Against very weak opponents, it’s usually not necessary to randomize your decisions. You don’t need to be very deceptive, because a straightforward strategy will usually earn the most money. But against more experienced players it’s a good idea to mix it up, as long as you don’t sacrifice too much in the process.

But how do you randomize? There are many ways to do this, some simple, some elaborate. One very easy way is to decide to choose the standard play for close decisions (such as mostly calling, but sometimes raising) three-quarters (75 percent) of the time and the exception one-quarter (25 percent) of the time. For situations in which a three-to-one ratio of standard play to exception seems reasonable to you, you can simply consider the suit of the FIRST card dealt to you. If it’s a spade, choose the exception and raise (for the sake of this example). If it’s any other suit, go with the standard play and just call.

As an extra precaution against the unlikely event that an opponent will catch on, you might change the exception suit from time to time. You could change it each session or even each hour.

Mike Caro

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When you begin with two suited cards and flop two more — meaning you need to catch one more of that suit on the 4th (turn) or 5th (river) cards, it’s often correct to continue to pursue the pot. So, if you start with Kh-Jh in a fixed-limit game and the flop is 7-A-4, you probably should call (and sometimes even bet, partially for deceptive purposes).

But if there’s a pair on that flop, such as 10-10-7, you should often fold. Why? It’s because the flush attempt is usually only marginally profitably (on average) without the pair present. The increased chances of you making a flush only to have it beat by a full house when a pair is present often makes the pursuit unprofitable.

That’s why, if you think the pursuit of the flush would only show a small profit without the pair, you should almost always fold with the pair present. Rare exceptions might involve times when you can use the presence of the pair to bluff or to posture.

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Here’s a quick tip from top poker author and professional, Mike Caro.

Even if you play all the way to a showdown in hold ’em, if you start with a pair of deuces, the odds against you catching at least one more deuce among the five board cards are 4.2 to 1. You’ll only succeed 19 percent of the time.

When you consider that you’re unlikely to win without seeing a third deuce, that you might lose — often at some expense — even when you do see one, and that it will probably cost you considerably more money to get to that last river card, you can understand why a pair of deuces is usually unprofitable to play in hold ’em.

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Although you can often call profitably with a small pair against a long line of players in hold ’em, when you’re in late position and no one has entered the pot, it’s different. Then, you should usually raise, not just call.

The reason is that against many players, you’re trying to take advantage of pot odds by calling and seeing the flop. You realize that you’ll almost certainly need to improve your hand to win against that many opponents.

But when you’re in late position, you can raise hoping to end up one-on-one or to win the blinds outright. If you do end up against just one opponent, there’s a good chance your small pair might be enough win the pot, affording you an extra chance to win that you would seldom enjoy against many opponents.

The raise is designed to chase players out and give yourself that extra chance to win.

Mike Caro

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This week, the team at bet365 Poker opened their satchel of poker tips and pulled out the exercise book that deals with M-ratio.

It a term invented by professional backgammon player Paul Magriel who, when he’s not tumbling dice, also finds time to sit down at the occasional poker game and pen a few books. Although the term and theory are his babies, as is often the case with these definitions, the basic principles were already applied by advanced players such as Doyle Brunson.

The M-ratio is a simple measurement of chip stack when factored against the price of playing each round. M is equal to the number of laps a player can survive, making only compulsory bets, before his chip run out. It is deduced by the following formula: M = stack/SB+BB+(ante x number of players)

Example: in a ten player game, with blinds of $100/$200 and antes of $10, a player with a $2000 stack has the M-ratio of 5: he will be dead in five rounds (or fifty hands) if just makes the compulsory bets.

This can be more useful in tournaments than cash games – in the latter, a player can effectively set his own M-ratio as he can keep buying chips.  However, in tournaments, knowing your M-ratio, and thus the power of your stack, is a real asset. To this end, pro Dan Harrington went to the blackboard and created five M Zones to help give novice and veteran alike a quick reference.

These are:

M ≥ 20 is the Green Zone – bet away as this is the best situation to be in. Play as you choose – loose or tight, you have plenty of time.

20 ≤ M ≤ 10 is the Yellow Zone – you have to start taking more chances here. Crucially, Dan argues small pairs and small suited connector lose value

6 ≤ M ≤ 10 is the Orange Zone – starting to become tight. Dan suggests a focus on making sure you are the first person to put money into the pot.

1 ≤ M ≤ 6 is the Red Zone – similar to what Alex Ferguson, manager of Manchester United, called ‘squeaky bum time’, your only option is now to push or to fold.

M  . You’re in Stephen King territory now, you have to push your money into an empty pot and rely on luck to survive.

For the ratio to remain valid in the latter stages of a tournament, you have to remember to factor in the percentage of players still left at the table. So, for the earlier example, if the player’s M-ratio was 5 at a full table, it falls to 2.5 if there are only five players remaining

Is this case, M effective = M x (players/10) or… 5 x 5/10 = 2.5.

Whether or not you really need to call it the M-ratio, a nod to Harrington’s ‘Zones’ may improve your tournament strategy.

Blimey! Get down to bet365 Poker and put those formulae into practice!

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We thought we’d share some of Doyle Brunson’s advice from his 1984 book, Poker Wisdom of a Champion.

Doyle believes that most ‘players would do well to examine themselves carefully before every game’, and given that he is regularly touted as one of the best three individuals ever to peep at pocket aces, his words might be worthy of consideration. Keeps them moving and look at

So, as most people should recognise that playing in the wrong frame of mind can be a wonderful method of shovelling cash to your opponents, let’s have a look at ‘Texas Dolly’s’ seven point checklist.

1. Have you had enough sleep? If no, don’t play.

(Bear in mind it was written in the eighties, before the online game exploded and players began a policy of bed-avoidance in July. We wonder if Gus Hansen would agree – in one forty-eight hour session, he managed to turn around a two month, million dollar deficit.)

2. Is there something else you would rather be doing? If yes, don’t play.

(An interesting one this – it seems to imply poker should feel like your number one priority. We’re not sure GA would agree.)

3. Are you feeling physically well enough to sit through a movie? If no, don’t play. When you are tired or you’d be fidgety in a theatre, you probably won’t play your best poker.

(With the amount of people multi-tabling these days, we suspect a bit of adrenaline might be necessary to keep them going and look at Phil Hellmuth – a multi WSOP bracelet winner but hardly Mr Phlegmatic.)

4. Are you so mad at someone that it is interfering with your concentration? If yes, don’t play.

(No quibbles here. It is possibly the single most important thing. Read Zen and the Art of Archery for more insight.)

5. Are drugs, alcohol, or medication interfering with your logical thinking? If yes, don’t play.

(Look at how he qualifies the point with ‘logical thinking’. He seems to have foreseen the day when people would pop ‘n crunch Adderal.)

6. Are you emotionally upset? If yes, don’t play. Fights with your wife or girlfriend are not healthy to your money clip.

(Whilst true, this point manages to combine elements of number four and casual sexism.)

7. (He says this is the most important advice) Do you feel like you’re going to win? If no, don’t play. Give credibility to your hidden feelings. Your subconscious might be analysing things you are not aware of.

(It is hard to disagree. The wording might be a little off – how can you give credibility to your hidden feelings? – but he proves that he could also have been a champion of the positive thinking movement with the final gem of the Dolly’s checklist.

At the end of the article, he offers the following as a wave-off:

‘If it looks like a good game and you survive the checklist, then sit down and do some serious winning. Otherwise, save your energy for tomorrow.’

Blimey!

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Most players, even serious ones, suffer much greater poker losses than they should. One reason is that their losses are “reversed manufactured.” (Reverse manufactured just means that those losses are the necessary byproduct of trying to manufacture a winning streak).

Oh, fine, but what does “manufacture a winning streak” mean. How can you manufacture a win? It’s amazingly easy. All you have to do is refuse to settle for a loss and accept small wins whenever you need to. The only requirement is that you fight back when you’re behind, hoping to break into the plus column, then quit happy if you succeed, rejoicing in the notion that you overcame adversity, struggled to restack your chips, and are now going home to rest victorious. It will feel like a proud accomplishment to you, but it shouldn’t.

How you won

Let’s look at how it might have just happened. You’re a medium-limit player, not competing quite large enough to make a good living, but large enough to supplement your income or to barely get by without a job when required. In this way, you’re like the majority of winning poker players – somewhere between just eking out a profit and professional wage-earner status.

Anyway, today you sit down in a $10/$20 hold ’em game, supposedly hoping to make a profit by showing off your Sunday-best poker skills. Sad stuff happens right away, though. Down goes a king-high heart flush, which you flopped, when a player holding the ace of hearts and deuce of diamonds sees a fourth heart come on the river. Next you flop three jacks, but they finish third when two opponents hit straights. Then there’s that devastating hand where you got bluffed out of your birdcage by Bruno, who never, ever did that before. And it gets worse. The little medium hands that can go either North or South, all go South. Losses pile up. Misery surrounds you.

But somewhere deep, deep inside, you maintain your faith and conviction, and the spirit strikes you. You fight back. Hours pass. You grow weary. Hours pass. You fight to stay alert and wait for your luck to change. Hours pass.

It’s now 3:40 in the morning and you need to be up at 8:30. Suddenly several pots are pushed to you. Then a small setback. Then you win more pots. After a string of pots go your way, you win a really big one. Is your recovery complete? You don’t know, because you haven’t had time to count your chips.

“Deal me out one hand,” you tell the table. You need to stack these newly won chips, count them, find out where you stand. Down $135, put 10 of these $5 chips here, down $85 now, put these two $25 chips off to the side, down $35, oops, three more $5 chips under a $20 bill, exactly even, and that leaves these three $1 chips, change from the rake, so up $3! You did it! Your winning streak continues!

Time to go

“Deal me out!” you announce. “It’s getting later than I thought.”  “Don’t you wanna play till your blind?” someone asks. “You’ve got another hand coming.” You’re tempted, after all, you can just fold everything except aces – even aces if you really want to. But you just wave away the suggestion. “Nah, deal around me.” And within minutes you’re cashed out and on your way home. As you’re leaving, a friend asks you how you did tonight. Your chest puffs out proudly and you say, “I won a tiny bit. Nothing that matters, but that’s 19 winning days in a row.”

Signs of trouble, my friends. Bad signs of trouble. You’re manufacturing that win streak just so you can make yourself feel good about it. But you’re not manufacturing profit. Sure, you think you’re making profit, but really you’re putting your bankroll at risk. You have tallied a lot of wins – a couple when you got off to a fast start and kept on winning, a few short ones when you started fast, but faltered and quit before you found yourself in the negative column, some where you’d come from behind and quit when you got ahead. And, of course, tonight when you’d stuck it out and turned a major loss into a tiny win.

Speaking of tiny wins, that’s exactly the kind you’re likely to have when you strive to extend a winning streak. That’s simply because you’re willing to settle for them. You’ll quit with small wins when you’ve been winning more to keep from dropping below break even. And you’ll gladly cash out with a small win if you’ve been losing and get ahead. However, there is no such thing as a small loss. You won’t accept one. It’s either a win or a big loss. You need to keep that winning streak alive if you can, right?

The wrong time to play

But, all together, this strategy means you’re playing more hours than you should when you were losing, because you’re trying to catch up. And it means you’re playing fewer hours when you’re winning, because you’re eager to cash out and add to your win streak. By manufacturing a win streak, by forcing small wins, you’re also putting yourself in grave danger of manufacturing huge losses – you simply won’t experience them as long as your luck holds and your winning streak is extended.

You see, when you try hard as you can to dig yourself out, you risk digging yourself deeper. It’s like that popular advice, “When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.” I think those words were tailored for poker. Beware! On the few occasions that you won’t be able to experience the glory of cashing out with that $3 profit and puffing up proudly, you’re likely to suffer painful losses and depart pitifully from the poker table, all chance of recovery now hopeless. Maybe chance of recovery tomorrow will be hopeless, too. You will have lost way more than you should have. And I’m not talking about a magic stop-loss or predetermined limit on how much you should risk in a game.

Listen closely. I’m saying something different. I’m saying you lost much more than you should because you played poker in the worst of circumstances. When you’re winning, opponents are usually intimidated by you. They’re less likely to play their best games, less likely to make daring bets and raises with winning hands and extract every penny of profit from you. This means you can make value bets that can push your profits to the limit. Opponents who are intimidated usually keep calling in frustration, but seldom raise with anything but obviously strong hands. In doing so, they neglect to take advantage of all their edges, so you rule the table, and your profit soars.

Conversely, when you’re losing, opponents are inspired. They play better against you specifically. They think, “Hey, there’s someone I can beat. There’s someone who’s unluckier than I am.” And they single you out for money extraction.

So, I don’t like to hear about long manufactured winning streaks, because I know that those invite huge manufactured losses, too. And, in the long run, long winning streaks usually mean that you’ve played most of your time under bad circumstances and limited the time you’ve played under good circumstances. And that isn’t a smooth path to poker profit.

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Mike Caro’s nickname as ‘The Mad Genius of Poker’ is well chosen. Resembling a cross between Sigmund Freud and Dr Emmett Brown from the Back to the Future trilogy, if someone told you that he could travel back in time to find out why you grasp your earlobes in times of stress, you would nod your head.

Luckily for us mortals of the felt, Caro is now more famous as a leading poker ‘theorist’ and seems happier playing with statistical tables. To this end, he founded the ‘Mike Caro University of Poker, Gambling and Life Strategy’ and was one of a handful of individuals who believed online poker could be a money-spinner.

His theories, when extricated from some of the ‘Life Strategy’, are always worthy of consideration. In one of his lectures, he compares poker to the game Rock, Paper, Scissors.

For the rules of the latter game, there is no optimum strategy to win every time – rock beats scissors beats paper beats rock. If you are to have any edge over your opponent, you have to predict how he’ll play. Caro then expands the metaphor to poker and offers a practical example.

He puts three hands on the table, asks his opponent to pick one, and then he chooses the ideal one of the remaining two. (It is not a perfect comparison to Rock, Paper, Scissors as he knows his opponent’s choice before he acts.)

The hands are: 4c,4h  /  Jh,10h  /  Ac, Ks

It makes his point well – if his opponent picks the two fours, Caro opts for jack-ten and will win 53% of the time; likewise, if the sucker chooses AK, Mad Genius awards himself 44 and profits in 54% of the battles; and finally, if his hapless student fancies jack-ten, AK is snatched up and Caro takes 59%.

He then indulges his love of mumbo-jumbo and goes a bit Lion-King by suggesting that the above is an example of the ‘circle of strength’. He calls this, with a nod again to both mysticism and ego, ‘Caro’s Conception’

It states: ‘ In life, strength is sometimes circular. Therefore, the conqueror can be an underdog to an entity too weak even to defeat what has already been conquered.’

In lay-men’s terms, this means that it can be a mistake to believe there is ‘a best hand’ and the key to survival is adaptability. Therefore, and back to a Friday night’s online session, when you are staring at leagues of multi-tabling rocks, you have to work out how to become paper. It is here that some of Caro’s points stumble. He argues that rocks lose out because they are unobservant and fail to steal pots – which is true, but only to a point.

In a tournament, with increasing blinds they lose out – but in online cash games, spread across twelve tables, they have the time to wait and there are usually plenty of fish to pay them off. Their hourly rate may suffer but they rarely lose money as they are only investing in premium hands.

It is possible to beat rocks but it is a task about as pleasurable and time-consuming as papering the Grand Canyon. It is better, when possible, to leave the quarry and look elsewhere. If that is not possible, steal blinds, don’t ever call their all-in bets unless you have the nuts, stay patient and make more from the looser players.

Good luck.

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In poker, two decision making concepts come into play:
1. You should usually make the decision that has the best chance of success, even if in retrospect other decisions might have been better
2. When you hold a superior hand, you want your opponents to bond to the pot

Here’s an example of common bad decision making that violates these precepts:

You’re playing Hold’em. The game is nine-handed and you’re two seats to the right of the button before the flop. Everyone else has folded. You peek at your cards and, OMG, you have A-A! In an instant flash of brilliance you decide, cleverly, just to call. You reason that this will invite opponents into the pot and set a trap.

And that might work perfectly. On rare occasions I will choose this tactic, just to confuse astute opponents and set the stage for making more money on future hands when I’ll be able to play lesser cards more safely because others will remember that I could hold a monster. But that tactic isn’t the most profitable way to play this specific hand right now.

If you have Aces in early position, you might just call, hoping others will raise and you’ll build a bigger pot with a significant advantage. But here, in your fairly late position, analysis shows that you’ll make more profit on your Aces by raising. I suggest a minimum raise or a little more. If the big blind is $100, try wagering $200 to $250. As a standard tactic, just calling is poor, because many opponents become suspicious of a big hand. They’ve been there and done that themselves. They might surmise that your call means you have either a fairly weak hand or a speculative one, such as 8c-7c. But they’ll also be alert to the possibility that you’re trapping. If you raise though, that act seems natural to your opponents who expect you to leverage your late position. Oddly the possibility that you hold a big pair will often seem less likely to them than if you just call. And you’ll be able to bet after seeing the flop with much more likelihood of being called – especially if non-threatening cards flop.

In their Heads

Opponents put you on hands. If you raise on your first two cards, they’re thinking you’re trying to buy the pot on the flop and they’re likely to call if they connect in any manner whatsoever, including just holding high overcards. But there’s an even bigger reason why making a small raise is the best tactic. You’re getting players to bond. They now feel that they have an “investment” in the pot. That’s bonding.

So, clearly in common poker situations, almost any decision might turn out to be ideal. And you should sometimes choose an unusual tactic to keep sophisticated foes off guard. But the choices that have the best chance of winning the most money most of the time are the ones you should routinely choose. Also, when you have a quality hand, you should try to bond opponents to the pot, which you crave.

In poker and in life, always consider whether making someone else bond will benefit you. Then make the decision that has the biggest shot at long-range profit, keeping in mind that it might not work as well right now as a seemingly inferior choice might. In poker and beyond, the trick is to steadfastly do what’s most likely to succeed.

Mike Caro
There’s lots of choice when it comes to poker networks including the iPoker Network, Microgaming Poker, Chico Poker and WPN Poker Networks. Check out the latest poker room reviews before you decide where to play your next hand of poker.

In Mike Caro’s previous blog posting he shared a list of truths about poker. This blog covers some poker fiction (ie false statements).  It’s not a quiz, because you don’t get to answer the questions. He does.

THE FALSE GROUP. Everything on this list is false.

After about 1,000 hours of play, everyone’s luck at poker is about equal, and skill alone determines who does better. (Don’t expect your luck to even out in 1,000 hours. It may not even out for your lifetime. Even if you did get precisely your fair share of flushes and full houses, you might not win your fair share of them. Additionally, there are all sorts of luck factors that influence your success, not the least of which is whether you happen to be available to play when that out-of-towner decides to unload $1 million. Your job is to do the best you can with the cards you’re dealt. A break-even player with $50,000 worth of overall bad luck for the year will lose $50,000. But if you learn skills that make you $120,000 better than break-even and you suffer $50,000 worth of misfortune, you’ll still win $70,000. That’s the secret. Your job isn’t making sure the cards are distributed fairly. Somebody else already has that job. Your job is to look at the cards you’re dealt and to make the most profitable decisions about them.)

On average, the top female poker players earn more money than the top male poker players. (Why is that false? What about question #1 in the True Group? Not a conflict. It’s the difference between what most intelligent women are capable of winning and what they actually are winning right now.)

There is more skill involved in limit hold ’em than in no-limit hold ’em. (You’re right, how could that possibly be true, although we hear the claim made quite often. In no limit, you need to make the same decisions about whether to bet or raise, but you also have to make decisions about how much to bet or raise. The only strong argument to the contrary is that in no-limit games, the all-in factor comes into play often. After someone is all-in, there are no subsequent decisions and the cards are simply dealt out with no further skill involved. This argument isn’t strong enough, however.)

On average, top professional blackjack players earn more than top professional poker players. (Not even close. Top poker pros earn a lot more.)

You can win a lot of extra profit by aggravating opponents and putting them emotionally on tilt. (Opponents may get aggravated, but they’ll usually decide that you’re just no fun to lose to. And when they decide that, they play better against you.)

Mike Caro is the greatest poker player alive, but nobody knows it. (Somebody knows it. See, it was a trick question. Speaking as a friend of Mike’s, I know he gets tired of hearing, “Those who can, do; those who can’t teach.” Whenever he hears people say that, he wants to slap their clubby little faces, because he personally was doing long before he was teaching. And he’s still doing; and if they don’t shut up, and if they have any money, he might have to do it to them, too. Got it?)

Any world-class player has an advantage against a well-programmed computer poker opponent, because the computer cannot use psychology. (Maybe the computer can’t use psychology or maybe it can. But in any case, the human can’t use psychology, so – at worst – this is a push from the computer’s point of view. If both opponents are forced to ignore psychology, the battle will be resolved on a purely computational basis. If the computer is properly programmed, it won’t lose, no matter how much psychology its opponent understands.)

A predetermined stop-loss specifying the maximum amount you should lose in a game will save you money. (This is not true in any honest game where you are not incapacitated, you feel like playing, and the opponents are beatable. The more hours you play under favorable conditions, the more you’ll win. You earn an average amount per hour. Consider that your wage. More hours, more money – just like most other jobs).

There’s lots of choice when it comes to poker networks including the iPoker Network, Microgaming Poker, Chico Poker and WPN Poker Networks. Check out the latest poker room reviews before you decide where to play your next hand of poker.