In this post we have assembled some really big leaks that we find come up in losing players Poker games, we are going to run through a bunch of hands and try and honestly think what you would do, let’s get into it!
Leak 1
We are playing early stages of a Tournament and we start with 10,000 chips, Blinds are 50/100
Hero is in the Big Blind(BB) with 9♣ 6♣
UTG: Raises to 450
Hi-Jack: Calls 450
Button: Calls 450
Hero:?
This is a spot where I feel that nearly everyone who plays Poker just calls right?
But this is actually a terrible spot for us where we are going to lose a tonne of bets most of the time, we are up against an UTG raise of 4.5x which typically means a very strong hand and most of the time is a large pair that will have us in bad shape with regards to equity.
We are also up against 2 other players who all have position on us post-flop and likely have good starting hands to be able to call such a strong raise.
We don’t have a good hand to 3-Bet with, because we don’t block any value hands, better blocker hands would include broadways or suited Ace highs that have decent playability post-flop and block super strong hands like AA, KK, & AK.
So yes, we could just flick this in, but what are we hoping for other than flopping absolutely huge here… often times we are just burning up our money and some of the time we will get flush over flushed against one of our opponents that has a higher combination of clubs than us.
There is an old saying that goes tight is right and this is the perfect time for it, make the fold.
Leak 2
So in this pot we are playing the same tournament where starting stacks are 10,000, but the blinds are now 200/400 with a 400 ante and we have around 20,000 chips in our stack.
UTG: Hero: A♣ J♠ Raise to 1,000
Hi-Jack: Raises to 4,000
Hero: ?
I used to always call in this spot and think well I could have two overcards and my Ace could be could if they do have a big hand like JJ-KK
However that is basically the best-case scenario, here is what is really going to happen… we will have to play the entire rest of the hand out of position against someone who has already announced they have a big hand so it’s going to be super hard for us to win this pot.
Even if we hit our Ace here, it could be the worst card for us if they have a hand like AK or AQs which is a big part of there range here.
We could use this hand as a 4-Bet bluff sometimes against aggressive opponents that could have some 3-Bet bluffs in their range, that is a decent way to continue the hand, either folding to a 5-Bet, winning pre-flop with our 4-Bet or continuing in the hand with the betting lead at least.
However in general in this spot, we are just going to be way behind, try and think in terms of ranges, this is pretty much the bottom of our range for opening the pot from UTG, maybe we can open some AT0 sometimes too, but that’s pretty much the same hand, so against a large 3-Bet we have a pretty easy fold.
My thinking here is we are going to need to fold some opens against 3-Bets so we need to choose the bottom of our range to pick these hands from, now for the times we have TT+ AQs+ we won’t be throwing those hands in the muck, but this is just not one of those times.
So the answer to this one is mainly folding and at a low percentage using this hand as a bluff 4-Bet against aggressive opponents that have 3-Bet bluffs in their arsenal.
Leak 3
We are in the same tournament and moving towards late game, blinds are 1000/2000 and we have a below-average stack with around 40,000 chips.
We look down at 4♦ 4♥ from UTG+1
How should we play this with our 20BBs?
We are going to want to throw this hand in the muck.
We are not deep enough to attempt to open raise with this hand any more, we would want at least 30BBs+ for that move and as we are moving towards the money bubble we will want to tighten up our ranges a little and just play our stack as a re-shoving stack to move over the top of wide opens and steal pots pre-flop with no risk.
If we open raise here, we could get 3-Bet and even if we don’t we aren’t going to flop a set often enough to make this profitable.
We can still open hands like suited broadways and hands that flop good equity and that have good removal against our opponents but small pocket pairs just don’t play well enough from early position with these stacks.
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