FullTilt Poker Tips

In the game of Hold‘em, especially No Limit, aggression is usually rewarded. By being aggressive, you are putting your opponent in an uncomfortable situation and forcing him to either make a hand or make a bluff. You take over control of the pot and put yourself in the driver’s seat.

Table image can be a very powerful tool at the poker table, especially in ring games where you can expect to play a long session against the same opponents. But when it comes to tournament play, trying to project a certain table image can often times prove to be a futile endeavor. Your attempt might end up costing you precious chips now without gaining a later advantage, since you may be at a different table against different opponents a few minutes later.

When you’re playing a tournament and sitting on around 15 big blinds, you can face some seriously tough pre-flop decisions. Welcome to stack size limbo. It feels likes you have too many chips to push all-in, but a standard pre-flop raise can prove disastrous if an aggressive player comes over the top and puts you to the test.

We’ve all played poker against those guys who are relentlessly aggressive, who’ll make moves with any two cards. The fact of the matter is that you have to make a stand against those guys sooner or later. The key is picking the right time to do it. There’s nothing more painful than being the sucker who pays him off when he finally has a monster. But it’s a gamble you have to take on occasion in order to be the guy who gets all of the maniac’s chips when he runs an ill-advised bluff.

It’s been said many times that the weakest play in poker is calling – that it’s better to be raising or folding. In my opinion, there are situations where that statement simply isn’t true. I recently played a hand online at Full Tilt Poker that served as a perfect example of how checking and calling can win you a hand that you would have lost by folding (obviously) or raising.

In the late stages of a poker tournament, big pairs are generally pretty easy to play. When you have 20, 30 or 40 big blinds in your stack, and you find a pair of Queens or Kings, you usually just want to play aggressively, force a fold, or play a big all-in pot and hope things work out in the end.

When beginning poker players are describing a hand they’ve played, they usually start by saying what their hole cards were before moving on to talk about the betting. A professional poker player, however, would never describe the dynamics of a hand without first talking about his position at the table because in games like Hold ’em and Omaha, position can be even more important than the cards in your hand.

Mike Caro once said that when you join a poker game, you should say to yourself, “I am a great poker player; a powerful winning force surrounds me.” I believe it’s a technique worth trying.

Many players new to online poker find multi-tabling – playing more than one table at once – intimidating. While it might seem this way at first, there are several things that you can do to get the most out of your experience right from the start.

One theme you’ll see throughout our Tips From The Pros series is that when you’re making a move, your actions need to tell a plausible story. Some stories can be simple. For example, if you raise pre-flop and then follow up with a bet on a King-high flop, you’re telling opponents that you’re happy with the progression of the hand and maybe you have A-K or K-Q.

A lot of outstanding poker players will tell you the cornerstone of pre-flop play is consistency. That approach works for many top players, but I don’t necessarily subscribe to that theory.

As a Producer at Full Tilt Poker Academy, one of the great benefits of my job is being expected to keep a hand in the game and actually play some poker now and then. I need to apply the ideas and techniques that I learn every day while working with some of the best players in the world. At-the-table research is essential; that’s what I tell my wife and my boss, and so far they’re buying it.

While No-Limit Hold ‘em and Limit Hold ‘em tournaments might look the same to a casual observer, they’re completely different. In a No-Limit Hold ‘em tournament, one big hand can either set you up for a run to the final table or send you home early. That’s not how it works in a Limit Hold ‘em tournament – a single hand is never going to define your entire tournament. You should approach a Limit Hold ‘em tournament more like a cash game by trying to slowly accumulate chips and limiting your mistakes. For players making the transition from No-Limit to Limit Hold‘em tournaments, a good rule of thumb is to play a little tighter before the flop and a little looser after the flop.

To succeed in Pot-Limit Hold ‘em tournaments, No-Limit Hold‘em players need to make certain adjustments to their game. Perhaps the biggest modification you need to make is to recognize the importance of being the second raiser before the flop rather than the first, a change necessitated in large part by Pot-Limit’s unique betting structure.

Bluffing in Limit Hold ’em is nothing like bluffing in No-Limit Hold’em. In a Limit game, you can rarely price an opponent out of the pot if he has any kind of a made hand or draw. Sometimes you’ll try a bluff on the river because your opponent can no longer chase, but even so, his pot odds are usually so overwhelming that he’ll call with a weak hand.

I’ve been playing poker for 23 years, and one thing I can say about my play with great pride is that I never steam. In fact, that’s true of a lot of pros. In general, the more experienced a player is, the less likely he or she is to have a steam factor.

In the second week of the 2004 Series, I just missed a final table, finishing eleventh in a $2,000 Limit Hold’em event. Daniel (Negreanu) went on to win that tournament for his third WSOP bracelet. What I remember most about that tournament was a hand that came up about eight hours into Day One.

If you want to become a complete poker player, you need to learn how to play all the variations of the game. You should do this because it’s no good being the world’s best Hold’em player when the biggest sucker in town only wants to play Seven-Card Stud. Ideally, you want to be able to play whatever game looks to be the most profitable on any given day.

Most of the time when you’re engaged in a poker hand, you’ll be thinking about what decisions you will make before you have to make them. For example, if you call a raise with K-Q, you’ll think to yourself: Okay, if I hit top pair, I’m going to play this hand. If I have a gut-shot and two over-cards, I’m going to play this hand. If I have an open-ender and two over-cards, I’m going to play this hand. Otherwise, I’m going to let it go.

I'm aware that most poker players know me primarily as a poker commentator on shows like NBC's "Poker After Dark" and "National Heads-Up Poker Championship", but I also happen to be a pretty serious Limit Hold‘em and mixed game player. I particularly enjoy HORSE, so I thought I'd give one quick tip on each of the five games to help players who are beginning to explore this challenging format.

Hand coordination is the relative strength of your hand compared to your opponents’ hand, and it’s probably the single biggest factor determining whether you have a good or bad session playing poker. If it’s working in your favor, whenever you flop a monster, one of your opponents will also make a big hand, just not quite as big as yours. In this situation, playing your hand as fast as possible usually gives you the best chance to make the most money.

I firmly believe that it's impossible to play too tight in Omaha Hi/Lo, especially in a ring game. I'll be the first to admit that it's not especially fun to play the game that tight, but if you have the patience for it, it's as good a game as any to make money in.

A medium stack is defined as when you have about 30-40 big blinds, and learning how to play it is absolutely vital to tournament success. In most poker tournaments, you’ll have a stack that size from about the time half of the field has been eliminated all the way to the final table.

When most poker players think about tells, they visualize physical actions that occur at the table. For example, the way an opponent’s hands start shaking whenever he has the nuts or the way he handles his chips in certain situations. Online poker players don’t have this sort of information to work with, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t tells in online play. There’s actually a great deal of information that an observant player can pick up on, and much of it can be discovered before you even sit down at a table. I call these important first impressions “pre-game tells.”

For me, poker is a game that is meant to be played joyfully, and the path to playing the game joyfully begins with finding the game that’s right for you and entering it in the right frame of mind.