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Making the Right Play

June 1, 2006

Most people hate them. Few claim that they always fold them. They are the "fish hooks". Making the right play with pocket jacks is one of the most difficult things to do in pocker.

There are some pocker players - it's only a few of them to be sure - who never bluff. Once you learn who they are, playing against them is easy. With a semibluff, as opposed to a bluff with a helpless hand, a player has two ways to win. His opponent might think the bluffer has the hand he's representing and release his own hand. If the opponent calls, the bluffer might catch the card he needs and beat his opponent that way.

While you need standards, it is important to realize that these standards are not fixed and immutable; they are dynamic! They vary with the situation, based on the number of pocker players, the texture of the game (loose, tight, or somewhere in between), the ability of your opponents, and your position (Must you act first, or do you have the advantage of seeing what each of your opponents will do before you're required to check, bet, fold or raise?).

If you play in low limit games at the pocker room at the Golden Nugget, don't worry about running into last year's World Series of Poker winner, the eight toughest card players in your hometown, Bat Masterson, Doc Holiday or any other legends of the game at your table. While there are many ways to classify players, the easiest is to group your opponents into three types: Recreational players, Regulars, and Professionals. Recreational players love the game, but when push comes to shove, they don't really care whether they win or lose.

• If you've got a lot of game experience, you should not be running into many entirely new situations at the Venetian. Most will be analogous to others you've faced before. That's why there is no substitute for real game experience coupled with theoretical knowledge that you've molded into practical know-how. Expertise at poker comes from an iterative cycle of reading and studying the game, playing the game and thinking about the game.
• This is a case in which recalling the play of the hand is more important than knowing the tendencies of your opponents. If you can deduce what kind of hand - or hands - your opponents are likely to hold, you can decide whether to come out betting or try for a check-raise. Remember, unless you think your opponent will bet and call your raise, betting is the preferred course of action.

Hold'em is a game that requires aggressive pocker play as well as selectivity. You can't win in the long run by passively calling. You've also got to initiate your share of raises, and here are some raising hands. You always can raise with a pair of aces, kings, queens, jacks, or tens. In fact, if someone has raised before it's your turn to act and you have a pair of aces, kings, or queens in your hand, go ahead and reraise

While Hold'em is exciting, exhilarating, and enjoyable, you ought to know something before telling funny pocker jokes, or diving in and plunking your money down - even if it's the lowest-limit game in the house. Here are a few of those somethings that I wish I had known when first making the transition from seven-card stud to Texas Hold'em.

Just one more lucky hand and I would have made the final pocker table with a good opportunity to win my first bracelet. I played some really good poker early in this tournament to be within the top 3 in chips. Freddy Deeb and I rubbed elbows quite a bit and he got the best of me while calling my early position raise with 32 in the big blind. The flop came up something like T33 and he won a nice size pot from me as I had KK.