We are going to look at some great tips for increasing your win rates in cash game poker and Zoom Poker specifically.

Pokerstars has made various changes to its software recently, where sadly we now can’t even see things like how many tables a player is playing or even their nationality, so we need to combat this with looking to gain any tells we can.

Playing Against Leads

Certain players are going to have some strange plays in their game, for instance, one thing I see a lot is the donk lead.

We can almost guarantee that this is going to be from a weak player, that will be unbalanced and have weak checks typically, however some players will do this with complete airball bluffs too.

Recently I have seen this with hands like top pair plus or close to zero equity with hands like 8 high on high-card boards. Look to learn what your opponent had when they lead out and then combat this in future spots against them.

It’s also possible to combat leads by floating and waiting for our opponent to get scared by a changing board texture and then turn our hands into bluffs to take advantage of our positional advantage as well as our possible ranges that can include stronger hands than our opponent.

The Open Jam

Some players will just open jam certain hand strengths, I have seen this done with hands like JJ+ but I’ve also seen the occasional player Turn up with hands as weak as 77 and 88 in these spots too.

Look to gamble it up in these spots with JJ+ AKo+ or a little lighter if our opponent is shorter stacked because that will widen their range.

Play only strong hands from the Small Blind

This is one of the hardest positions to play from on the table, we will be out of position for the rest of the hand and it gets really tough to realise our equity in these spots, even with strong hands.

Play tight ranges and look to either limp and combat raises with 3-Bets or open raise to at least 4x, this will narrow our opponents’ ranges and make playing out flops, turns and rivers with a better idea of what our opponents’ holdings could be.

Float from the Big Blind when against Small Blind

Much in the same way we just talked about how hard it is to play from the Small Blind when the action is folded to the Small Blind, we will want to play a pretty wide range of hands in this spot.

Look to 3-Bet a fairly wide range including suited Aces, pairs like 77+ and pretty much any broadway hands is a decent starting strategy, but you can look to sometimes trap with these hands to keep worse hands in the pot and look to win a really big pot when we dominate ranges that might fold to a 3-Bet pre-flop.

Don’t just fold to one bet, too many players are going to stab once from the Small Blind and then give up after this little bluff, so we can look to take many pots away on the Turn from weaker players.

Watch How the Best Do it

Top players like BenCB and Steffen Sontheimer who play for some of the highest stakes on the internet have streamed sessions of Zoom games at low stakes, watching these can really help your mindset for the game.

Take a look at their lines in pots, make a mental note of their 3-Bet hands, opening ranges and you can’t really go too wrong.

Over-Fold Rivers

We are living in the times when many players just don’t have what it takes to bluff rivers too often. So if you get to a River even with a pretty strong hand, but your gut is telling you that your opponent has you beat, then just make the fold. This will help you win loads more, if you can switch your mindset into one where you think rationally, would they do this as a bluff, what bluffs are there if any? Quite often you will land on the answer of folding and you will be right a lot of the time.

That’s not to say that if your opponents’ story doesn’t make sense you shouldn’t call, but in spots where our opponent is fearlessly jamming money into the pot, this 95% of the time will mean we are beaten.

Another top tip to recognise strength in zoom games is instant bets, many players will only do this with very strong hands, because there is nothing left to think about, so, be wary of that too!