Poker Strategy

You will sometimes find yourself on a "rush" winning every hand no matter what you start with. You will feel invincible and the whole table will be staring at you in disbelief while you're stacking your chips after catching a gutshot straight on the river etc.

The question you ought to ask yourself is 1) is there any scientific explanation to this string of good luck? What explains this seemingly unnatural string of good luck 2) should you vary your play because you're on the rush and if so in what way?

The answer to question one is there is no scientific explanation to this. Cards do not discern between different players and different hands. If you make the flush on the river three times in a row, that still doesn't raise the percentages. You got lucky three times...that's it!! It doesn't mean that the next time you're drawing for a flush, you're more likely to hit it.

You will therefore be somewhat surprised to hear that the answer to the second question is: yes, you should vary your play when you're doing good. You should play a bit looser and with more confidence. The reason for playing looser is as follows:

Your pyshology IS inevitably affected by your luck whether you're aware of it or not. If you are a good player, you WILL play better when you're lucky than when you're not lucky. Now let's clarify this: If you're a bad player, you may be playing a bit tight sometimes and then when you see that the cards are coming you'll go on a binge and play even worse and still win, perhaps because you're playing so bad. However, if you are a good player and know tha real value of every poker starting/developing hand and how the hand's value fluctuates depending on its liveliness and what your opponents have, then you'll play even better when you're winning.

Now tight isn't necessarilly good. As a matter of fact, you can play looser than many good players and still win, perhaps even more than the tight player. That's because it's easy to stay out of trouble when you have a strict set of rules as to what to play and how far to play it. A good player can take advantage of his discretion to play marginal hands and drop it quickly if it doesn't develop properly, thereby making even more money and managing to stay "busy" while waiting for a hand. It's NOT a waste of money to see fourth street for the bring in with that KT8. If you know what you're doing, you can call and even raise with that in the right situation, even though it's normally not a playable hand.

When you are winning and only when you're winning can your psychology afford to play these marginal hands. When you're losing, you're broke and you feel desparate. Your judgement is not optimal and when it comes to very close decisions, you are more likely to make the wrong one even if you are generally a great player.

Now you might say..."Well, I've played so many hands so many years...I'm so good...my judgement is not affected by anything. I can sit hours and hours folding garbage and I play every hand regardless of whether this is the first hand I've gotten in three hours or it's the third time I've gottan split aces back to back". Now that might be true and if it is, you have achieved a great deal in your poker career. However, we're not talking here about conventional playing decisions. We're talking about extremely subtle decisions and those decisions can be made better when you're winning.

The other element that calls for playing loser when you're winning is simply becasue your opponents respect you. They will tend to fold more hands to your bet or raise than they would if you had been losing and this is generally to your advantage since they are folding hands that they shouldn't be folding, thereby giving up their interest in the pot. They don't realize that because you've won 20 out of the last 30 hands, doesn't mean that you're gonna win this one too. In extreme cases, they will be so fearfull of you that they will check very strong hands all the way down. If you raise once, they will sit tight all the way and just check and call. This kind of attitude is of course tremendously advatagous to you, as you back into winning hands with utter garbage simply because your opponent checked it down. And then you're even luckier that your opponent is stupid enough to call you on the river after you finally made a hand and there's no money in the pot to justify keeping you honest.

Basically what we're saying here is that you're capitalizing on your opponent's psychological weekness and on your psychological strength when you're winning to play marginal hands correctly and win even more.