Tuesday, April 28, 2009

A Simple Exercise to Improve Your Tournament Poker Game

The countdown continues...

Here is a simple exercise to improve your game playing online poker.

Raise or Fold

Enter a MTT event online. You are going to do the following:

1. The first two rounds play tight
2. After the first two rounds, you will have the following decision pre-flop; You will raise, re-raise or fold. The only exception will be in the big blind where you may end up being in a hand when no one raises.
3. On the flop, play the player and the texture of the board.

How will this improve your game?

It show you the power of raising and re-raising.

For example, if a player raises on the cut-off (one to the right of the button) and you have pocket 6's, re-raise instead of calling or folding. If you get called, lean towards following through with a continuation bet on the flop.

You will also be surprised at how well this simple exercise works in accumulating a large stack of chips if you get a little luck in the first hour of play.

Give it a shot and it will show you the power of aggression.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Tried this tonight on a 45 player sng on ub. Worked pretty well until final table. I was the big blind, with 6-9. Two limpers and small blind. Flop was 5-7-8 rainbow. Couldn't believe I flopped a straight. Bet the size of the pot. Was raised three times pot. Pushed all in was called. Raiser had pocket 8's, flopped a set. The turn was a 6, filling him up and knocking me out seventh. Bummer. Should I have not pushed all in? No one raised preflop, thought I was golden with the straight.

Mitchell Cogert said...

You got your opponent all-in and you had the best hand. That is a great situation in a tournament.

In this case, he got lucky and hit the right card to suck out on you.

The only way to get away from this hand is if he would have raised pre-flop and you would have folded.

What's Your Poker IQ?