Champion of Poker

In general in Hold’em online, I prefer to have a little more equity in the pot than that but I had made the decision to make this move before the flop even fell if my opponent repeated his previous betting pattern which in this case they did. My opponent folds and I rake in a nice profit. For me, this is a once in a session type of play and there is no way that I will leave myself exposed again like this during the same session. A bold move like this at the right time against the right opponent with the right betting tendencies can help you in your goal to end the session a winner or to be a winning poker player full stop for that matter.

What I will not allow myself to do in bigger limit games is to get caught in the middle of being aggressive and then passive because very good players will feed on this. Everyone expects their opposition to be aggressive in games like these and when you bet and get raised then you cannot always trust that raise and the player doing it.

It is a large part of my overall poker strategy to steal from the stealers in the bigger NLHE games simply because conventional play is too easily combated and beaten these days. But when I sit down to play in any session of poker then I am really not looking to do anything special. I will sit and watch the players for maybe an hour or so and try to really get a feel for what everyone is doing and what they are trying to achieve at the table. Then I will basically sit down and play good solid poker and then look to make one or two well timed big moves per session.

The types of games I am referring to of course here are the bigger games at $10-$20 and $25-$50 NLHE. At the time of writing this article, I have a very substantial offer on the table to be financed to play very high stakes online poker. As of yet, this is still in the preparation stages but I know that I can win at this level. By the time that you are reading this then yours truly may just be playing $200-$400 and $300-$600 but we will have to wait and see.

But my philosophy of stealing from the stealers is paramount in how I play high stakes poker and the more aggressive the game, the more it fits my style of play. The type of games that I don’t like are the types where the players are basically tight playing rocks because these are the hardest to extract big chunks of money from. But this hand and the ideas and concepts that are in it takes us on very nicely to the next hand where I am now going to totally contradict something that I said earlier or at least it is going to seem that way to many readers.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson
Author – “Winning High Stakes Poker”