Pot control is the art of maintaining the size of the pot close to the relative size of your hand. There are various ways to achieve this. Part of pokers skill is pot control and making a check in the right place instead of betting and spotting these critical moments of the hand where you think ahead and make the right decision. Professionals utilise pot control extremely well, so if we want to get up to that level of skill then we better take a look at just how to control pots. If you want to win playing Hold’em online this will be time well spent!

Pot control is achieved by taking into account some significant factors in the hand and then implementing the right moves to achieve your desired goal. Let us look at each in turn.

Considerations

Stack Size – If you are very deep in terms of your stack in a cash game then pot control is of paramount importance as a big pot could mean a lot of chips. You only want to build a pot with a very strong hand. Remember the key concept, small hand small pot, large hand large pot.

Opponent Range – Knowing how your opponent plays their hands and their betting patterns helps you work out their potential range. This pulls you as close as possible to the fundamental part of winning poker which is….fold when you are beat. In a specific situation you can assess what hands your opponent may have and whether your hand ranks well against them. If it does not, get out of the hand quickly!

Opponent Style – Getting into a hand that you would prefer to keep the pot small knowing he is aggressive and bets every street is unwise because you know what will happen. Other players are more passive and you can engage with them knowing showdown is possible. Against this opponent you could play a wider range of hands and expect to reach the river for fewer chips than playing an aggressive opponent.

Implementation

Pot control must be implemented, which means the decision to bet, call, check, raise or fold must be correct no matter how well you consider the above factors whilst deciding what to do.

Increasing the pot size when you believe your opponent is on a draw is a good idea. This aggressive “anti-draw” strategy can be seen in many high stakes cash games on the videos you can view online.

I have received responses to these types of article in the past saying that playing aggressive opponents does not give you the opportunity to execute pot control. This is untrue. Aggressive players will rarely show up on the river with less than top pair. Ultra aggressive players are rare. To an intermediate player it can look like a tight aggressive player just bets all of the time but they usually have something and will fold many hands. You can play small hands against this type of player. Remember to have a hand when you play these players!

All of the techniques used in pot control must coincide with you understanding your own hands value and strength relative to the action. If you simply make plays to make your opponent fold you will not succeed because your opponents will force to you go to showdown. This keeps you honest as a poker player! Think about the pot size in relation to your own hand strength as this is a good way to step away from the hand and realise you are in too deep when the action says fold. Sometimes you just have to give up a hand and not think of creative ways to win.

By Malcolm Clarke

Poker Bots are a constant problem for poker rooms who want everyone playing poker on their site to be honest human players prone to the same errors and learning that every player goes through whilst developing their poker skills. Players using computer programs to play their hands are not only cheating because it is not their skills being used to play, but they are breaching the terms and conditions of the poker room. As online poker is unregulated, the only Policing of such activity is by the poker rooms themselves so a good question for players to ask is, are they doing enough to quash this sort of cheating?

The truth is that it is very difficult to catch poker bot users because the programs themselves can be hard to detect and easily masked as something else running on the player’s computer. The bots also click different pixels of the fold, check or raise buttons which looks human and some of the more sophisticated bots can even type in “nh” for “nice hand” into the chat box if they lose a large pot with a strong hand.

Wherever there is money involved in anything there are people prepared to go to extreme lengths to get it, whether that means breaking the rules or not. Poker bots remove the human emotion element and given the circumstances it faces it will always make the optimum response, providing it is programmed well enough. Any player prone to tilt has a major problem facing a bot who will always mean its best poker. On the other hand I have read poker articles where players were aware they were playing a bot, yet the bot was so bad they did not mind. Only when the poker bot owner saw the losses incurred would they realise their bot was outplayed, but by then it would be too late.

Poker rooms will act if a player plays over four tables for three full days solid or if players report suspicious activity. Many poker bots are discovered through the illogical action of their owner rather than their own failings when they let the bot play for so long a human could not manage that length of poker session thus their cover is blown. Some players have accused poker rooms of not caring providing rake is being generated but this is unfair as that implies they do not care about their players.

There is also the problem of proving that a bot is being used, which is virtually impossible unless the poker bot is flawed in some way. Confiscating players bankrolls on the back of random accusations by players emailing the poker room support is a dangerous situation to get into as once investigations are complete players will cash out and the poker room may lose a regular player. It is a tough balance between being seen to be actively policing their own site to trusting their regular players. I would not like to be in their shoes.

If you suspect you are playing against a bot you should email customer support and give them the reasons why you believe this is the case. Ask for them to get back in touch with their findings and if they believe you may be right. Make sure you have good reason for doing this as another player may believe the same of you and any investigation can be stressful and inconvenient, particularly if you are innocent. Some players are constantly reporting others and losing one session against a player is not a reason to think they may be a bot. They may just be better at poker than you are.

I play poker at bwin.com where I have not read of a single instance of bot related activity and their site is not listed on any of the bot sites as a playable room. That is good enough for me.

By Malcolm Clarke

Sit still because everyone is watching. Say nothing, do not breathe or move or speak. This is the standard primer on not giving any poker tells at the table and is, if I may say so, a little extreme. When you play poker there are a range of different things you can do to avoid giving tells. Texas Hold ‘em poker players all have a different approach to detecting tells and avoiding giving them and it is very interesting to learn the tactics players use in relation to physical tells. This article is more focused on live poker rather than online poker because when playing on your favourite poker sites you can put your head in your hands and scream for a fold if you make a bluff attempt and nobody can see you!

If you ask a none poker player to do a poker face, what do they do? They try and look unemotional and keep as still as possible. Many new players think that the key to poker is looking for tells on an opponent then exploiting them to win all of the chips. In reality it is a little more difficult and a lot different. Tells are important but it is so difficult to know whether a tell is real, genuine or just you trying to convince yourself you can see something that is not there that it plays less of a role in poker than a novice may think.

What players cannot hide is the way their hands are played. Optimal poker strategy suggests that in a certain scenario a player plays poker in a certain way and if you can detect these patterns you can put them on a hand and know how to play against them. This gives you a great advantage in a tough situation if you know how the player plays poker. The true poker tells are in hand reading and opponent profiling. Having a read on a player is knowing their tendencies and being able to predict backwards why they made the play they did. They may be twitching, poking their hair and being physically predictable but one thing that never ever lies is the way they play poker hands.

Rarely does a player deliberately play a hand badly to deceive opponents in the way they would shuffle, cough or do something else to deceive a player from knowing their physical tells. Doing things like this is quite a basic and effective way to hide any physical tells. Only a weak player deliberately loses money to give false information about that style. If only to set up a future bluff it is a risky and losing way of playing poker.

Professional players often use scare tactics to make a player feel uncomfortable. They stare down a player looking for reads in their behaviour. Daniel Negreanu says that professionals use these scare tactics to make a player think twice about making a move in future hoping they remember feeling decidedly uncomfortable during the tactical stare down. This method tries to take the less experienced player out of their comfort zone so they either play badly or reveal more about their style by either talking or revealing information through body language.

Sometimes you can be so focused on working out a player physically that you forget to watch the betting. Do they always raise pre-flop with the goods? Are they trappy or tricky? Before watching out for physical tells do your homework learning their playing tendencies through their patterns of play and player style. This is far more profitable to you than risking all of your chips re-shoving because the player touched their nose like they did when they were bluffing three hands ago. They might just have a cold!

By Malcolm Clarke

With two hole cards facing down and one face up Seven Card Stud is immediately different from Texas Hold ‘em. Learning the correct starting hands for seven card stud is essential to getting a good win percentage. By the time you read this article you will have a better idea on what constitutes a good starting hand in seven card stud.

In the low limit Stud games, lack of knowledge on your opponents part means that many hands are played all the way to showdown. This increases the need for selective starting hands to give you a good chance of getting a winning hand come showdown.

It is recommended that where possible the lowest card you hold is the highest card showing around the table. In stud games you are only making a hand with your own cards, there are no community cards. In seven card stud high (this article does not deal with Stud Hi-Lo) it therefore makes sense to have more than one way to win in the hand. An example of another type of strong starting hand in seven card stud is three cards to a flush. The higher the flush draw the better. Ah-Jh-2h is a strong starting hand. You could catch a Jack, Ace or flush cards. Count how many of the suit you hold is showing elsewhere on the table and then work out the odds of hitting your flush accurately.

Suited connectors or three cards to a straight give good open ended straight draw opportunities or back door flushes. The benefits of these starting hands are that when you are drawing to these hands, because two of the cards to the straight are face down they are concealed from your opponents rather than the having most of your straight in the up cards. You can also monitor which of these cards are dealt face up to your opponents so knowing when to fold becomes easier with more accurate pot odds. High connected cards also offer opportunities for hitting high pairs, which are likely to be strong hands.

Sets are good starting hands however you must be careful that straights and flushes do not hit later in the hand that beat you. Sets look incredibly strong when dealt as stud high starting hands and this type of hand will be the most common hands to be overplayed by intermediate players. Lower sets in particular should be approached with a degree of caution as they are beat by straights, flushes and better sets.

When your face up card is an Ace there are certain benefits to playing the hand. If there are no other Aces showing from your opponents then providing you have another positive reason to play the hand, whether that be a flush possibility or straight possibility then you can proceed in the hand. It is not a very strong hand, but certainly playable. Other poker strategy articles say that a hand like this can only be played if it is raise worthy. This follows the same lines as having extra strength in addition to the Ace in terms of potential flushes or straights.

Learning seven card stud will help you learn good hand reading skills and learn the changing odds better than Texas Hold ‘em can. As you can see your opponents up cards there are more calculations to make and tougher decisions during a hand. By learning to play only positive expected value starting hands like the ones mentioned above, then you improve your chances of beating the stud games significantly. This used to be the game that before No Limit Texas Hold ‘em hit the big time was the game of choice for poker players. When you play it you will see why that was.

By Malcolm Clarke