Sometimes you need to mix it up, particularly when you are battling someone who you have played with for quite awhile. You should be able to pick apart many players’ game once you have played a few hundred hands with them, if not you should be paying more attention to what is going on.
Fold equity is a concept that poker players tend to overlook, but it is extremely important. Fold equity, in a nutshell, is what is going to be derived from the times where you make a play and are happy with forcing a fold. These situations will often be spots where you will be happy with a fold, but aren’t going to be upset if the player makes a call. Different draws are great hands to have when trying to maximize your fold equity, but there are many other situations where your raise is going to compensate for those times where you get called and are behind.
Why You Need to Maximize Fold Equity
If you don’t maximize your fold equity there is a good chance that you are missing out on all kinds of value. This can either mean that you are folding hands too easily or that you are simply not playing them optimally. You can’t pass up on a hand simply because you are scared, the reality of poker is that you will be involved in many pots where your edge is razor thing. These situations are unavoidable and you can’t try to weasel your way out of them.
2-7 Triple Draw is a form of poker that many people are unfamiliar with, but PokerStars has made it available for its players to check out. Other popular sites such as Full Tilt Poker and Cake Poker, however, do not feature the game in their current repertoire. 2-7 Triple Draw is an interesting variation of poker in which players aim to complete the worst hand possible.
Think about what a good hand would be in Omaha or Texas Hold’em, this would be an example of a terrible hand in 2-7 Triple Draw. Your goal in 2-7 Triple Draw is to compile a hand with the lowest value cards that do not form any type of pair, two pair, straight, flush, or full house combination. The final hand that you have will be comprised of 5 total cards with the absolute nuts being 7, 5, 4, 3, 2. If you think you have bad luck in Texas Hold’em you might be pleasantly surprised that your awful hands will now be a goldmine.
Playing 2-7 Triple Draw Poker
2-7 Triple Draw poker is of course a draw game, meaning that you will multiple opportunities to discard cards from your hand at different times in the action. This is where the skill element comes into play. You will have to be able to judge what types of starting hands are worth continuing with, what types of cards you should throw away, and how to judge your hand’s relative strength. If you continually play poor starting hands you will eventually find that you are not making many good hands because you don’t give yourself a fighting chance. Hand selection is important in 2-7 Triple Draw just as it is in the more popular variations of poker.
3-Betting is a valuable weapon when you are holding a strong starting hand, but it can also be incredibly strong when you are holding suited connectors. There is a common misconception that some poker players have that you should only be re raising pre flop with strong hands. This notion is an old school approach to the game, but some players still believe it is true.
Think about what would happen if you had a strong hand each and every time that you 3-Bet pre flop. If you ever played with someone on multiple occasions it would be easy for them to realize that you have a solid hand the second that you 3-Bet. The players who pick up on this tendency would have a very easy time making a fold whenever you 3-Bet them. You shouldn’t want everyone to fold whenever you re raise with a strong hand, instead you should want them to get involved in the pot. When you start to 3-Bet your opponents you will be balancing your range.
Balancing Your Range
In online poker you are balancing your range when you begin to make the same move (be it folding, calling, or raising) when you are holding different types of hands. If you make an occasional 3-Bet with a suited connector type hand you will be offsetting the times where you 3-Bet with a big hand like pocket queens or pocket kings.
AK is a tricky hand to play. AK is an incredibly strong hand, there is no debating that, but at the same time it is not a made hand. Any pocket pair has an edge over AK. Part of the reason why AK is so valuable stems from the times where it is able to take down a pot before you even get to the flop.
Poker players have a tendency to think that AK is only going to turn them a profit if they are “lucky” enough to connect with the board. This is completely incorrect. Think about how many hands have AK crushed, there are only two, AA and KK. Even when you do face KK you will have a shot at pairing your ace. You are definitely at a big disadvantage when you get AK all in vs. AA, but even then you still have a chance to take down the pot. You will only see a lot of value from AK once you learn to play it correctly.
Your standard poker player will correlate bet sizes with a player’s relative hand strength. In some games and at certain limits this will be acceptable, but there are many situations where a small bet could be the biggest indicator of strength. The term value bet was derived from a bet that was only made to cater to the opposition. What is the use in betting $72 if your opponent is only going to call off $60?
Value bets work both ways, however, and you need to make sure that you aren’t the victim. When you have a strong hand you will want to extract each and every penny possible from the other players, but you want to lose the least whenever you might be beat. It is much harder to determine when someone else is value betting than it is to make a solid value bet of your own. You will have all areas of the value bet covered once you are able to not only identify spots where you should be value betting, but also the times where you are being value bet. A penny saved is a penny earned, and this is never truer than when dumping a hand when you are being value bet.
Prior Bets
The easiest way to analyze someone’s strength is to consider how they had been acting in the hand up until the spot you are currently in. Think about not only what the board is, but how they have been reacting as circumstances continued to change. Poker is a game that runs amuck with adjustments, and it is of the utmost importance that you change as the hand does.
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