NLHE Theory and Practice: Week 2.

[fatguy'06]

I'm with Vinland on that, I feel like they repeat throughout that there are situations where certain pot sizing methods would be fruitless without explicitly naming which situations would be bad. It also allows you to tailor the ideas to the individual villain. Again the pot sizing example comes to mind as the book gives different scenarios based on different reads.

The overall message I got from the implied odds section is, "Either force your opponent to fold or trick him into a -EV call based on stack sizes and reads" That makes sense to me for the most part but I dont see how you would figure out the right bet size without calculations on hand.. other than looking at the hand after the fact and learning from mistakes.

[BooG690]

The overall message I got from the implied odds section is, "Either force your opponent to fold or trick him into a -EV call based on stack sizes and reads" That makes sense to me for the most part but I dont see how you would figure out the right bet size without calculations on hand.. other than looking at the hand after the fact and learning from mistakes.

Meh, that's not really the message you should be getting. Basically, we don't want to offer our villain good implied odds if we know he may be calling with a speculative hand. An example I used in my previous post is the limp/caller. A lot of bad players almost always limp/call with pocket pairs. Here, we can punish them by isoraising them big to cut down on their implied odds (and to get more money in the pot when they choose to c/f the flop). As was seen, it doesn't have to be too big since these players are playing with imperfect information. We won't be paying their sets off too much and sometimes we may even stack them with a better hand. We never want to "force" our opponent to do anything since we simply can't "force" anyone to do anything.

Also, as for looking at the hand after the fact and learning from our mistakes, this should be a regular part of playing poker. Session reviews give players the chance to look at their hands after playing by using whichever hand tracker they have downloaded. We can analyze these hands, do some math, and see that some situations are common enough that we can apply our findings of THIS hand to OTHER hands that we may play. By doing these analyses, its easier to make the correct play in real-time.