Champion of Poker

I thought long and hard about putting this particular hand example into this article because it covers one of the real secrets as to how I win in the bigger no limit Texas Holdem games. Of course if you are going to write an article then you owe it to the people reading it to hold nothing back.

But there was one tactic that I really wanted to avoid putting in this article, in fact it is more than just a tactic but more an extension of my poker philosophy. But the more that I thought about it, the more apparent that it became that I could actually put this in the article without it really hurting my game too much.

Most people who read this article will not play as high as $25-$50 and even if they do, they will not have the identical circumstances to me in order to make this work. What I am referring to by identical circumstances is my financial situation plus my own individual attitude towards bankrolls which is something that I think probably should not be emulated and for that reason I am not going to go down the avenue of explaining it simply because it can do more harm than good for the people reading it.

But it is common knowledge that many players take shots in bigger games and the regular players in these games can smell the shot takers a mile off. In a $25-$50 game with a 100BB maximum buy in then strong players who are properly bankrolled will tend to buy in for the maximum and top that up repeatedly should they fall short of that during actual play.

But I sometimes will purposefully sit down in a game with a table consisting of several very strong players but do so with a reduced stack of say $2000 to $2500. I realise that this may seem to contradict what I have recently said about game selection and seat selection but stay with me on this one. Most players who buy into these poker games for these reduced amounts of money tend to be shot takers who are there to try and get lucky and play solid cards.

In short, they will do nothing fancy and their action can be pretty predictable. Because I site hop an awful lot (not as much now) then I encounter many players who will be seeing me for the very first time. But because I have been ghosting the games sometimes for as long as several weeks then I come to know many of the regulars and know what types of players they are and what they like to do at the table and more importantly, what their objectives are at the table. This can also be applied by players who play poker tournaments as well.

In the following articles then I will be expanding on what I am saying here which hopefully should start to make more sense. So do keep a look out for part two of this article series coming soon.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson
Author – “Winning Cash Game Poker”