Becoming a solid poker player by default

This may sound a very strange title for a blog post but you will have to keep with me here while I explain myself. Poker at the end of the day is a game of simple decision making. You have to address the strength of your hand with the likely expected strength of your opponents and then make a simple decision of whether you should call, fold, check or raise. The actions of calling, folding, checking or raising are pretty straight forward……it is knowing where you stand with regards to your hand strength versus your opponents hand strength that is the hard part. If you have junk then that is easy to identify, if you have a lot of strength then this is also easy to identify……..but that doesn’t mean that you can simply make an automatic play.

If you have 7-2 after checking your option in the big blind and the flop comes K-J-10 and the small blind had limped in and then c-bet the pot then you are not making a mistake by folding. In fact even if you and the small blind were the only two players in the pot then you was not making a mistake by not raising pre-flop. Both checking and check-folding with obviously weak hands are what I call “default” plays. These are plays that you make when the action is clearly obvious. The default play is the “obvious” play and the “solid” play. If you do anything else with a hand that is as weak as this then it is certainly non-standard. However there is another factor at work in poker beyond the hand strength that you hold…….this is the hand strength of your opponent.

This is why the better players set out to get as much information about their opponents as they possibly can. Let us say that your opponent raised on the button and you held 7-2 in the big blind. In this situation then the clear play when we know nothing about our opponent is to fold. In actual fact even if we knew that they were getting out of line then the combination of them having position and us having the worst of all hands still makes the play a fold. However there are many instances where the situation is a lot less clear. Let us say that you had J-10 in the big blind and a very aggressive player raised on the button with K-9. In this example let us also say that you knew what their hand was…….how would you play the hand if you knew your opponents hand?

Well despite holding an inferior hand you also know that your opponent is not holding a strong one either. This then highlights one interesting facet of poker and it is that you could have the worst hand but still win the pot. So you have two goals as a poker player, the first is to play your hands in a good default way and to play them as well as possible when you have no information whatsoever on your opponents. Secondly you need to actively try and get as much information as you possibly can on your opponents and to do this as fast as you can. This allows you to make those non-standard plays that are so vital to making money that the best players perform and utilise. However if you do not know when the right times are to do this or if you see another player make a play with a piece of junk then you are going to try emulating them and end up making some horrendous errors.