A Couple Of "Almosts" and Cash Talk

MTTs

I played around 8 MTT's Sunday and cashed in 6. Of those, one was a Final Table 8th place and another was a 12th place. The rest were middle of the road cashes. Then I picked up a buy-in grinding 600 hands of 50 NL so all in all not a bad little day.

I'm starting to be content with these deeper finishes instead of going on life tilt which is nice. My girlfriend will appreciate me getting bette at that, too.

I've been playing a lot on Absolute Poker. I deposited $50 a couple weeks ago and my bankroll is sitting around $310 now with $75 in rakeback payments pending. My cash game play has been up and down say the least.

Cash

50 NL has so many call stations. This means you need the balls to two barrel and three barrel bluff. They'll be calling like 80% of flop c-bets and maybe rightfully so. This means you need to pay special attention to their Turn and River fold percentages. Weak-Passive fish will call tons of flops with improper drawing odds but since they are weak they will not go all the way to showdown unless it's a very special type of fish, and these ones you simply value bet and never bluff.

This also means you should polarize your 3 betting hands to just your strong hands. No need to do anything else against Level 1 and Level 2 players.

Bluffing

Ok, so Harrington On Hold Em got everyone thinking about how most flops miss both players and usually the person who takes the lead wins the pot, right? Still holds true but now that everyone knows this you don't win as much on the flop anymore.

TAG style dictates raising your good hands, c-betting 100%, and shutting down on the Turn if you still fail to have a hand. You'll lose a lot of money to weak/passive fish this way and I'm sure you will still profit long-term but at a reduced rate.

Oh hai Two Barrel Bluff.

The best flops to bluff are dry flops like K 2 7 rainbow which contains one "scare card" and two other cards unlikely to hit your opponent. If you bet this flop and get called you can start narrowing down your opponent's range. He could float with A high. He could have a weakish K. He could have a medium pair. Hands like QT and 9T are likely to just fold to the c-bet.

When the Turn comes, the best cards to bluff at are other scare cards that don't complete draws. In this case you can safely fire and 2nd barrel and shut down if called.

Conversely, wet flops are bad to bluff since they can hit your opponent's range hard. A flop like 6c 7c 8h is never seeing a c-bet from me when I hold a hand like AdQd because I'm creating a large pot with no redraw and quite possibly already crushed in the hand.

Three Barrel Bluffs are very read dependent. Often you'll try them on a flop like As 4h 5h where your opponent just calls the c-bet. Then a card like 9s comes on the Turn and you fire again. When the river brings something like Qd you can try a three barrel bluff if you think your opponent is holding 67 or a busted heart draw.

Again, read dependent and you want the opponent to have a high River fold percentage. Otherwise you're just spewing chips.

I never gave an example of what we hold here. With a hand like a medium pair I will three barrel. Same with JT, etc. and hands you can only win with by bluffing.

With a baby Ace or a Queen I have showdown value and so I will just check back on the river instead of firing a third shell. Often times your Q will be good and sometimes you will lose to a baby Ace that was scare to ever raise you, but at least you saved money by not firing the third bullet.

50 NL Strategy

Basically, it's this:

Open only good hands in EP. Flat a lot of speculative hands on the button. Only 3 bet my strong hands. Larger 3 bet when playing from the blinds as I'll be out of position in the hand. C-bet most flops. Identify players who fold lots of Turns and 2 Barrel Bluff them. Otherwise play ABC TAG poker.

So far so good but I catch myself calling too much some times. These weak players will never two barrel you light so it's important to be able to release marginal hands like 2nd and 3rd pair.

That's it for now. Good luck at the tables.