How to Play the Turn

We’ve all heard someone say how their fate changed on the turn of a card.  One card here, one card there, a card away from a championship….in poker, sometimes the fate of your hand often changes with the turn card. 

The key to playing the turn is to understand when you want to shut down any further betting and knowing when to leave the betting open.  Closing the action simply means that your opponent can’t bet again on that round.  For example, if your opponent checks to you and you check behind him, then you’ve closed the action and you will both see the River card.  On the other hand, if your opponent checks to you and you bet out, the action is still open and you are giving your opponent a chance to call or raise you. Likewise if your opponent bets the turn and you call, you are closing the action, but if your opponent bets and you raise, you are leaving the action open, giving your opponent the opportunity to three-bet against you or maybe move all-in. 

The reason this is important is because many times you may be holding the best hand on the turn, but it’s not strong enough to withstand a raise or a re-raise from your opponent. This is often true if you’re holding something like top pair, which can be especially vulnerable.  If you only have one pair on the turn then opening up the action to your opponent is dangerous because if you get check-raised, you are most likely going to have to fold AND you may well be folding the best hand.

Here’s an example.  Let’s say you have KC and JH and the board is KS, 9D, 4C and the turn is 7H.  If your opponent checks to you, checking back isn’t bad because the board isn’t dangerous and giving your opponent a free card isn’t likely to hurt your hand.  In other words, it’s unlikely your opponent has a straight draw and the board isn’t textured to show a flush draw. However, betting here may cause you trouble if you already have your opponent beat. They are probably intending to do one of two things after you bet, fold or check/raise.  If your opponent folds, then your bet will earn you nothing, of course you do win the pot, but you don’t make any more money from the hand.  If your opponent decides to check/raise you, your original bet will have made you loose the entire pot, because you would probably fold KJ, which is even a worse outcome.

If you are up against a better hand than yours, then betting isn’t good either.  If you check,  then you lose absolutely no money on the turn, but if you bet, you lose the amount of money that you bet in addition to whatever money was already in the pot. Betting marginal hands can be costly on the turn and raising them can be profitable, because when you raise on the turn you are putting the pressure on your opponent. For example, you may raise with a 9-10 on a K-9-4-7 board and by raising you could potentially force your opponent to fold the K-J hand.  You can raise by either check/raising out of position or by just raising when you are in position.  Either way it is a very strong play because it makes it very hard for your opponent to call, even if they are holding a hand like KQ. 

So remember, raising on the Flop can often signal weakness, raising on the Turn will usually signal strength, which is why it is a more effective play. In short, closing the action on the turn with a marginal hand is generally a smart move.

Who is Updating the Money Lists?!

Recently Erik Seidel moved up to 3^rd from 11^th on the Poker All-Time Money List after taking down the $250,000 buy-in Super High Roller’s Event at Aussie Millions.  After that happened, a debate erupted in regards to the validity of today’s current list.  The #1 source for tracking the all-time  money winners is Hendon Mob’s website and they’ve recently added three new lists to help better determine who really is on top.

The three new lists essentially filter out particular results based on certain criteria.  One list counts only the open events, regardless of the buy-in amount.  Another list excludes the events that are greater than $50,000, but counts non-open events.  The third new list excludes both non-open events and any event over $50K.  An open event is defined as an event that has no restrictions on entry.  Events such as Poker After Dark, Women’s Events and made for TV events will fall under this category.

As most of you may know, Daniel Negreanu is in the top spot for the original All-Time Money list.  On the new lists however, Negreanu tops the list that includes all events under $50,000 and the list for all open events under $50,000.  On the all-time list that includes all open events regardless of buy-in, Erik Seidel has taken over the top spot with $13.53 million where Negreanu trails with a meager $13.34 million.

We understand that these lists only track the gross proceeds from tournaments and do not factor in buy-ins, bust-outs, etc.  Some people feel that in order to really see who is making the most money in tournament poker, all of these particulars should be tracked.  In an effort to keep attracting new players with the promise of huge payouts in tournaments, the likelihood of that happening is pretty slim.  For instance, poker tournament officials probably do not want people to realize facts such as Bill Edler winning $2.7 million in 2007, a big fat zero for 2008 and has won only $42K since.

But the lists just keep on coming and we keep on reading them.

Playing Poker Professionally

I’ve been reading so much about poker lately and finally had to ask myself, “Why would anyone want to become a professional poker player?  I know so many people that envy the life of the professional poker player, and why not?  Who wouldn’t want to set their own hours, play a game they love for a living, and if they want, travel around the world playing in high-stakes tournaments?

There is no Poker Pro College that poker players graduate from and even players who lose money playing poker will tell you that they have turned professional for one of two reasons:  they can make more money playing poker that they could at any other job, or they simply enjoy the poker lifestyle so much that they will take losing over winning just to be a part of it.  Only a small percentage of players will view poker-playing as a career for life.  I suppose you could get lucky and win enough at a tournament, something like the main event at the WSOP, but consider your odds and then consider buying a lottery ticket.  I’m talking about becoming the type of player that you can actually make a solid living at it and that is not so easy to do.

Generally speaking a player would have to log in over 500 hours of poker to come up with some type of measure to consider their hourly rate.  There are plenty of websites out there with tools that will help you figure out what you are actually making when you are playing.  A solid poker professional will be able to figure out how to use poker to maximize their income, and poker pros understand and accept that their bread and butter is based on skill, the size of their bankroll, guts and luck.

It’s not always fun and games though. If you are playing online at home, there is no human interaction and poker can become very monotonous very quickly.  Since a poker professional is primarily interested in making money, he will probably concentrate on the one game that provides his highest hourly rate.  This can become very boring, very fast.  Also, and this is probably the most important thing to consider, poker can have a highly variable income.  Based on my own data, my standard deviation per hour is 6 times my hourly rate.  What this basically means is that if I made a $100 an hour, there is about a 68% chance that in any one hour I’d make between $500 and $700.  And if the odds change and the luck drifts out the window, I could make much less than that, but I have to be able to cover myself.
What a true professional worries about is not the luck of the cards but the changes in the poker market. Professionals need to play against poor players, the fishes. If a pro is playing against a bunch of pros, then very little money might be made.  But luckily, (no pun intended) there are more online sites offering brilliant bonuses and the virtual casino is so lifelike, that you really feel as if you are in a real brick and mortar casino.

It is probably a good thing for poker professionals that being a full-time poker player is not too appealing of a job. If many people became pros, then the competition would be too tough to make much money at poker!

Play the Player!

There are professional poker players that have claimed that you do not need to be a math magician to be extremely good at poker. Sure, playing the percentages certainly works to your advantage, but what good is that if there is always another player trying to knock you off your hand when you actually have the better percentages; you just do not know it. That’s when being able to read your opponents and not the cards come into play.

Being great at poker means being more than just the type of player who only plays the best of cards.  The crushers are great, but they usually don’t come as often as we’d like.  The best of players know how to play with terrible cards.  You have to learn to prey on the weak and take advantage of the strong.  You have to learn how to bluff someone off a decent hand and hone your skills at tricking your opponents into thinking that you have the worse hand.  Playing your opponent is just as important, if not more than learning the math.

Not only do you have to think about the strength of your hand and your table position, but you have to realize that any poker player with experience is probably thinking the same way you are. Whittle your way down to the facts you do know about your opponent since you can’t see their hand.

What is their table position?  Did they call, bet or raise pre-flop?  Are they confident when they bet or are they making a show of it?  How did they react when they looked at their cards?  How big is their stack or bankroll?  Learn to notice when a player is on tilt and cannot control their emotions.  Keeping alert, focusing and remembering things that go on around you on the felt and even online, will help you to learn more about the player you are facing off with.

Bluffing is very hard to master and if you are not confident you are better off trying to spot signs of weakness from your opponents.  If you’re playing online poker, being able to spot calling stations is an important trait to have.  It’s sometimes easier to bluff a good player than a bad one because a good one will fold two pair when a bad one will call you down with a pair of Queens with a five kicker.

There is really no point in bluffing a terrible poker player who is a calling station because he is going to call you down all the way to the river.  In a lot of cases you need to have the ability to categorize the type of players your opponents are very quickly, then use their strengths and their weaknesses against them