Exploiting weakness in your opponents will pay dividends in your tournament play. Stuart Rutter explains.
Good poker players play their cards well; they employ enough patience and judgement so that they often end up holding the best hand in the big pots.
The best players, however, go one step further than this. They carve success based on not only the strength of their own cards, but on the weakness of their opponents’ cards. If you watch these top players, you will so often see them making their big moves at exactly the right times. This kind of bullying needs a lot of courage, but it is far from simple recklessness. To evade danger so successfully relies on an incredibly shrewd sense of timing.
They might not realise it, but merely decent poker players time their big moves simply according to when they want to make a big move. They convince themselves that their decisions are made logically, but really the rational mind is just finding the reasons that fit with what their emotions want to decide.
Let’s have a look at some of the moves that can help you win pots you are not entitled to, and the kind of conditions that you are looking for.
THE SQUEEZE PLAY
One of the best ways to frustrate your opponents as an aggressive player is to pull the squeeze. The very best conditions arise when a very aggressive player makes a raise in late position, and is called by one or more players who have been seen to call with too many hands.
Now you can make a re-raise to something like three times the original bet, and hope to take the pot down. The play relies on the likelyhood of your opponents’ hands not being strong enough to contest, but further, the squeeze that troubles the first opponent. He will be less able to continue with a reasonable hand, as there is the possible threat of the other players to act behind him.
Within a few hours of tournament poker, you may sense several opportunities to pull the squeeze. It is worth being very careful about choosing only the one or two best scenarios that you will have to make the play. Note that, although you need your raiser to be aggressive and your other opponents to play too many hands, none of these players must be too loose. After all, the effect of a squeeze play will completely disappear if the second opponent is a calling station who is not able to pass a marginal hand.
CHECK-RAISING THE FLOP
The squeeze is often assumed as describing a pre-flop situation, but it can be just as effective on a later street. Let’s say you call from the big blind, and have no interest in a flop that comes 8h-8s-5c. The pre-flop raiser continues the betting, and is called by a suspicious player on the button. A re-raise can now represent a lot of strength, and poses a real problem to the continuation bettor. He now has to worry about two potentially strong actions (your re-raise and the other player’s flat call), and he will find it tough to continue with any hand that cannot beat three eights.
The move would become perfect if you have seen that the button player has the ability to float. A float is a flat-call on one street that is used to reinforce a bet on the next street, and can be made with a marginal hand or even no hand at all. It can be a cunning ploy and is tough for the other opponent to combat. However, it can inadvertently present the third player, which here is you, with the perfect opportunity to pick up the pot with a re-raise.
TAKING ADVANTAGE OF WEAKNESS
What do you think the best street is to try to pounce on weakness from your opponent and steal the pot?
I would argue the turn is the street that presents an aggressive player with the most scary opportunities. If you can find a way of representing that the turn has helped you, your opponent will not have the hope that remains on the flop, as there is only one more card to come. The comfort of the river is that you only have to call one more bet, but the turn brings the knowledge that calling will likely lead to an even bigger decision on the river. It is this implied threat that can make a turn bluff so successful.
Any good bluff also often relies on the other strong advantage of poker, and that is position. Position allows extra information each time you act, and if you sense a good chance that your opponent did not like the turn card, now is the time to pounce.
We will look at a scenario that can present a great opportunity, and that is when the turn brings an over-card to the board:
Example #1
You call a raise on the button with 10s-9s, and call another bet with your straight draw on a J-8-2 flop. The turn brings a king. If you sense any uncertainty in your opponent’s bet size and the stacks are deep enough, test him with a raise.
Have a think about how many hands can feel comfortable about your re-raise, and there are very few. Even a player holding aces will have reason to worry that one pair is not winning, as you have the perfect representation here for a very strong hand. Calling the flop and then raising the turn is a very strong move, not least because it is the exact line a lot of players take when they flop a really strong hand. (Have a think about what you would expect most players to do if they flop a set of eights here, and it is probably the same).
The success of this type of daring bluff depends a lot upon the type of opponent we are against, and that brings us to the last key lesson:
Key Lesson #3 – THE BIGGEST BLUFF
Raising on the turn in a pot where your opponent has already put in three bets will divide your opponents into two distinct types. A disciplined player will realise the strength that this action represents, and will be fearful about facing another bet on the river. They are the best players to make this move against, but the opposite type brings danger. An emotional player becomes more and more attached to a pot as he puts more money into it. Uncertainty about what to do on the turn will lead him to call, and your chance of making him pass diminishes even more as the pot grows on the river.
Key lesson #1 - EMOTIONS
There is no rule in poker more important than this one: You must try to eliminate emotion as much as you possibly can, and use a clear logic to make an honest decision to how good the conditions really are for your move.
Key Lesson #2 – SQUEEZE IT
When you are making a squeeze play against two players, the real victim of your squeeze is the first of the two players. For this reason, you should always be looking for a situation where it is this player that has the stronger of the two hands. |
