Champion of Poker

I have the advantage because they don’t know me or how I play and what my goals or objectives are in Texas Hold’em poker. But I started out at $25-$50 by having little hit and run sessions where I would go onto the table and buy in for about $2500. I knew that my opponents would be taking me for a shot taker, some player who hasn’t got the proper bankroll to be playing at that level and who would be playing fairly tight and was someone who they could push around.

Well they got the first two parts of the equation right because I was certainly taking a shot in the poker game and I also did not have an adequate bankroll for those kinds of stakes. But what they got totally wrong was in how I was going to play when I sat down. I never intended to play like the average Joe who sits down with a medium sized stack and I was certain that this would throw them a curve ball and get me the edge.

I used to like it even better when the other players had similar sized stacks to me because they were precisely the ones who I would target because these were the guys who were in fact playing on short bankrolls and taking a shot themselves. You also see this sort of short bankroll philosophy with online poker tournaments as well.

What I did not want to be doing with a $2500 buy in and with hardly any bankroll was picking on players or getting involved in pots with players who I knew to be good. The strong players nearly always had big stacks and kept them topped up and heaven only knows what size bankrolls they were sitting on.

But strong poker players with large bankrolls tend to look you up more often and that wasn’t going to help me at all so I carefully steered my way around them and played pots with players who either had comparable stacks to me or smaller stacks.

But when I got involved with these players then I played my stack as though it was a big stack because I knew that most of them were playing on scared money. The reason that I was reticent about putting this into the article was simply because of how successful I have been as a result of using this tactic. I amassed winnings of over $100,000 during the first six months of playing and that wasn’t even full time hours.

This was far better than the hourly grinding that I had been doing playing limit hold’em and it was also far more interesting to me than simply sitting down and playing multiple tables.

But it is a fact that I simply could not have got away with this tactic playing limit hold’em because you cannot be as aggressive with players who are playing with short bankrolls or shot taking in that form of poker. But one such shot taker got themselves involved with me in this hand. It was folded to me in the cut off and I raised it to $150 while holding the 9s-8s and the small blind passed and the shot taker called in the big blind with a $2000 stack. Look out for part three of this article coming soon.

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