I call some raises with hands like 8-7 suited etc because I can bust premium hands with them DEPENDING ON THE SIZE OF MY OPPONENTS STACK OF COURSE. Well I feel that there is something very important about making plays like this. Many professional poker players use what is called the 5-10 rule.
This is that if someone raises and it is 5% or less of their stack to call then they will do so. If it is between 5%-10% then this is a bit trickier and judgement needs to be exercised. More than 10% and they will fold speculative hands to a raise as the chances of them flopping something are not strong enough to call with such a high percentage of their stack.
Another rule of thumb that many professional poker players use is the 20-1 rule. This rule is once again based around calling raises with speculative hands. If you can stand to win at LEAST 20 times the amount that you are calling then a call is viable. If a poker player raises to $200 in a 25-50 NL Texas Hold’em game and only has $800 on the table then you cannot consider calling with a hand like 7-6 suited for instance.
The payoff is just not going to be enough and you only stand to get 4-1 on you money. Whereas if that same player had $5000 on the table then your $200 stands to win $5000 which is 25-1 on your money.
So learn and remember these two very important rules of thumb and remember them well.
Being the best……and still getting killed!
There are many bad things that will happen to you in poker and this reflects gambling in general. You will work on your game like never before, read countless books and even pay for tuition like you are doing and still get killed when you play. You WILL have times when you think that life is unfair and you do not deserve what is happening to you.
Well, DESERVE has nothing to do with it. There is at least one session a week where everything seems to go horribly wrong for me. My bluff raises are getting called, people winning pots with silly hands and getting killed with someone flopping a higher set than me. It is all part of poker and if you were to experience these things early on in your poker career then you would be forgiven for thinking that you were useless.
Turning to Limit poker for a moment, a top player will earn in the region of 2-3% of their total turnover and this is still substantially more than the traditional 1% that a blackjack card counter can obtain. These statistics should just underline that the difference between skilled and unskilled players is a lot more marginal than what many people think. A novice can and will beat any top player in the world on any given day.
Only the other day I was watching one of my recorded DVD’s of the 2005 British Poker Open because I was doing some research and there were three of the best players in the world on that six man table. There was the 2000 World Champion Chris Ferguson along with Top Pro Andy Bloch and poker legend Howard Lederer.
The other three players were unknown Internet qualifiers. You would have thought that it was a certainty that one of the top pro’s would win but not so and this happens countless times. So it does not take very much imagination to realise that if a top pro’s edge over a lesser player on any given day is very marginal then what price a wannabee who is nowhere near as good as what they think they are.
Carl “The Dean” Sampson
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