out, you can get a little looser, or you may have stay tight.
If you vary your play enough, no one will be able to read you and you may get someone with a stronger hand to fold to you.

SSG Schwartz

14

This thread from a few months ago had some good tips on how to bet.

15

I was thinking about no-limit, cash games on the internet. But if you play tight, and only play good hands, then other players will know that everytime you raise, you have good cards?

16

My personal opinion is that it’s good to bluff often enough so that the other players know you could be bluffing. Bluffing on one out of every ~7-8 hands that you bet should suffice for that.

But even if you don’t, the fact is that even if the other players know you only play good hands, there’s (a) the fact that on 85% of the hands, you aren’t watching chips drain from your pile, (b) some of the other players will probably think their hand’s good too, and (c) there’s a fair degree of uncertainty, until that last card turns up, of just how good a hand you have. So even if you only bet the best 15% of your hands, and everyone else knows it, there’s still plenty of reason to bet against you.

One thing that’s worked for me is to change betting styles during the course of an evening’s poker. Last time I played, I bluffed a lot early on, before the blinds had doubled more than a time or two, when I wasn’t risking a lot. By mid-game, everyone was convinced I was bluffing almost every time I bet, so I switched up, and started betting good hands as if I was bluffing and trying to drive everyone else out. It worked pretty well; I’m gonna have to try that again.

17

He did specify originally “very long run”.

You sit 10 guys down at a 3/6 table in AC, each with $100.

You might have $300 raked from that table after 4 hours (30 hands an hour, $2-3 per hand), and it’s quite possible that no one is ahead. We’re not talking about a crazy statistical anomaly here. A lot of money leaves the table in rake.

MuddVayne. . .it’s impossible to answer your question.

Yeah, if you were playing a donkey, you could get by with checking a weak hand, calling with a drawing hand (couple with an elementary odds calculation) and raising with a strong hand. An effective rudimentary technique you might learn is to bet/raise some drawing hands. It can slow down action in later rounds if you haven’t hit (on bets that you would have paid anyway) and it gets more money in the pot if you hit. And, if you miss, it’s usually just read as a “bluff” from your opponents. This is typically practiced by raising a flop with a drawing hand in the hopes of getting a free card on the turn. Of course, everyone does this now, too.

You’ll get killed in a $.50 limit game playing like that online.

First and foremost, you don’t want to have “tendencies” and if you do, you have to be able to know who is aware of them, and how to exploit that.

Contrary to what RTFirefly talks of, I find it much more effective to establish a tight image early and then get a little more bluff-happy. I’d rather take down a whole pot I don’t deserve than get one extra bet in from an opponent on a pot I’m winning. Bluffing too much early destroys your value on “marginal hands”, part of which comes from opponents folding a better hand against you.

18

There is nothing worse than not being able to scare people away from a pot because they believe that you bet indiscriminately or bluff all the time.

But, that style of play will also lend power to your hands that maybe aren’t quite sure things (as Trunk says). Ideally, every time you play a hand out to the end, you’re holding the best hand. The next best thing is to make other people think you have the best hand so they don’t stay in till the end. If you bluff all the time (and will certainly get caught doing it a few times), you’re not going to be able to get people out of a hand early, and will then only be winning on hands that beat everyone else’s.

19

I can see the logic of that. Right now, I’m a little leery of it personally, because I’m still feeling my way when it comes to bluffing, and I’m less than sure of my ability to pull it off, so for now I’d rather bluff for small stakes. That’ll probably change as I get better at it.

20

This is a little off-topic, but RTFirefly, have you been playing any of the WCOOP events on Stars? I was railing one for a bit and saw someone with that screen name and I wondered if it was you.