In this the first of a two-part post we have found you some of the best tips for being a winning ZOOM poker player as we move into 2020. We have picked up some of the best lines from some of the best mentors out there to work into our game and now we are sharing these with you…
Finding Flop Check-Backs
We don’t want to bet all of our top pairs all of the time if we do we are firstly playing too straight forward and can never have any good hands the times we check-back, but secondly, we will just be betting too many hands and will be building pots when we are behind some of the time.
Another good reason to check-back flops where we hit top pair like this one is that we can pick up bets from worse hands on the turn that may fold to action on this flop, but hands like second pair might pick up the lead in the pot on the Turn for example as they will think they are good.
Make the Pot Big with Big Hands
Now, this sounds pretty simple right, we want to have our biggest pots made up of our strongest holdings.
You’d be surprised how many players mess this easy strategy up by doing weird things like “trapping” opponents with limps or slow plays. Don’t do this, just play super straight forward and put more money in the pot with good hands than you would with a weak hand and you can’t really go wrong.
In this pot, for example, we opened to 3.5x on the button instead of some small 2.2x raise, we then follow up this action with a big raise of a full pot lead from our opponent.
Our reasoning is simple in this pot, our opponent is repping strength, well let’s accommodate them by making the pot big before any scare cards come up. If they have holdings like A9, Q9, TT, JJ, QQ then they aren’t going to be able to fold on this board to a single raise anyway.
We want to mainly be raising when entering the pot
With a few exceptions, suited connectors that play well in multiway pots and even better in position will make fine smooth calls.
We can make good hands even in multiway single raised pots and we don’t really want to turn our hand into a bluff in a 3-Bet pot because then even the prospect of making top pair could end up costing us money if our opponent is calling with hands that dominate ours.
Play Tight Ranges in Blinds
Following on from our last tip is that we want to be playing a pretty tight aggressive strategy where we don’t want to be doing too much calling and when we are calling, we want to at least be in position.
So with regards to play from the Blinds we will want to strip out a tonne of hands and just throw them in the bin, this isn’t tournament poker, this is a cash game without antes where players are folding quickly to play their best hands, so our ranges, especially from the blinds, need to be airtight.
Hands like offsuit Ace’s even as good as hands like ATo are going to play terribly out of position, it’s just too hard to realise equity with them, let’s say we hit our Ace on the flop, OK great, so now do we just check-call 3 bets and hope our opponent doesn’t have a set or better Ace than us?
Or… We just make an easy fold pre-flop and move on to a more lucrative opportunity.
Squeeze Raising with Proper Sizings
Too many times I’ve seen players make tiny 3-Bets when we pick up hands that we are going to make 3-Bets with we want to accomplish a few things.
- Reduce the number of players in the pot
- Define our opponents’ range better
- Build a big pot for value
This sizing with our pocket Jacks is a good one, because if we make it something like €1 we are giving too many hands a good price to continue and we don’t want to play a three-way pot with pocket Jacks, ideally we want to knock out the initial raiser and play the rest of the hand in position against the player in the Small Blind with our range advantage.
Another good point to making these 3-Bets is that pocket Jacks is not going to play well in a 4-Bet pot, so in cases where the Hi-Jack raiser follows up with a 4-Bet to say €2.75 or so here, we can pretty easily just get away from the hand as the best shape we can ever be in against that kind of action is a flip against a 4-Bet bluff with AQo for example.
We will continue these tips in part two of this post… so keep your eyes peeled for that.
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