Poker Foundations Page​ | 1

Poker Foundations Page​ | 2

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Introduction 7
Why This Book 7
How to Use This Book 7
Fundamentals 9
How I Think About Gambling 9
How I Think About Gambling 9
What Can We Learn from This Example? 10
Why Ever Play a Hand? 11
Position 12
After the Flop Has Been Dealt 13
Selecting Betting Hands vs Checking Hands 14
Conclusion 17
Blinds 17
To Straddle or Not to Straddle? 19
Pot Odds 19
Converting a Percentage into Odds 21
Implied Odds 21

Equity 21
Pot Equity 21
Outs 22
Fold Equity 23
Reasons for Betting 24
Basic Hand Reading Techniques 26
Value Targeting 26
Bluff Targeting 27
Excluding Irrelevant Hands 28
Preflop Basics 29
Is Preflop Entirely Different from Later Streets? 29
Preflop Guidelines 31
As the RFI Player 32
Against Limpers 33
Relative Hand Strength vs Absolute Hand Strength 34
Single Raised Pots vs 3Bet Pots 34
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PLO 6 Max Flops: 36

NLH 6 Max Flops 36
Small Stakes Strategy 36
Putting It All Together: Part 1 38
Hand 1 38
Hand 2 40
Hand #3 42
Getting Deeper 44
Classifying Opponents 44
Loose Passive 45
Tight Passive 47
Loose Aggressive 48
Tight Aggressive 49
Adding Nuance 51
Final Note 51
Reciprocality 52
Stack Depth 53
Draws 53
Made Hands 54
Conclusion 54
Stack to Pot Ratio (SPR) 55
Introduction to Ranges 55
Slightly Ahead/Way Behind 56
Natural Bluffs 58
Reading Their Range/Logic Chains 58
Range Inelasticity 60
Bigger Is Better 62
Equity Continued: Counterfeit Outs, Degraded Outs, and Equity Pieces 62
Degraded Outs 63
Board Texture 64
Reading Your Range 67
Opponent Tendencies Based on Postflop Lines 68
Flop Play 69
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Check Raising the Flop 73

Turn Play 74
3B Pots 76
River Play 78
Thin Value Betting 78
Selecting Bluffs 79
Putting It All Together: Part 2 80
Hand 2 81
Hand 3 83
Choosing Your Game 86
No Limit Hold’em vs Pot Limit Omaha: Where to Start? 86
No Limit Hold’em 86
Cash Games vs Tournaments 87
Advantages of Cash Games 88
Disadvantages of Cash Games: 88
Advantages of Tournaments 88
Disadvantages of Tournaments 89
Aside: The Independent Chip Model or ICM 89
HU vs Ring Games 91
Introduction to Game Theory 96
Polarization and Indifference 97
Combinatorics and Blockers 98
Weighted Combinatorics 99
Capped and Condensed Ranges 101
Minimum Defense Frequency 101
Why Ever Play A Hand (Other Than The Nuts): Expert Explanation 102
Putting It All Together: Part 3 103
What I Wish I Had Known 109
The Process 109
Heuristics and Metacognitive Thinking 110
Mindset and Stoicism 111
Self-Deception Is the Reason Gambling Exists 113
Why This Matters: 114
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Counterfactual Thinking 114

Life Balance Is Overrated (At The Beginning) 115
How to Study 118
Managing Relationships, Stress and Maintaining a Healthy Life 119
Quitting 119
Rake 120
How Rake Will Impact Your Game 121
Variance 121
Making Adjustments In Game With Phil 125

Book List 124

Poker Terms 125
Essential Poker Terms 125
Poker Culture Terms 128
Game Theory Terms 130
Psychology and Mental Game Terms 131
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Introduction
Why This Book
At the beginning of my poker career, I indiscriminately devoured every poker book I could find.
Through this process, I noticed several major issues with the literature available. First several of the
recommended books were wildly outdated. While certain concepts are timeless, these books often had
whole sections dedicated to “trick plays” or “moves” which is an obsolete way of thinking about poker.
These “trick plays” were shortcuts from authors who didn’t comprehend the game on the deepest level
or were designed to ​exploit​ certain types of players. Unfortunately, a trick that works well against Player
A can backfire magnificently against Player B.

Another fault I encountered was taking tens or hundreds of pages to cover content that only
needed two pages. My goal is to give you what you need to radically improve your poker in as few words
as possible.

I want to provide a view of the ceiling of the poker theory cathedral even for those entering on
the ground floor. I did this for two reasons. First, I don’t feel that any poker book for beginners has ever
done this before. This is either because the author was not an elite player and couldn’t provide this view
or wanted to put the reader on a “payment plan” and release subsequent volumes. Second, I wanted to
provide the reader with the ability to think about and appreciate the game on the highest level. Though I
achieved the title of master in chess, I can rarely play a game comparable to the best grandmasters.
Despite that I do have the skills to appreciate the masterpieces they create as an advanced musical
student can appreciate a symphony on a deeper level than a beginner. Many of you will not choose to
become professional poker players (though I will always push you to treat the game as a professional
would) and so the greatest gift I can provide you is the knowledge to revel in the beauty of frescos on
the ceiling above you.

My final intention was to help elevate your skill level so you would be able to enjoy and learn
from the video lessons on the Runitonce Poker Training Site. As a coach on this site, it’s obvious that I
would like to see the site succeed, but there is a non-obvious problem as well. The training material on
Runitonce is at such a high level that it is daunting for a beginner to jump directly into the video lessons
there. My desire is to bridge that gap and to give you all the information you will need to start your
journey on Runitonce.

How to Use This Book

This book is organized into three poker theory sections, each building on the previous and
increasing in complexity. Since later sections refer to those before them, I would strongly encourage you
to read the beginning section, even if you feel the concepts are too simple. Simple concepts may have
more depth than expected. You also might find that these early chapters correct some mistaken notions
you have about the game.
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 9

The fourth section compares and contrasts the most popular game types both live and online.
This section is designed to help you choose which game suits your goals and interests best.

The fifth section is a mental game section which can be read at any time. Try reading it a couple
times as you move through the theory chapters and your theoretical knowledge improves. Some of the
topics that seem foreign at the beginning may seem all too real later in your poker journey.

Instead of always stopping to define terms, I included a glossary of terminology at the back of
the book. Whenever you see a bolded term in the text, it will appear back there. Please also see the
glossary if you need more definition of ​hand terminology​. Ebook readers will have the additional option
of moving their mouse over the word, which will cause the definition to pop up immediately.
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 10

Fundamentals
How I Think About Gambling
Gambling is the art and science of assessing uncertainty. As a gambler (or, if you prefer,
“investor”), you are risking some form of currency, be it money or time, on the outcome of uncertain
events. Given this simple definition, we can determine that if there is any skill in this activity, it must
come in the form of assessing the outcome of probabilistic events better than our competition.

No one would characterize a great entrepreneur like Bill Gates or outstanding investor like
Warren Buffet as gamblers, however, from the definition above, that’s precisely what they are. Each
risked money, time, or the opportunity to work on other projects to pursue their goals. Their success
only seems like a forgone conclusion due to ​hindsight bias​. I say this to not only remove the stigma from
gambling but also that you can start seeing the world around you as a series of probabilistic outcomes
that you can learn to assess with more skill than others.

There are three components to any bet:

1. The payout
2. The odds being laid
3. The likelihood that an outcome occurs

Knowing the value of each of these components allows us to exactly state how much a bet is
worth and on which side of that bet we would like to find ourselves. While the first two components are
easy to assess, the final component is where the skill and mystery lie. In the real world, it’s almost
impossible to know exactly how often an event will occur. However, if you can learn to determine the
likelihood with greater accuracy than your opponents, you can make money in a number of fields.

Let me give you an entertaining real world example to illustrate how universal the skills of
assessing uncertainty are and how large of an advantage a “trained professional” can have over a
novice.

My good friend, let’s call her Kate, wanted to learn how to drive. Despite being 27 years old, she
had never held a driver’s license and had developed a phobia of driving after a terrible accident when
she was younger. She also held a number of ​limiting beliefs​ around [what she perceived as] her
[in]ability to pass the maneuvering portion of the exam.

So we set out to practice driving for an hour or two a few times a week. We ended up practicing
for over three months before Kate felt comfortable attempting the test.

Now Emily enters the story. Emily is one of my best friends and is also good friends with Kate.
Emily is also one of the smartest people I have ever met. Emily and I decided that regardless of the
outcome of the exam, we would throw a celebratory dinner for Kate.

A week before this dinner, Emily mentioned in passing that Kate would surely fail her exam the
first time due to Kate’s tendency to​ s​ elf-sabotage​ and become flustered when under stress. I was
somewhat taken aback by her pessimism. I had seen my friend make tremendous improvement during
our practice sessions and consider myself to be quite skilled as a teacher. I responded that I felt there
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 11

was very little chance Kate would fail. So Emily suggested that we make a friendly wager and that the
winner of the bet would pay for the dinner. I immediately accepted.

While this seems like just friendly competition, this bet actually articulates the primary
differences between the thought process of a professional gambler and a person who has not studied
gambling. Let’s break it down mathematically:

1. Emily and I agreed that the loser would pay for dinner. Let’s say dinner and drinks for several
people costs $300. Since both parties have to pay the same amount when they lose, the odds
being laid are 1 to 1. Stated another way, Emily risked $300 to potentially win $300. This means
that if Kate fails more than 50% of the time, Emily makes money and if Kate passes more than
50% of the time, I make money. When Emily makes this bet, she is essentially stating that she
thinks Kate will pass less than half the time. If Emily had asked me to lay 2 to 1 odds then she
would risk $300 to win $600 or one dinner to win two dinners. In that case, Kate would have to
pass more than 66.6% of the time for me to profit.
2. I had a tremendous amount of ​asymmetric information​ ​or knowledge that Emily didn’t have. I
had just spent three months working with Kate and had witnessed her making a couple critical
breakthroughs. I had also spent the last decade of my life teaching myself and others to play
chess and poker at a high level and was very confident in my ability to teach. There was no way
in hell she was going to fail 50% of the time. I assessed that Kate would pass at least 95% of the
time.
3. So the math works out like this:
a. If I’m right and Kate has a 95% chance of passing: 0.95($600) - 0.05($300) = $555. This
means that whenever I wager $300 (or one dinner) I end up getting back my $300 and
an additional $255. What I did above is a simple ​expected value​ ​(or ​EV​) calculation and
is an essential part of determining whether your play was correct or not and will be
covered in greater detail later in the book.

Kate passed with a near perfect score on her driving exam. Does mean that I made a profitable
bet? It’s possible that if Kate took this test 100 times, she would only pass 49 times, which means I
would lose money. However, her nearly perfect score indicates that the likelihood of Kate passing was
extremely high.

What Can We Learn from This Example?

● I instantly translated our bet into a statement: “Kate needs to pass more than 50% of the time
to make this bet profitable for me.”
● I then assigned a probability that she would pass based on my experience.
● Due to her inexperience, Emily didn’t consider assigning a probability to the outcome of an
uncertain event and laying particular odds.
● Even after I “won” the bet, I still am questioning whether I truly won or whether I simply got
lucky. Because luck makes it unclear whether I made the correct decision, I am looking for
evidence to support or refute my hypothesis. Evidence like “Kate’s confidence while driving” or
her passing with nearly a perfect score indicates that her chances of passing were quite high.
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 12

Here’s another more directly poker related question. I am going to put two ​NLH​ hands down in
front of you. One will be 72o, the worst possible hand you could hold in NLH and the other will be AA,
the best possible hand you could hold. I will then deal a flop, turn, and river and see which hand wins.
Which hand would you bet on?

If you said “Well, it depends on the odds each side is laying” then congratulations, you weren’t
ensnared by a classic gambling trap.

If I was forced to bet $50 and my opponent was forced to bet the same amount, then we both
would want to choose AA as it will clearly win more than 50% of the time. If, however, you were willing
to bet any amount up to $99 dollars on AA, I would gladly take 72o and bet $1. Since 72o will beat AA
about 12% of the time, I make a ton of money. To put this in the form of an equation: I will lose $1 dollar
22 times out of 25 since AA beats 72o 88% of the time (I elaborate on this more in the section called
equity). 3 times out of 25, you will lose $99. 0.12($99) - 0.88($1) = $11, the amount I expect to win every
time we make this bet.

Why Ever Play a Hand?

One of the best ways to deeply understand a topic is to ask stupid questions. Most of the time,
the answers will be elementary, but once in a while, you’ll find that even supposed experts will struggle
to provide truly satisfactory answers. This represents a gap in their knowledge or an area where their
understanding hasn’t fully matured.

A sign of true expertise is the capacity to explain the foundational elements of a topic.

Because losing the fear of asking “stupid” questions and challenging the status quo are two of
the most important skills in life and poker (how are you ever going to beat anyone in poker if you simply
do the same things that they do?), I’m going to ask some asinine questions on your behalf.

So why should we ever play a hand in poker? The answer is obvious: We are trying to win money
and we can’t possibly win without ever playing a hand. That leads us to the next “stupid” question: Why
ever play a hand other than the ​nuts​ ​preflop? I would be willing to bet that more than a few “serious”
poker players would fail to provide a satisfactory answer.

Answers to this question come in three different flavors: Beginner, Intermediate, Expert. I will
cover the expert explanation to this question later in the book. For now, let’s stick with the first two.

The first answer to this question is that there are other profitable hands that we can play.

The more sophisticated answer takes into account another variable: We can play hands other
than the nuts profitably because the ​blinds​ exist. In fact, without the blinds, you really would not have
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 13

much incentive to play hands other than the nuts (see the Expert explanation later for more
elaboration).

How can such a small amount of money impact our play so dramatically that we go from playing
only the nuts​ ​to playing up to sixty percent of hands? To help us understand this concept, let’s ask
another elementary question: Would we be happy if our opponents always folded the blinds to us?
Certainly we would be happy when we have junk hands, but wouldn’t our strong hands prefer to try to
win a big pot? In fact, almost every hand would prefer to simply win the blinds rather than be forced to
play ​postflop​. This isn’t to say you should raise huge to avoid playing postflop, but simply winning the
blinds is one of the most profitable outcomes for us. The blinds are enormously significant and most of
the value of our hands comes from the times when everyone folds.

Position
We are now about to dive into one of the most significant pieces of poker strategy for the
aspiring poker student. If you’ve been playing poker for fun with friends, understanding this one concept
may be enough to give you a lasting edge over them.

In games of complete information like chess or go, acting first confers an advantage. The player
who moves first has the ability to dictate the tempo of the game and throw his or her opponent back on
the defensive.

Poker is the exact opposite.

Poker is a game of incomplete information. The more information your opponent reveals, the
larger your advantage becomes. Imagine, for instance, the advantage you would have if you actually
knew your opponent’s cards. Gaining ​position​ inches you closer to that unattainable goal.

So poker is a game of acquiring information, but what is position and how does it allow us to
achieve this goal? First, position simply means the order in which the players act during the hand. After
preflop has concluded, acting last is always an advantage. Preflop, the player on the button should
expect to win the most money on average because when they play the hand, they will always act last​.
Since the blinds move every hand, your position also changes every hand.

Let’s use a thought experiment to examine how position impacts our decisions at the table,
starting with the choice to raise or fold preflop. Imagine that every hand has an invisible dollar amount
floating above it. This number is the average amount that you will win with this hand given all of the
possible future scenarios. The dollar amount for a hand like AA in NLH or AAJTds in ​PLO​ will be quite
large relative to the stakes that you’re playing because on average these hands win us a lot of money. A
hand like 77 in NLH or KJT8ds in PLO will still have a positive dollar amount above it, but that amount will
be significantly less than the amount floating above AA.

Some hands like 72o in NLH or 4443ss in PLO will almost always have negative dollar amounts
floating over them. Fortunately, we aren’t compelled to play them. We can take an alternative, more
profitable option, which is to fold. When we fold a hand we lose zero (except when we’re in the blinds)
and since playing them would have cost us money, we ​maximize​ ​our​ ​EV​ b
​ y folding.
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 14

Part of playing a hand well in poker is sometimes simply to fold it.

Many hands, often the most difficult ones to play, reside in the middle of these two poles. The
number floating above them falls on a spectrum between slightly positive to slightly negative depending
on a myriad of variables, one of the most significant being position.

Remember that the number above our cards can change as the hand continues. The original
number accounts for all possible future scenarios, some of which are great for us and some of which are
poor. When we zoom in on a particular situation like having 22 on a KJ2 flop, that scenario will be worth
way more than the initial number because it is one of the best possible outcomes. Conversely, holding
22 on KQ9 will be worth less than the original number.

When you are first to act at a 9-handed table, there are 8 players to your left waiting to act.
Those players all have an equal opportunity to ​“​wake up​”​ with a hand that has a high dollar amount
above it and re-raise you. They also have the opportunity to ​bluff​ you, or simply to call and try to make a
better hand or bluff later. In most cases, you’ll have to act first for the rest of the hand.

By acting first, you have zero information about their hands. This uncertainty about the future
drives down the value of all of your hands and pushes many of those hands that would have made
money in other contexts from winners to losers. This effect, combined with rarely making everyone fold
and winning the blinds, is so dramatic that when we are first to act with 8 players remaining behind us,
we should fold around 90% of our hands.

Now imagine being on the button when everyone has folded to you. What have their actions
told you? Each player that folded has effectively stated “I think my hand is worth zero dollars or less so I
gave up.” The chance that both the small and big blind also have garbage hands that they will fold to our
raise is reasonably high, so our chance of winning the blinds is high. We also know that we will act last
for the rest of the hand. These advantages ensure that the numbers floating over a lot of our hands
remain positive. On the button, we will get to play at least half of all possible hands.

No one can actually see that invisible number floating over their own hands. The better you
become at poker, the more you can make informed estimates of those numbers. Another essential truth
is that most amateurs don’t think about, know about, or care about the dollar amount floating over their
hand. They will routinely play hands that lose money and their lack of skill will often turn hands that are
winning for a professional into losing hands. This leads us to another conclusion:

When starting out in poker, a lot of hands will have negative numbers floating over them until you
acquire more skill. This means folding more is a great option.

After the Flop Has Been Dealt

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The above example explains why position is valuable ​preflop​, but may not completely illuminate
why position is so valuable after the flop. The reasoning is related, but slightly different.

Think about a hand of poker with two players after the flop. Are their options the same? They
seem to be. The ​out-of-position​ (or ​OOP​) player can check or bet and the ​in-position​ (or ​IP​) player who
acts second can do the same. But there is a fundamental difference. Try to guess what that is before
reading farther.

When the in-position player checks, he or she cannot face any more bets on that current ​street
and will now see the next card for free. Conversely, when the out-of-position player checks, they
constantly have to live in fear of facing another bet. This will either force them to fold a hand which
could either improve or currently be best or call a bet and put more money in the pot with a worse
hand.

This structural difference between the positions has a dramatic impact on the value of hands,
especially marginal or middling strength hands. Let’s take a hand like 88 on K95r in ​NLH​ or KJ42 on K95r
in ​PLO​. Remember the invisible number that floats over each hand? That number will be radically
different for each of these hands depending on whether we are in or out of position.

When we are in position and are checked to, we can joyfully check back and see a free card. This
allows us to keep the pot smaller and maybe hit a turn card that improves us. Even a turn that doesn’t
improve us, but misses our opponent, might be enough to keep us in the hand and to keep that invisible
number positive.

When we are out of position, our situation is far less palatable. Now, when we check, we no
longer receive a free card but instead face our opponent’s choices. When we hold a medium strength
hand, our opponent may bet hands which are superior to ours and he or she may make bluffs that aspire
to make us fold our medium strength hand. If we call all the time, we end up running into too many
hands that are better than us and if we always fold, we end up letting the bluffs win too often. A lot of
the middle strength hands that had positive numbers floating over them when IP are now quite close to
zero for the out-of-position player.

Selecting Betting Hands vs Checking Hands

The way we select betting hands and checking hands is also quite different when ​in position​ or
out of position​. Below are two charts to help you visualize the structure of in-position play vs
out-of-position play. On the X-axis are hands arranged by strength from the strongest on the left side to
the weakest on the far right. The Y-axis displays the betting frequency for each hand.
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 16

Notice the structural difference between each chart. When the in-position player holds an
extremely strong hand or the pure nuts, it rarely makes sense to ​slow play​ ​or check back for deception.
Remember, the ultimate ​goal of poker​ is to maximize the amount of money we make, not to be
deceptive. Deception is also only valuable on those players observant enough to be deceived AND those
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 17

1
who are capable of turning their observations into action. An important rule to remember in poker,
especially at small stakes is:

The most deceptive action we can take is to bet and also bet with ​bluffs​.

When out of position, we have significantly more incentive to slow play strong hands. That is
because we don’t close the action and our opponent still has the opportunity to bet. This allows us to
occasionally check-raise against our opponent’s bet. A check-raise allows us to significantly increase the
amount of money we get into the pot with our strongest hands which conforms perfectly with the
ultimate goal of poker.

Lastly, when it comes to playing our weakest hands, the strategic choices are radically different
for the in-position player and the out-of-position player. As the out-of-position player, it will almost
never be a good idea to bet the very weakest hands. These hands have almost no ​pot equity​ and can
only win by bluffing. For bluffing to succeed, we need ​fold equity​ ​which is another way of saying, “We
need our opponent to fold some percentage of the time.” The problem is that the in-position player will
have more hands with positive numbers floating above them simply by virtue of being in position. This
allows the in-position player to call more, thus reducing the fold equity of the weakest hands out of
position. This leads us to an essential poker equation:

Amount of Pot Equity + Amount of Fold Equity = Quality of a Bet

Here we see that with very weak hands out of position, we have very little pot equity and very little fold
equity. That means our bet is likely losing money so checking to give up is probably a better option.

When we are in position, the above statements do not hold true. We have more fold equity
when we are in position. More out-of-position hands will have negative numbers floating above them
and will need to make the higher EV play of folding against a bet. Additionally, when we are in position it
won’t make sense for us to bet our medium strength or weaker hands that can still improve since we
can opt to take a free card. That means that if we wish to still have bluffs at all when we bet, we will
2
want to bluff with the “almost hopeless” category of hands​. ​This is called ​polarization​ and will be
discussed later in the ​game theory​ section of the book.

Here are some examples of almost hopeless hands that we might want to bluff when we’re in
position:

1
For instance, in NLH, if you check back on a board like KQ9ss, an elite pro might bet two times the pot on the turn
and shove the river with a bluff thinking you never have any strong hands after checking back. Against this player,
checking back JT might be excellent because it makes more money than betting. Very few players are capable of
this, however.
2
Depending on how much our opponent likes to call, we may just want to give up with these hands too. More on
this topic in the ​Classifying Opponents​ section.
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 18

● In NLH: As5s on Ks 8d 2h
● In PLO: Jd5s5s4d on Ad Th 4s
● In NLH: 8h7s on Ah 9d 5h
● In PLO: Kc 9d 8s 7d on Jc 4c 2c

While the above charts and explanations support the ideal poker thought process, poker is not a
game which can be played formulaically. What I have given you is simply a guideline and guidelines have
exceptions. Here are three examples where we might deviate from the above recommendations:

● In PLO: We hold Qd Qs 3d 3c in position on 9h 7d 2h. While this is a medium strength hand that
will generally want to check back at a high frequency, if our opponent is very passive and will
almost never raise us, betting and getting called by a worse hand or getting a fold from a hand
with a chance to beat us is a nice idea.
● In NLH: The same is true for a hand like 8s 6s on 9h 7d 2h. If our opponent is passive and won’t
bluff raise us often, betting and making him fold a hand like Qc Jd is a great outcome.
● In NLH: We are out of position in a live game with 5s 4s in the BB. BTN, who likes to raise and bet
frequently, raises preflop and we call. On Qs 9h 7d, he gives a disgusted look and checks back.
The turn is 2c. While we have total ​air​ and really “shouldn’t bluff” in theory, our opponent has
given us so much information that bluffing now seems like an excellent option. You bet and he
folds AK face up and proceeds to tell the table how unbelievably unlucky he is.

Conclusion
While playing ​out of position​ reduces your ​EV​, this doesn’t mean you should always fold. Often
in poker, especially when we are out of position, we want to make the best of a bad situation. There will
be plenty of times when the invisible number floating over your hand will be positive, but only by a few
pennies. The option to play the hand is still superior to folding (which is worth zero and only our best
option if playing the hand is worth less than zero).

Blinds
In the section “Why Ever Play A Hand?” we discussed how the blinds drive the action at a poker
table and compel the players to collide with subpar holdings. Now let’s consider what kind of
information we need when deciding whether to play a hand from the blinds.

Let’s make a strategic distinction between the two blinds themselves:

● The ​Small Blind​ (or ​SB​) acts before the Big Blind and only has to commit half of the ​big blind
before seeing his or her cards. The downside of being in the Small Blind is that you will always be
in the worst ​Absolute Position​ ​throughout the rest of the hand.
● The​ ​Big Blind​ ​(or ​BB​)​ a​ cts after the Small Blind and unless he or she decides to re-raise (known
as a ​Three Bet​ ​or ​3B​), his or her call will end the current street of betting and propel all of the
players still in the hand to the flop.

When playing the blinds, we are compelled to put money in without ever seeing our cards from
the two worst possible positions on the table. This means that it’s virtually impossible to win money in
the long run from either position. Of course, this doesn’t mean we can’t win individual hands, but rather
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 19

that the sum of all our wins and losses will be negative. Our objective therefore is to minimize the
damage and lose as little as possible.

In the Small Blind, often the best way to “minimize the damage” is simply not to play very many
hands and, when we do play, to come in for a raise or Three Bet. Indeed, against a single preflop raiser,
many players choose a strategy of only three betting or folding. The idea is that by simply calling, we will
encourage the Big Blind​ ​to call by laying him or her excellent ​pot odds​ ​(see the next section) which
would result in the Small Blind being out of position to two players. The Big Blind also has the option to
raise us which may force us to fold a decent hand or make another, larger call that might just be losing
us money. By Three Betting or folding (and folding about 85% of the time) we force the BB to fold with
the majority of his hands and occasionally force the ​IP​ ​player to fold thus mitigating our positional
disadvantage. When IP does call, it will usually be with a hand that is weaker than ours.

Against multiple players, ​squeezing​ can be an option, but calling is also more worthy of
consideration. Still, marginal hands will perform poorly out of position and this is especially true when
there are several players in the pot. A good rule of thumb is:

If you are not absolutely sure the hand will win you money in the long run, fold it from the Small
Blind.

When we are in the Big Blind, our choices are radically different. Here the ability to “close the
action” and take the hand to the flop encourages us to call a lot more. We also already have twice the
money the Small Blind has in the pot so our incentive to call is much higher.

Another way to think about this is in terms of those magic numbers floating over our hand. We
only want to continue with hands that have a positive number floating over them. How does getting a
discount on our call impact those numbers compared to the small blind? We never get re-raised off our
hand from behind since we close the action so that has to shift some slightly negative hands to
breakeven and some breakeven hands to positive. Now consider that when we call a raise, we need to
put in less money than we would elsewhere. When we risk less money, we can afford to win less often.
That should further shift some of those hands on the borderline to clear calls.

Here’s some quick math to help further cement this idea:

● When BTN raises 3bb, the pot is 4.5bb (with the small blind and big blind already in the pot)
● Small blind needs to call 2.5bb into 4.5bb to keep playing
● This means that small blind needs to call 2.5bb to win a final pot of 7bb. 2.5bb goes into 7bb
35.7% of the time so SB needs to win 35.7% of the time
● This number is SB’s pot odds

Now let’s look at this from BB’s perspective

● When BTN raises 3bb, the pot is 4.5bb (after SB folds)

● Big Blind only needs to call 2bb to win 6.5bb now
● 2bb goes into 6.5bb 30.8% of the time so BB’s pot odds are 30.8%
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 20

Only needing to win 30.8% of the time is a pretty low bar to cross and quite a few hands can
fulfill this requirement. Don’t get carried away though. It’s still difficult to play out of position and the
rake​ ​at small stakes can eat up your profits quickly. (For more discussion of rake, check out the rake
chapter in the next section.)

To Straddle or Not to Straddle?

A peculiarity of live games is that players often choose to straddle when they are ​Under the Gun
(or ​UTG​). A ​straddle​ usually amounts to twice the big blind and essentially acts as a third blind in the
game. Consider for a moment whether this seems like a wise strategic move.

The straddling player is electing to put money in the pot without seeing their cards from poor
position. This is guaranteed to be a losing play in the long run. The only justification is that some players
get confused by the presence of the additional blind and play poorly. The two pieces of information you
need here are:

● The straddle is simply a third, “bigger blind.” It’s nothing more sophisticated than that.
● While the amount of money in our stacks is still the same, the amount of money in play relative
to the blinds just got smaller. For instance, in a $1-$2 game with a $4 straddle, a raise that is 3
times the big blind is now $12 instead of $6. This means that our $200 dollars is no longer 100
times the big blind, but rather 50 times the big blind. We will discuss the strategic implications
of this change later in the book.

Pot Odds
Along with determining a hand’s ​equity​, accurately calculating pot odds is the first mathematical
skill you’ll need to master in order to start playing poker well. Fortunately, it’s a relatively easy task and
one that will teach you more about how gambling and investing actually works than virtually any other
skill.

To illustrate this concept, let’s use the casino game roulette. Is this a game you could play
thousands of times and expect to be a winner? Even without calculating the odds, your intuitive guess is
probably “no.” There is no skill in the game and if the casino invests floor space in a game as large as
roulette, it probably makes them money. But how exactly do they make money? You certainly can win a
spin in roulette, you might even win 15 times in a row. In the long run though, your loss is a
mathematical certainty.

Let’s stick with the simplest aspect of the game. You can bet some amount of money on the
color red or the color black. On the wheel, let’s say there are 10 black numbers and 10 red numbers. A
3
ball is dropped in the wheel and can land on any of those numbers randomly. If you put your money on
red and the ball landed on red, you would double your money. If it lands on black, you lose your money.
Since there are 10 red numbers and 10 black numbers your chances of winning are 50%. Since you

3
You might imagine that the game is rigged to land on certain numbers, but that would actually hurt the casino
because an observant human would eventually be able to exploit it.
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 21

double your money half the time and lose it half the time, your bet has an expectation of $0 in the long
run. The way to demonstrate this mathematically is:

Let your bet equal “x” then 0.5(2x) - 0.5(0x) = ?

If you plug $10 into this equation, you end up with $10 at the end. Since we started with $10
dollars, we made $0 in this transaction. Another way of saying this using gambling lingo is that our bet
has an ​expected value​ of $0, or is ​0EV​.

Now some of you who are familiar with the game of roulette will point out that there are also
one or two green numbers on the wheel. This is in fact where all the money in this game comes from.
Think about how the addition of numbers alters our chances of winning. Now when you bet on red, the
ball lands on a red number 10 times out of 21 with one green or out of 22 with two greens. Instead of
winning 5/10​th​ of the time, you now win 5/11ths (or 45.5%) of the time with one or 5/12​th​ of the time
with two. Let’s revisit the equation:

0.455(2x) - 0.545(0x) = ?

Now the amount that you win is only $9.09 which is $0.91 less than the $10 with which you
started. We can clearly see that this bet has a negative expected value (or ​-EV​) and should be avoided.

How is this relevant to poker? Every hand where you face a bet in poker, your opponent will be
laying you certain odds based on the size of his bet relative to the size of the pot. Unlike roulette, these
odds change every hand and it’s up to you to evaluate whether you win often enough to justify making a
call.

Fundamentally, we are trying to maximize the amount of money we make with every decision in
poker. However, this doesn’t mean that we necessarily need to win very often for that decision to be
correct. We simply need to win more than the odds we are being laid.

So let’s say our opponent bets 100 into a pot of 100 on the river. The pot is 200 when it reaches
us and we need to call 100 to win 200. In order to determine our pot odds, we add 100 to 200 and use
that number as our denominator. The amount we need to call becomes the numerator which makes our
pot odds 1/3​rd​ or 33.3%. To write this in terms of odds, we simply stick the pot size in front of the
amount we need to call, in this case 200 to 100 or 2 to 1 pot odds. If you try these numbers again when
your opponent bets 50 instead of 100, you’ll see that you only need to win 25% to at least break even.
That is, his or her bet makes the pot 150, and you need to call 50 to play. That makes the pot odds 150
to 50, or 3 to 1.

The logical follow up question is: “How do I know how often my hand wins?” That will depend
on how many of your opponent’s hands your hand beats. If your opponent lays you 2 to 1, you need to
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 22

beat at least 1 hand for every 2 hands you lose to. If he lays you 3 to 1, you only need to beat 1 hand for
every 3 hands that beat you. From this alone, we can conclude:

When we face very small bets, we don’t need to win very often.

While this math works extremely well for the river, pot odds gets significantly more complicated
on earlier streets for several reasons. One reason is that you can face more bets in the future so your
true odds over the course of the whole hand aren’t really known to you. Another reason is that it’s hard
to pinpoint how many hands you beat and how many beat you. Most hands aren’t static and can
improve (especially draws). Your hand might also improve or be ​counterfeited​.

Implied Odds
Sometimes your hand just won’t have the right pot odds to call. Life is hard. Sometimes you
need to fold.

But not always.

Implied odds can occasionally allow you to justify calling a hand that isn’t getting the right pot
odds.

The idea is simple. If you improve to a strong hand and your opponent will keep betting into
you, it is as if they were offering you better pot odds on the previous street. This is most true of draws,
but we often use implied odds to justify calling small pocket pairs preflop in NLH too. In some sense, a
hand like 22 is a draw because it rarely wins without improvement and is in very bad shape against
hands like QQ or JJ. When 22 does make three of a kind on boards like JT2r and our opponent holds QQ,
it can make a lot of money.

Before you run out and start calling every bet using implied odds as a justification, there are a
few factors you need to consider:

● In order to have implied odds, your opponent needs to keep betting. The more passive
or fearful your opponent is, the less likely they are to keep betting
● If your draw is extremely obvious like a flush draw, you might not get bet into enough
when you do improve. Imagine calling with a 4h 3h on Jh Ts 6h and seeing a Qh turn.
Yes you improved, but your opponent probably isn’t going to keep firing away with
hands like AJ

Converting a Percentage into Odds

This mathematical conversion is used extremely often in poker and is frequently explained in a
confusing way. Here are some simple steps to follow:
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 23

1. Convert the percentage into a fraction. Let’s use 17%. We want to see how many times 17 fits
into 100.
2. 100 divided by 17 is 5.88 which becomes our denominator. Our numerator is just 1.
3. To go from the fraction 1/5.88 to odds, we simply subtract 1 from 5.88 which gives us 4.88 to 1
odds.

The confusion often arises when odds are mistaken for a fraction. 2 to 1 odds is 1/3 or 33%, not
50%. That’s because the 2 and the 1 in “2 to 1 odds” are both pieces of the larger whole, which in this
case is 3. 9 to 1 odds is 10% because the “whole” is 9+1 rather than 9.

Equity
Every hand has a claim to the pot​ ​regardless of how strong it seems. We call this claim ​equity
and it is like owning stock in a company, but in poker, every new pot is a new chance to own stock in the
pot. Winning the hand is like gaining sole ownership. The person who becomes the sole owner of the
largest of these “companies” at the end of the night will likely be the winner.

Equity in poker is our hand’s chance of winning against another hand. The board determines
which hands have the most equity and betting allows us to either leverage our own hand’s strength to
get called or to leverage our opponent’s lack of hand strength to get a fold. These two types of equity
are known as ​pot equity​ and ​fold equity​.

Pot Equity
4
While it may seem as though some hands are incapable of winning, this is demonstrably false.
Even a hand as weak as 72o in NLH will beat AA about 12% of the time and a hand like 7422r will beat
AAJTds 26% percent of the time. Another way of visualizing this is by imagining that you have 72o in
your hand and that I have AA. We are both ​all-in​ with a pot of $100. If we were to run out the flop, turn,
and river ten thousand times before splitting up the money, the final amount you would receive would
be very close to $12 dollars while I would receive $88. This happens because occasionally 72o will ​suck
out​ on AA by making two pair, a flush, or a straight.

Essentially, ​pot equity​ is a percentage that lets you know how often your hand will win against
their hand if there were to be no more betting and all the cards were run out. At the river, each hand
will have 0%, 100%, or 50% pot equity in the rare case when we have the same hand. In the next
chapter, I will detail how we figure out our hand’s pot equity against another hand, but for now, there is
an important philosophical point to be made:

When we get all-in before the river and win, unless we had one hundred percent equity (such as flush
over flush or straight over straight), we won more than we “deserved” to win.

4
There are a few exceptions in PLO where a hand like 2222 will be ​drawing dead​ before the flop to any higher pair.
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 24

In reality, when we have 80% equity in a $400 pot, we can only stake a claim to $320 of that pot.
It just so happens that the $320 dollars is distributed to us randomly in chunks of $400 and occasionally
that same amount is taken away from us when we get “unlucky.” While most people remember the
times they lost as a big favorite, very few people can count up all the times they got slightly “lucky”
because this is less memorable and less painful.

Reminding yourself of the small bits of good fortune you experience every day will also increase your
enjoyment of life and poker.

Outs
One way we can figure out how much pot equity we have in a given hand is by considering the
number of outs our hand has when behind. With a hand like JT on Q94r, our J high will rarely win the
hand at showdown so we will need to improve. In this particular case, we have an ​Open-Ended Straight
Draw​ ​(or ​OESD​) which means that we can make a ​straight​ with a card above or below the line of four
cards already available. In this case, a K or 8 would create a straight using the Q-J-T-9. Since there are
four kings and four eights in a standard deck of cards, we have eight outs to complete our straight.
While it’s true that some of those cards could have been folded preflop, since we don’t know, we
operate under the assumption that all are available to us.

Now that we know that there are eight cards that give us a straight, how do we take that
information and translate it to pot equity? The way to start is to take the full deck of 52 cards and
subtract from it the cards which we already know. In this NLH example, we know our two cards and the
three cards from the board, reducing 52 to 47 unseen cards. Since there are 8 cards that improve our
hand, we need to see how many times 8 goes into 47 to determine how often we improve and then
convert that to a percentage. Once we’ve done that, we see that 8 outs yields us 17% equity or about
4.9 to 1 odds. 17% is only the likelihood that we make a straight on the turn when we’ve started on the
flop. Some readers may have noticed that on the turn, we know 6 cards rather than 5, so we would need
to divide 8 into 46 to determine our equity from the turn to the river. Figuring out how often we make
our hand when we start on the flop and will see turns and rivers requires ​conditional probability​ and is
still not entirely accurate for reasons that will be discussed later in the book. It’s best to simply ignore
the conditional probabilities because there is a much simpler way to convert outs to equity. The quick
rule of thumb most players use is:

On the flop, when there are two cards to come, an out is worth roughly 4% equity. On the turn, with
one card to come, an out is worth about 2% equity.

This rule tends to be off by about 1% in most cases, but that is compensated by the amount of
time savings it provides. ​The 2 and 4 Rule​ does tend to break down when you reach a large number of
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 25

outs. A 15-out draw like a ​Flush Draw​ (or ​FD​) with an OESD (known as a ​combo draw​) will have more
like 54% equity rather than the 60% equity the rule gives us. Another important rule of thumb is:

Once you have more than 13 outs, your hand tends to be 50/50 or a slight favorite against many made
hands.

Notice that when a hand has multiple draws, they tend to interfere with each other. A Flush
Draw (9 outs) and an OESD (8 outs) together in one hand are only a 15 out draw rather than a 17 out
draw. That’s because two of the straight outs are also ​flush​ outs. In PLO, when a ​wrap​ also has a flush
draw like Jh 8h 7s 5c on Ah 9h 6d, the flush draw interferes with a number of the straight’s outs reducing
it to 19 outs in this particular case.

Another important takeaway is that all hands have some kind of drawing component to them as
long as they have outs. For instance, in PLO, when you hold AKJT on J62 and I have Q876, I have 11 outs
to make two pair or ​trips​ to beat you. If I do make my two pair on a 7 turn, you now have 11 outs to try
and make a higher two pair or trips to beat me.

Fold Equity
Another deeply important type of equity in poker is known as fold equity​.​ ​Fold equity​ is the
chance (visualized as a percentage) that our opponent folds to our bet. Bluffs rely on fold equity to
justify their bet while very strong made hands seek to avoid it since their pot equity offers a better
profit.

Draws rely on a mixture of both pot equity and fold equity for us to play them profitably. The
more pot equity the draw has, the less fold equity it will need to justify betting. Imagine a hand like Ah
Ks Jh 2d on Qh 9h 2c in ​Pot Limit Omaha​. This is a premium draw which can make flushes, straights,
three of a kind, and decent two pair hands. While this hand is betting with the intention of making
villain​ fold a hand like JJ or 9xxx, it doesn’t need this to happen very often because it has so many other
ways to win. A hand like 63 on Q42 requires much more fold equity to make it profitable because it has
so little pot equity. While we can justify betting the first hand against any type of opponent, we might
want to give up with the 63 against a player that calls a lot. Without pot equity, we need lots of fold
equity to make this a good bluff and against a player that calls too much, we just don’t have it.

Fold equity is one of the many reasons ​limping​ preflop is seldom recommended. By matching
the big blind instead of raising, we never give ourselves the opportunity to win the pot immediately. We
also allow the Big Blind to realize some pot equity with extremely weak hands that he would have folded
to any raise. This gives him a chance to win pots he never should have been eligible to contest.

Reasons for Betting

 Poker Foundations Page​ | 26

There are two reasons to bet in poker: You can bet for ​value​ or as a ​bluff​. While these seem
relatively straightforward, if you spend enough time around amateur poker players who lack clearly
defined thought processes, you’ll hear a plethora of other reasons why they chose to bet. Below are
some of the common justifications for betting that amateur players often cite:

● Betting for protection

● Betting for information
● Betting to end the hand
● Betting because s/he was the preflop raiser
● Betting to prevent being bluffed

Betting for value means that we are betting a reasonably strong hand with the hopes that we
will get called by a worse hand or raised by a worse hand. Against weaker competition, when we are
betting for value, we are almost always hoping for a call rather than a raise. Once we start playing
stronger competition, we may very well under-represent our strong hand by checking one or more times
in order to allow them to raise us for ​thin value​. For now though, getting called by a worse hand will be
most relevant.

Betting as a bluff means that we are betting in order to make villain fold a hand that is currently
better than our own or to fold villain off his​ ​equity​. The second part of the definition may be somewhat
confusing but will be elaborated more in the protection section to follow. For now, just try to picture
what hands you would be able to bluff with Q5 on KJ4. Don’t set your sights too high. We aren’t going to
make them fold a K or J but are likely to fold ​A-high​ hands that don’t have straight draws. Even pairs like
33 and 22 will get folded. Every time this happens, you’ve won a minor victory against your opponent.

So what about protection? This is probably the most often cited reason for betting that is not
value or a bluff, but it is in fact a consequence of betting for value rather than a reason for betting itself.
When we have a hand like J976 on J92hh in PLO we are betting for value, but additionally we receive
some protection from hands like AK82 that will fold to our bet, but still have 8 outs against us. While we
would certainly prefer that this hand call our bet, if our opponent will only ever put in money with this
hand when they improve to beat us, we would rather they fold right now. In this way, even strong hands
can fulfill the second part of the bluffing definition as they cause an opponent to sacrifice equity.

Only a hand that is strong enough to get value is worthy of protection.

The caveat to this rule occurs in extremely passive games. When playing against passive
opposition who almost never bluff raise, betting for protection has more merit because it prevents
equity realization​. ​Another way of stating this is that all hands have a claim to the pot and if your
opponent will choose to fold all of his weak hands rather than fight you for his small share of the pot,
you might as well make him fold.

This logic breaks down as soon as your opponents are capable of bluff check-raising.

What about betting for information? Poker is a game of hidden information so it would seem
logical that acquiring more information would be a good idea. This is roughly the same
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 27

misunderstanding as the notion of betting for protection. Information is simply a consequence of betting
rather than a reason for betting itself. If you bet as a bluff and get called, you gather some information
about your opponent’s hand. We now know that he thinks his hand is profitable to call on this ​board
texture​, but perhaps not strong enough to raise for value or appropriate for bluff raising. If we bet as a
bluff and get raised, we can happily fold because we now have the information that we are either way
behind a strong value hand or may not be doing so well against another bluff.

What happens when we bet a hand like second pair for information? Now how do we feel when
we get raised? Are you really happy with the information you’ve received? And furthermore, can you
really trust that information? Your opponent could clearly have stronger hands than you do, but he also
might have some draws that you’re currently beating. You could raise and make him fold his draws, but
then you may put all your money in against a ​set​ and be ​drawing dead​.​ You could also call, but now
you’re stuck playing a big pot with a medium strength hand against either strong value or draws that will
continue to fire big bets. This is an example of putting yourself in a ​slightly ahead / way behind​ scenario
and should be avoided at all costs.

How about betting to end the hand? To be honest, I don’t even know what this means. If we are
betting as a bluff to get our opponent to fold stronger hands, this makes sense, but why would we ever
want to end the hand if we were betting for value? Isn’t the point of a ​value bet​ to get called or raised
by a hand that is worse than ours?

Another oft cited reason for betting is because we were the preflop raiser. While it’s true that
the preflop raiser will often have strong hands that want to value bet and thus will often want to bluff,
there’s no rule that says we must bet hands that we raised preflop. Some hands would much rather
check and raise, call, or fold. If you worry that your opponent will ​stab​ ​too often if you check, then you
should simply check your good hands and raise this player often.

The final non-value and non-bluffing reason for betting is “to prevent being bluffed.” This is also
called a “​blocking bet​” or what I call an “​indifference​ prevention bet” and can only be used as out of
position ​(there’s no need to block your opponent from betting when you’re in position and can check
back)​. There are many complicated explanations for a bet like this, but it is almost always a small bet
designed to make it hard for the IP player to raise you, when against a check, he would bluff you. While I
acknowledge that this is sometimes a viable strategy, beginners misapply it and end up making large
mistakes as a result. I would encourage you to stick to betting for value or as a bluff – and if you think
your opponent bluffs too much, simply check and call those bluffs.

Basic Hand Reading Techniques

Hand reading in poker is the place where ruthless logic and unquantifiable intuition intersect.
When done well, it can appear magical. Like any other skill, hand reading is just a series of techniques
stacked on top of each other like bricks with innate talent as the mortar. You can stack the bricks pretty
high by themselves, but to get to the very highest levels, you’ll need talent to glue them all together.

Below are four techniques that can serve as foundational pieces in your hand-reading high rise
(notice I didn’t say shack or studio apartment). Master them, but recognize that these are just the first
steps and will later evolve into more sophisticated techniques.
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 28

Value Targeting
Value Targeting​ is a basic technique that can help the aspiring poker player think about specific
hands which they would like to call. Andrew Brokos named this technique and it is useful for players
who can recognize the reasons for betting, but are not quite ready to visualize their opponent’s full
range​.

The idea is to select one or two average hands that represent our opponent’s full range. These
hands act as stand ins for our opponent’s full range, so we can more easily visualize how we should go
about getting value. Let’s consider an example:

We open raise with AAQ3 on the button, get called by the BB and ​c-bet​ on a KT2r flop in PLO
and get called again. The turn is 2x.

PLO ranges are often voluminous and intimidating to analyze, so let’s consider some average
hands. First, what sets might our opponent hold? Villain won’t have many combinations of 22. A lot of
villain’s KK and TT will have raised on the flop as well as his KT. Next, what two pair hands? Villain can
have some K2 and T2, but most of the 2xxx that didn’t have other drawing components will have folded.
That leaves one pair hands and draws. Most likely, villain will hold a lot of Kxxx. Additionally, while some
of the wraps like AJQ or QJ9 may have raised, most of the QJ will call. In my eyes, villain’s two most likely
holdings are Kxxx or QJ. Take a moment and consider what your exact hand would like to do against
those particular holdings.

Kxxx has almost no chance to beat us. Even KT99 only has 6 outs. Given that fact, we would
really like this hand to keep playing. Since Kxxx is ​top pair​, it’s probably unlikely to ever bluff us, so
checking and trying to catch bluffs doesn’t seem ideal. Checking also doesn’t ever give us the chance to
bet turn, get called, and then bet river hoping to get called by worse. Even if this is an infrequent
occurrence (we will probably have to check and show down on K, Q, T, 9), leaving ourselves the option is
highly valuable.

QJ has only a few outs as well. Even if villain has a hand like QJ95 which didn’t check-raise the
flop, they still have only 8 outs since we hold one of their queens. We also have at least some ​implied
odds​ ​on an ace river since we make the nut full house when they make the nut straight. This hand may
try to bluff us on a ​blank​ river if we check back the turn and give it a free shot at its equity. This hand is
also likely to call our bet.

Clearly an ​overpair​ with a straight draw is strong enough to go for value here, but how big
should we bet? This will require knowledge of your opponent. The more they like to call, the larger we
can bet. However, if we don’t have knowledge of this particular opponent’s tendencies, we’ll need to
make our best approximation of the average player’s calling threshold. My feeling is that betting the full
size of the pot will just cause too many hands like weak top pair or QJT to find excuses to fold. As a
default, I would pick a smaller size, probably around half the pot.

Bluff Targeting
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 29

This​ is just the complimentary technique to Value Targeting. We are striving to identify the most
likely hand that villain can have which he is likely to fold. As you get better at this technique, you’ll
probably want to expand beyond “most likely hand” to more nuanced categories like “most likely draw”
or “most likely made hand.” The more nuance you add here, the closer you get to approximating your
opponent’s actual holdings.

Here’s an example from PLO to further illustrate the point:

We hold Ah Jd Td 8s on Kh 8h 7h. This is an excellent bluffing hand and we bluff the flop. What
are we targeting? Well we’re certainly not going to make a flush fold to one bet. We also won’t get sets
or two pair to fold either. That doesn’t mean our bluff is bad though. We should just set a more realistic
target. We can absolutely get QQ to fold, we can fold weak 7xxx hands and 8xxx hands, and maybe even
a Kxxx hand that has nothing else going for it. Once we get called and see the 2s turn, with this hand we
can bluff again thanks to our ​nut flush blocker​. Again we probably won’t make someone fold a flush or a
set, but a weak two pair may start to get worried and some players may fold them. Top pair hands can
definitely fold now. When we see the 3s river, we should fire a third ​barrel​ and target some stronger
hands. We won’t make the 2​nd​ or 3​rd​ nut flush fold, but a very weak flush should be very concerned. Sets
will also be quite worried and many will likely fold.

Some readers may point out, “My opponents call with everything! There’s no way they will ever
fold the hands you’re targeting.” That may be true, in which case you shouldn’t bluff as much and should
value bet them more. Be careful though. Statements like “You can’t bluff at small stakes” or “My
opponents never fold” can be wildly misleading and completely lack nuance. Some players may call too
often on the flop and turn, but fold almost everything on the river. Some may fold way too often on the
flop, but after that, they’ll nearly always call. Considering the specific situation is also important. Maybe
after showing strength, your opponent will never fold, but in limped pots, they put up less resistance
than a wet noodle. Remember to always try to move your thinking from general to specific.

Generalizations are limiting. The more nuance we can add to our thinking, the better we’ll play.

Excluding Irrelevant Hands

One of the most common errors I’ve observed from players who have just begun to hand read is
that they spend too much time fretting over irrelevant hands. This concern can come in two flavors:

1. Fear that villain has a hand which he can almost never have.
2. Being fearful of hands which ​cooler​ you.

Let’s address the first case with a hand example:

In NLH, a player raises QTs preflop and the big blind calls. The player bets the flop and turn on
Qh Td 3h, 6c, and the river reveals the 4d. If you’ve been around a poker table a few times, you’ve
probably witnessed a player in the bettor’s shoes cursing their luck. “Two straights hit the river! I can’t
believe this s@#$,” their bitter declaration crashes with a thud alongside their fist and upturned cards.
Have you ever noticed that this player almost always still collects the pot?
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 30

Consider this hand again and ask yourself what hands actually beat QT here and how likely they
actually are. 75 and 52 both beat QT, but how can villain possibly hold these hands? He would have had
to call with all of them preflop, check and call out of position with nothing on the flop, check-call the
turn with just a ​gutshot​ and then make the straight on the river. The only hands that could even
plausibly do this are 7h 5h and 5h 2h. The chances of his opponent holding these exact two card
combinations in his hand are extremely small.

QT also loses to ​sets​, but how likely are those? When someone holds a Q or a T in their hand
and there is another on board, it becomes extremely unlikely their opponent can have two queens or
tens in their hand (just how unlikely will be discussed later in the book). Also, mightn’t QQ and TT have
raised preflop? 33 is plausible, but it should have check-raised the flop or turn, so it’s not very likely.
Both 66 and 44 and highly implausible. Both would need to check-call the flop with very weak pairs, 66
would need to not check-raise the turn, and 44 would have to check-call the turn again!

I imagine some of readers will protest, saying “I regularly play with players so loose and crazy
they can have any 75 or 52 here.” That may be true and if so, be thankful. Given this flop, 75 and 52
make a straight less than 1% of the time. If you play with players that regularly call these hands, yes
you’ll lose a big pot like this one time in one hundred, but the other 99 times you’ll win a small or
medium sized pot. The wins will overwhelm the losses many times over.

Here’s an example of the irrational fear of coolers:

In PLO, a player open raises ​QJJ2ds​ on the button with 100bb and calls a 3B from the big blind,
who is a wild and aggressive player. The flop comes As Jd 3d and the 3Ber bets half pot, BTN calls and
faces a big bet on 8h turn. BTN chooses to just call. Later, he explained, “I was just really worried he had
AA here.”

Unlike the previous example, AA is a completely logical and realistic hand for the 3Ber to hold.
However, it’s completely irrelevant here. That’s because our hand is so strong that it can get value from
numerous other hands, including 88, 33, AJ, and most importantly, A with a ​flush draw​. It’s certainly
true that when we shove the turn, we may run into AA and lose almost every time. That’s supposed to
happen. By not ​shoving​, we give hands like 88, 33, and AJ a chance to avoid stacking off on flush rivers
and we give hands like Ad Kd Qh 5h a free shot to beat us when they would have gladly called our shove.

While we should always try to visualize what hands our opponents can hold, it’s also important
to recognize which hands we shouldn’t worry about and focus on making the most money we can
against the most relevant hands.

Preflop Basics
Preflop play is the foundation for the remainder of the poker hand. Any mistakes we made
preflop will reverberate throughout the rest of the hand, making the upper floors of our poker structure
unstable. While we will dive into the nuances of preflop play in much more depth, I wanted to give you a
basic primer early on so you could start competing immediately.
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 31

Is Preflop Entirely Different from Later Streets?

Just as we’ve discussed, we want to determine whether we’re betting for value or as a bluff
before we make a bet. How is this relevant preflop? Without the board, how can we know whether
we’re betting for value or as a bluff?

In some cases, it will be obvious. In both NLH and PLO, when we hold AA, we are betting for
value since we have the preflop ​nuts​. If we raise with an extremely weak hand like 72o in NLH or 8632r
5
in PLO we’re bluffing. What about a hand like 75s in NLH or JT74ss in PLO? Are these bluffs or are they
value hands? Well, the truth is, we just don’t know yet. Preflop, all hands fall along a spectrum of value
to bluff and the flop will redefine the true value hands and the true bluffs and throw plenty of hands
into the middle. Here are a couple visualizations to help you conceptualize this shift:

The next example uses the exact same board but instead utilizes PLO hands instead of NLH
hands. Try to estimate where certain hands will fall in the PLO distribution.

5
There’s basically no circumstance where we would want to play hands this weak. If we imagine the number
floating over the top of them, it is certain to be negative. There’s no reason to play hands that lose us money.
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 32

Notice how far down AA falls on this particular flop in PLO while in NLH it stays near the value
region. This leads us to an interesting conclusion about both games:

Preflop hand strength tends to translate to flop hand strength in NLH, while preflop hand strength and
flop hand strength are only loosely connected in PLO.

When playing PLO, try to think about ​overpairs​ less as their own class of strong hands like in
NLH and instead think about them as draws to various hands like top set or hands like overpair with a
flush draw or open-ended straight draw. These are genuinely strong hands and more similar to an
overpair in NLH. When we miss the draw to a set or overpair+draw, the hand plays much more like
middle pair in NLH: a reasonable hand, but one that doesn’t want to play a large pot.

Here are two more lessons that we can take away from this chapter:

Strong hands preflop are hands that, on average, end up as strong hands postflop.

And:
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 33

Any hand can become a value hand, but most often, weak hands preflop will turn into weak bluffs
later on.

Preflop Guidelines
At this stage in your poker development, it would probably be too daunting to give you charts of
hands to play from every position, so we will start to build your intuition with general principles. As you
improve, you’ll start to develop a feel for what hands you can play in various situations. Once that
happens, you’ll be ready to dive into more specifics. For now, just remember:

Any mistake you make preflop will be felt throughout that rest of the hand.

Preflop mistakes are like the serial killers in horror movies. You can run and hide and
occasionally you’ll make the lucky escape, but they are always a few steps behind you. Waiting…

Now that you’re sufficiently afraid of the dark, how do we avoid preflop mistakes? Playing ​tight
is a great way to start. The only way you can effectively take advantage of a tight player is by folding
strong hands to them. As you probably already know, low stakes players don’t like to fold strong hands.
This leads us to our next principle:

Playing too tight is almost always better than playing too loose.

When in doubt, play tight. Tight players are the hardest nuts to crack. As you improve, the dollar
values above all your hands will increase and you’ll have the opportunity to play more hands, but
whenever you feel outclassed, rusty, or confused, play tight.

Below are some slightly more nuanced recommendations about what hands to play in early and
late position. This is also a great opportunity for some high value practice. Deal yourself a few hands and
decide in what situations you would play them, if any. Once you’ve done this, read the next chapter and
refine your thought process using my recommendations.

As the Raise First In (RFI) Player

When the action has folded to us, we almost always want to enter the pot with a ​raise​. This
gives us the best opportunity to win the blinds immediately and build a pot with our strong hands while
also disguising our weaker hands. We’re happy to build a pot when we have a chance to play in position.

There are two critical considerations here. How large should we raise and what hands should we
play? Since our sizing (the number of big blinds we choose to raise) dictates how many hands we can
play and not the other way around, let’s start there. We want to pick a size that will give us a reasonable
opportunity to win the blinds without risking too much money with our weak hands. Raising three times
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 34

the big blind is a reasonable default. If players fold the blinds a lot, then feel free to go smaller and play
more hands. If players call a lot then you’ll want to raise larger and play stronger hands to punish their
loose play.

If we look back at our earlier discussion of position, we know that we should be playing a lot of
hands from the button and very few hands from UTG, but which hands do we want to raise? Let’s take a
look at each game and generate some guidelines:

NLH

● When we are in early position, we mostly play pocket pairs and ​suited​ hands in ​NLH​. We might
not even play AQo sometimes. It’s okay to raise very coordinated hands like 76s, but nothing
weaker like 96s, J5s, or even Q9s.
● On the button, we can probably raise almost all suited hands except the really awful ones like
94s. Hands like A2o and K9o can occasionally make straights and are okay to play.

PLO

● When we are in early position, we need to be really tight in ​PLO​. Position is even more valuable
in this game. Even a hand like KK97ss won’t make the cut. If you play a pocket pair, it has to be
double suited​ and ​coordinated​. A hand like T998ds is definitely a playable hand. You want to
have an A-high suit in your hand because making the nut flush is much more valuable than
making the second nut flush. Fold a hand like AKJ7 suited to the king, but if you give it an A-high
suit, it becomes playable.
● On the button, you can play lots of different types of hands, but always look for hands that can
make straights and flushes. Most double suited hands will be fine on the button. Pocket pairs
that can make a few straights like TT82ss are okay and coordinated hands like Q976ss generally
make the cut too.

Against Limpers
In low stakes games, it’s quite common for there to be one or more limpers before you. While
these players are likely making subpar decisions, it’s easy to go overboard trying to take advantage of
them. Raising to isolate the weak limper and play a large pot with him can be an effective strategy, but
we can’t do this indiscriminately. Here are a few recommendations that apply to both games equally:

NLH and PLO

● Raising to isolate the limper is a nice decision and often allows you to play a larger pot in
position with a player who has shown weakness.
● It’s important not to forget about position. You can ​isolation raise​ way more often when you’re
on the button than when you’re in middle position.
● Overlimping​ is often a reasonable option, especially in PLO where limpers will almost call. If you
see a hand that’s strong enough to play, but it’s really a value hand, consider overlimping.
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 35

● If you are in the blinds and face several limpers, only consider raising strong hands. In most
cases, it’s better to accept a cheap flop with a big pot than to try to win the hand from out of
position with 3 other players in the hand.

In the Blinds

Playing well from the blinds is always a challenge, but especially hard in PLO where position
counts for even more than it does in NLH. My recommendation is to play tight. This is especially true in
PLO when there are 3 or 4 players in the hand. Lots of hands that look like calls will result in you being
over-flushed​ or ​over -setted​ at some point.

Beware of the pot odds trap.

Many players will think, “I’m getting great odds to call with these four players in the pot,” and
while that’s true, you also have to beat four other hands from out of position. This means that hands
that often look like they are getting the right odds are really just hands waiting to suck you in and siphon
off your stack.

● Play close attention to the position of the raiser and try to guess if they are playing many or few
hands. The tighter they are, the tighter you should be.
● Against players playing lots of hands, three betting​ ​is a great option. If they fold, you
immediately win the pot and don’t have to play out of position. If they call a lot, a flop bet will
often get them to fold, winning you an even bigger pot. Use suited and high, connected hands
for this and occasionally throw in some lower coordinated hands like T975ds and 75s.

Relative Hand Strength vs Absolute Hand Strength

Properly identifying a hand’s relative strength is one of the primary skills which separates an
aspiring poker thinker from the hopeless amateur. To fully elucidate this concept, we need to first define
two terms:

1. Absolute Hand Strength​: How strong our hand is within the hierarchy of all possible hands. A
flush beats a straight so it falls above it in absolute hand strength.
2. Relative Hand Strength​: This is a far subtler concept. A flush has greater absolute hand strength
than a straight, but a flush is far from strong in ​no limit hold’em​ when there are four hearts on
the board already and we hold the lowly deuce of hearts. Conversely, two pair may be
particularly strong even on a board where a straight is possible. If our opponent is very unlikely
to hold the straight or would have played it differently, he or she functionally removes that part
of the absolute hand strength hierarchy from his or her ​range​. ​This means that hands which
would have been concerned about facing stronger hands now have less to fear which elevates
their relative hand strength, allowing us to play them more aggressively.
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 36

The key skill here is to recognize how our opponent’s actions constrain the possible hands he or
she could have. For instance, if your opponent tells you they never play a hand with a diamond in it, you
need not worry about the strength of your JhTh on KdQd9d. You have the effective nuts. Of course, this
is an extremely contrived example, so let’s consider something more plausible.

Let’s imagine a highly fearful opponent that is perpetually terrified of being outdrawn. Every
time he or she makes a strong hand, he or she immediately starts raising and re-raising. What does this
say about the relative hand strength of our KQ on K82? Well if our opponent simply checks and calls our
flop bet, we now can remove all better hands from their list of possible holdings. We can do this as
follows:

● AA, KK, and AK would have re-raised us preflop, thus we can remove those as possible
candidates that can beat us.
● 88, 22, K8, K2 would all raise our flop bet, so when our opponent calls, he or she cannot
have them. There is a good chance K2 would have folded preflop as well.
● 82 is very likely to be folded preflop.

So while we only hold a solitary pair which is only the 9​th​ nuts on this flop, since our opponent
cannot hold anything stronger after calling our bet, our relative hand strength is extremely strong and
thus we should play this hand as if it were KK.

Single Raised Pots vs 3Bet Pots

It’s natural to be confused or intimidated by three-bet pots when just starting out in poker. The
pots are large and you’ll often be forced to play out of position with one pair hands as the ​board texture
changes and big bets start to go in. Let’s observe some basic facts about three-bet pots so they seem
less daunting and then talk about them in the context of each game so we can start to build some
familiarity with them.

The first note is that a three bet pot is simply a normal pot with shallower stacks. Try not to get
caught up in the fact that there is x amount of dollars in the pot. Just think of the pot and your stack
purely in terms of the​ ​Stack to Pot Ratio​ we discussed earlier. If you started with 100bb stacks then
imagine there are 10 wagering units in the pot and 56 wagering units in your stack. This won’t change
whether you are playing $1000-$2000 blinds in the highest stake game in the world or one peanut-two
6
peanuts at home with friends. Next, remember that you almost always have a ​range advantage​.​ We’ll
talk more about ranges later in the book, but for now just remember that on almost any flop, your
average hand will be stronger than their average hand. Of course, this doesn’t mean that they can’t out
flop you, but that generally your overpairs will be better than theirs and your ​top pairs​ will have higher
kickers and even your weak hands will often be stronger than their weak hands.

If you generally have more strong hands than your opponent will, that means you get to bluff
quite a lot. This is especially true if your bluffs are ​high equity bluffs​. By that I mean bluffs or draws that
improve to better hands often. In NLH, an example would be AK on QT2r. This hand has a gutshot

6
In Dubai, it was illegal to have “gambling paraphernalia” aka poker chips, but my non-poker-playing friends
wanted to challenge me to a game one evening so we improvised with a jar of almonds and blinds of one
almond-two almonds. Stacks tended to disappear as our hunger increased.
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 37

straight draw which by itself is not a lot of equity. Remember though, hitting an Ace or King is relatively
likely to give you the best hand, too. In this case, we can think of AK as having more like 10 outs (3 for an
Ace, 3 for a King, and 4 for the Jack) than 4 outs.

This idea is even true on low card boards in some of the worst scenarios we can imagine. Using
another NLH example, imagine you have Kh Qh on 6h 4d 2d. You only have two ​overcards​ and there’s a
straight on board. Isn’t your hand absolute trash? Well, first of all, 53 is the only hand that makes a
straight and it’s very possible your opponent never has that hand because he either folded preflop or
folded to your three bet. Additionally, even when your opponent calls a flop bet, you’ll still have your
king and queen outs. It’s true that the king and queen of diamonds also bring a flush which makes them
lower quality outs, but only when your opponent has a flush. Often, he will simply have a hand like 88
that wants to check down to the river.

From these examples we can conclude:

Hands that we 3B will often have high cards in them. Having cards higher than the board gives us extra
chances to improve.

Now let’s look at some individual strategy advice for each game based on what flops and misses
us. Generally, the better a board is for us, the more we want to bet, so when I describe a board as
excellent, think “bet a lot” Board textures change based on the exact positions involved, but here are
some general guidelines:

PLO Flops:
● Ace high boards are always your friend. As a general rule, they will always be excellent for the
3Ber. The only one that might be merely good rather than excellent are the A-high boards with
low straights like A42.
● High ​Straight boards​ like AKJ are quite good for you. You have lots of straights and way more
sets and two pairs than your opponent.
● High card boards like QJ5 or KT7 are generally quite good for you because you 3B hands that
have high pairs and high cards that can make top pair and draws or top two.
● Low card boards like 762 aren’t great for you, but sometimes can be okay. The earlier the
position of the player who called your 3B, the less likely he is to have hands that hit this board.
● Low to medium straight boards like 986 are not your friend and you probably want to check
everything, even the nuts, to let your opponent bluff you. The more straights are available on
the board, the worse it is for you (987 allows 3 straights, 975 only allows one straight).
● Monotone boards​ are kind of neutral. You have some nut flushes​, b ​ ut a lot of your other hands
got weaker. You won’t want to do tons of betting on the flop and will want to have at least a
card of the suit in your hand to help lower the chance he has a flush.
● Paired boards​ will mostly depend on the pair and how coordinated the board is. KK2 will be way
better for the 3Ber than 998 with a FD.
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 38

NLH Flops
● Low boards like 742 or even 642 tend to miss both players which leaves the 3Ber with more
overpairs. Even your bluffs like A3 or A2 end up being decent bluffs or hands with show down
value.
● Low paired boards tend to also miss both players which emphasizes that the 3Ber has AA or KK.
Higher paired boards like QQJ tend to be good for the 3Ber as well.
● A-high boards are deceptive. If the caller can have lots of hands like A2o, then A high boards
won’t be so great for you with the exception on AKx or AQx boards. They aren’t terrible boards
for the 3Ber, but just not the best around.
● Monotone boards tend to be a little better in NLH than in PLO. That’s because a hand like AcKh
on Qc 7c 4c can improve to beat Kc Jc in NLH and hands like Ac Ad are strong for the 3Ber. Still,
we don’t want to be too aggressive here because the caller can have lots of flushes too.
● Middling straight boards, especially those that allow lots of straights like 987 are going to be
pretty bad for the 3Ber.

Small Stakes Strategy

All of the information up to this point could be conceived as the atomic structure of a poker
hand. These essential building blocks apply to every hand of poker you will ever play and will emphasize
themselves to lessor or greater extents depending on the specific hand. You’ve now learned the
equivalent of the letters that make up the alphabet of the language of poker. While this should give you
a solid foundation on which to start, it won’t be enough to take you to the level of fluency.

To begin the march towards fluency, we must now examine how you should construct your
strategy and how the information discussed in the previous sections informs your decisions. Take a few
moments and consider how you would define your strategy if you had to write it out as a research
paper.

If you found the above exercise challenging, you are not alone. While the best ​high stakes
professionals could easily write a 100 page doctoral thesis on their strategy, most beginners will struggle
to write more than a few sentences and often those will be fraught with logical errors.

Let’s start by considering some global truths. If you are playing small stakes poker (or even a live
high stakes private game among friends), the average skill level of players in your game will likely be
quite low. This is a wonderful way to start because it allows you to start winning money more quickly
than if you had to face staunch competition. While there are a variety of different types of weak players,
generally they all make a few consistent errors:

Weak players like to play too many hands preflop.

 Poker Foundations Page​ | 39

And:

Weak players dislike folding reasonable hands.

Given these statements, how should we construct our strategy?

First, we shouldn’t strive to make these players fold strong hands. By definition, most weak
players lack an understanding of ​relative hand strength​ and will generally view hands like flushes and
straights in ​absolute​ terms (Flush > Straight > Three of a Kind) rather than in more relative terms
(holding 54 on a K8765 against a player betting three times is not a particularly strong straight). These
players are the equivalent of the rock-paper-scissors player that has an affinity for rock. Trying to
bludgeon them with scissors is not likely to be successful. What will be successful is throwing a lot of
“paper.” In this example, “paper” corresponds to ​value betting​.

Imagine that you face a player that will never fold two pair on the river in hold’em. He doesn’t
care how much strength you’ve shown throughout the hand or what position you opened from at the
table. Two pair is the nuts to him and he cannot be convinced otherwise. You arrive at the river with a
hand that can beat two pair after betting the flop and turn. Your opponent probably would have folded
flop and turn with some weaker hands so the chances of him having a strong hand have increased
significantly. Does it make sense to bet $50 into a pot of $100 to ensure that you get called when you
have $250 in your stack? While he may have weaker hands that will only call $50, targeting the strongest
hands for value with a big ​overbet​ shove ​all-in​ is the best choice.

This is a great time to double check your logic. If you feel resistance towards making a shove like
this, then you should reexamine your thought process for contradictions. The statements “I want to bet
small and get called” and “My opponent never folds two pair” cannot co-exist simultaneously except in
some very rare circumstances like a ​tournament bubble​.

You might conclude that you should never try to bluff such a player. This couldn’t be farther
from the truth. You shouldn’t try to bluff such a player off strong hands by betting multiple times.
However, remember the other generalization we made? Most weak players like to play too many hands
preflop. This results in them arriving at the flop with far too many weak hands which miss the board and
are likely to fold. Bluffing them on the flop will be excellent and bluffing them again on the turn
(especially with good draws) can also be a decent choice. Just don’t fire on the river unless you have the
goods.

Putting It All Together: Part 1

After reading all of the previous sections, you should have begun constructing the foundations
of a poker thought process. I recommend that you put this book down for a week or two and play as
much poker as you can. Take some detailed notes on your thought process in a poker journal, being as
reflective and self-critical as possible. Then compare that journal to the hands that follow. Does your
thought process look like the thought process outlined in this section? If so, congratulations, you are
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 40

well on your way. If not, no problem. Try to find chapters that you didn’t fully grasp, reread them, and
then repeat the process.

One final note: It’s important to stay humble. While I am outlining a basic poker thought process
– which is essentially the same as the foundation of a building – the best players in the world have six or
seven additional layers of thought stacked on top of this foundation. The person who is most vulnerable
to overestimating their abilities is not the one who knows nothing about a subject, nor the one who
know a great deal. Rather it is the individual who knows a little and doesn’t know enough to know how
much they don’t know.

Don’t let that intimidate you either. A skyscraper would be worthless without a rock solid
foundation. Happy building.

Hand 1
You sit down at a 25 cent / 50 cent No Limit Hold’em game online and are dealt into the big
blind. The action folds to the button who opens for $1.25 and the small blind folds. You look down and
see that you have 86 suited in clubs. You consider your options:

While this hand doesn’t make quite as many straights as 76 or 87 and doesn’t make high flushes
like A5s, you note that the hand has a great deal of ​pot equity​ ​against a hand even as strong as AK. You
are uncomfortable about the fact that you will be playing ​out-of-position​ for the rest of the hand, but
remember that thanks to his ​position​, button has an incentive to play a large number of hands and may
even have worse hands than yours such as 74s. Lastly, you recall that you are in the ​Big Blind​ which
means you already have money in the pot. That means your ​pot odds​ ​are better than they usually would
be in other circumstances. Given all of this information, you consider the ​goal of poker​ ​and conclude
that this hand is probably winning you money and decide not to fold.

Now that you’ve rejected a poor option, it’s time to weigh the choice of whether to re-raise or
to simply call. If you re-raise, your hand clearly can’t get called (and almost never raised) by worse so it’s
not a ​value​ raise. The advantage of re-raising is that your raise may produce ​fold equity​ ​and get your
opponent to lay down a stronger hand like QTo which makes it a viable ​bluffing​ ​candidate.

Despite the previous arguments in favor of re-raising, you feel torn because your hand is only
8-high and a little less strong than 87s. You also consider the fact that you are new to the table and don’t
know anything about your opponent. Since neither decision seems to win significantly more money than
the other decision, you decide to take the more circumspect route and call. While being overly cautious
can often hurt you in poker and “playing it safe” should not be a part of your thought process, when
you’re new to the game, erring on the side of avoiding unclear bluffs is probably wise. This is especially
true at small stakes when players tend to call too much.

You decide to call and see a Kc 7s 5h flop. You check to the button who spends a long time and
bets about $0.75 into a pot of around $2.50 (rake has been taken out and low stakes tend to rake a high
percentage of the pot). You now are faced with a decision once again.

You stop to examine your pot odds and equity. You have an ​open-ended straight draw​ which
means that you have 8 outs to make a straight. This means that you will make your straight about 16%
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 41

of the time on the turn and 32% of the time if you see a turn and river. If your opponent had bet $0.75
into a pot of $2.25, he would be laying you 4 to 1, but since the pot is a little bigger, your odds are
slightly better. Getting 4 to 1 means you only have to win about 20% of the time and since his bet is
even smaller you’ll only need to win around 19%. Even though your hand will only become a straight
16% of the time on the turn and you need to win 19% of the time to justify calling, your opponent won’t
always bet the turn meaning that at least some of the time you’ll get to see a free river. In that case,
your hand will win far more than 19% of the time. Additionally, you’ll only need to win a tiny bit when
you actually hit your hand to justify calling. Therefore calling has to be profitable which means we can’t
fold.

While many players would stop their analysis here, you decided to dig deeper. What about the
option to raise? Firstly, our opponent thought a long time before betting. Would he really think a long
time before betting a hand like 77 or AA? Those seem like obvious value bets. He could be trying to trick
you or was considering trapping, but it’s more likely that he is just unsure what to do with a weaker
hand. Secondarily, his bet sizing on the flop was rather small. Again, this could be deception on his part,
but generally at these stakes, bet sizes mean what they appear to mean. In this case, small probably
means weak.

After having weighed your two options, you finally conclude that the chance your opponent
folds and gives you the pot is so high that raising is the better option. Even if your read was wrong in this
case and he does call, you still have a decent chance to win with your open-ended straight draw.

You raise $3 and your opponent clicks fold approximately half a second after the server displays
your raise and you scoop the pot.

Analysis

Bonus points if you…

● Noticed you had a backdoor ​flush draw​ on the flop.
● Calculated the ​pot odds​ exactly instead of estimating.
● Calculated what ​implied odds​ you would need in order to at least break even.

Hand 2
You are seated with $200 at a live 9-handed $1-2 PLO table at your local casino. You get dealt
total garbage that can’t be profitably played for the two ​orbits​ ​and consistently make the most
profitable decision, which is to fold. You reach the small blind again and are dealt 4422 ​double suited​.
You immediately recognize this hand as a playable one after what feels like an eternity of folding and
feel your heartrate quicken. Your mood slowly erodes as you notice the first to act player comes in for a
pot size raise and receives 5 callers including the button. While the temptation to flick in a call is almost
overwhelming, you pause for a few moments and consider your options.

You quickly reject raising. While your hand looks attractive, there’s no chance it can be a favorite
against so many hands.
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 42

You notice that the pot odds you are being laid are tremendous. You need to call $6 in order to
win $45 (before rake). That’s 7.5 to 1, which means that your hand needs to win only about 14% of the
time to show a profit. Almost any hand must be a profitable call in that scenario, right? Still, ideas
lingering in your subconscious keep gnawing at you.

You think back to one of the early chapters in this book and consider your ​position​. It can’t get
much worse than being in the ​Small Blind​ with 6 players i​ n position​ on you and one more left to act.
This must make some otherwise profitable hands unprofitable.

Next you consider what kind of hands your hand can make. Certainly you can flop ​sets​ which will
be a well above average outcome and may allow you to win a decent sized pot. You recognize this
scenario as one where you realize your ​implied odds​.

However, despite your enthusiasm you identify that in a 7 or 8 way pot in PLO, it’s quite easy in
for your opponents to have higher pairs. That means that some percentage of the time when you make
your set of 4s on QJ4cc, one of your opponents will have QQ or JJ and you will lose a big pot.

Last, you consider the two other components to your hand: your ability to make both straights
and flushes. While both of those qualities are incredibly desirable, your excitement begins to evaporate
when you realize how little value your 4 high flush will have in a large ​multiway pot​. Flopping a straight
will certainly be a better outcome, but will only happen rarely and is still no bargain when so many
higher straights will be possible.

After a deliberation that takes long enough to annoy the table, you finally decide the most
profitable decision you can make is to fold. The BB calls and you watch the flop intensely. You silently
curse your luck when a flop of A53dd rolls off. ​Under the Gun​ pots and the button raises ​all-in​. You
nearly fall backwards out of your chair. This is the scenario you’ve been dreaming of for the last hour!
Under the Gun proudly rolls over AAK3 and the button shows 9d 7d 6h 4h, a hand you recognize that
probably shouldn’t be played in his shoes. The board runs out Kx Jx and the AA scoops your pot.

In the depths of your misery, you tell the table you folded 4422 preflop and an elderly
gentleman at the far end of the table sagely replies, “Well, I guess you shouldn’t have folded then,” and
the whole table has a condescending chuckle at your expense.

Later, you tell your friend the professional all about your misfortune. He cocks his head to one
side and smiles

“You would have been a huge underdog.”

“Of course I wasn’t, I had the nuts!” you say, your righteous indignation frothing.

The professional pulls out his smart phone, opens an ​Equity Calculator​ a​ nd enters your hand,
the board, and your opponents’ hands and then shows you his phone.

“You had less than 17% equity. Getting all-in would have lost you a ton of money in the long
run.”

Analysis
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 43

The temptation to be ​results-oriented​ in poker is overwhelming without proper training. The

temptation is even stronger at a live poker table where you receive so few hands per hour and are
bombarded with the unsolicited thoughts of less-than-stellar poker minds. Here is what you need to
take away from this example:

● Unless you have psychic powers (why are you playing small stakes in that case?), your decisions
should be made with all the information currently available to you, not future information that
is unknowable. The correct decision preflop is correct regardless of what flop comes.
● Keep your brain active. It would be incredibly easy to flick in a call without much thought with
this hand. Challenge yourself to work through the process outlined in this book. At first it will be
exhausting, but gradually the process will become so second nature that you will consider all
the information in the previous hand almost automatically.
● You won’t ever win a huge pot by making a good fold, just as avoiding a cheeseburger and
picking a salad won’t immediately make you thin. If you do it one hundred times however, the
cumulative results will show.
● These are about the best case and worst case scenarios when trying to determine the
profitability of a play. Here we flop the nuts and two players without the nuts go all-in and the
result is that our flop equity is terrible (we would put in about 1/3​rd​ of the money and only get
about 1/6​th​ of it back).

This particular example illustrates some essential concepts in PLO and also to some degree NLH:

● If you regularly find yourself in situations where you’re faced with a host of poor choices on one
street​, it’s likely that you made a mistake on the previous street. There are some spots in poker
where all your options are unfavorable, but often it means you should have gotten out of the
way on the previous street​.
● High cards are king. The punishments for playing low cards with low suits are often scenarios
like this one where you get ​coolered​ for all your money. Fight the temptation to chalk it up
purely to bad luck. Dodging a landmine is just as valuable to your bottom line as catching your
opponent with one.

Hand #3
You are on the button in the second level of a NLH tournament in your local casino. After a few
unlucky hands, your stack has been whittled down to 8,000 chips. The blinds are 50-100 and you look
down at Ac Ah and can already feel your luck starting to turn. The table folds around to you.

You raise to 300 or three times the big blind and the Big Blind alone calls. There is 650 in the pot.

The flop comes Kc 9h 6h and the Big Blind checks to you. You conclude that you still easily have
a hand that can get value, but not one strong enough to trap. Therefore, you bet 400 into a pot of 650
and hope to get called. Your opponent, who is an older gentleman in his early 60’s who doesn’t raise
often, quickly raises you to 1600.

Your revelry immediately dissipates into abject disgust as this hand turns from highly favorable
to one that is mediocre at best. Your ​absolute hand strength​ has not changed, but your ​relative hand
strength​ just plummeted. First you consider what your opponent can have: He is clearly representing a
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 44

strong hand, maybe a set or two pair, but the board is also so ​draw heavy​ ​that he could easily be
bluffing or ​semi-bluffing​ with a draw.

You consider your options: Your initial reaction is to re-raise and try to get all the money in
before the board becomes even more frightening. You conclude this can’t be right because you have
almost no outs against a set or two pair. Your next option is to call and play in position. This is the best
option against most opponents because you can see what comes on the turn, but given that this player
raised large and doesn’t raise very often, you consider the possibility that he only has really strong
hands. After about 20 seconds of emotional turmoil, you decide to fold.

Your opponent shows the table 99 and rakes in the pot. The best player at the table looks over
at you with a sly smile. You realize that he knows you just folded a strong hand and is already updating
his mental model to include you among the thinking players. This is one of the best compliments you will
ever receive while playing poker.

Analysis

There is no glory in folding. Even when you see your opponent’s hand and it becomes clear to
everyone that you outplayed your opposition, rarely will you receive the same kind of reaction as when
you make an “amazing” call (I placed parenthesis around “amazing” because in fact, many of those
spectacular calls are losing money, the bluffing player just happened to have a bluff this time). To play
winning poker, it’s essential to divorce yourself from the desire to make flashy or impressive plays.
There is certainly a time for them, but that’s only when they make you money.

Remember, you are playing poker to make money, not to please an audience.
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 45

Getting Deeper
Classifying Opponents
In most forms of competition, commentators place a lot of emphasis on style to create contrast
between competitors and to develop a narrative that’s engaging for the viewers. While style may vary in
physical sports due to different body types, in mental forms of competitions like poker, chess, or
Jeopardy, making the best move is almost always the correct style.

Trying to play a particular style will lead you to inadvertently make inferior decisions in order to
conform to the “rules” of that specific style. In some sense, style is an ever retreating concept that gets
pushed towards the margins as we learn about ​optimal play​. It can only exist where there are two
choices of exactly equal value, allowing the competitor to freely choose between them based on
preference. This is easily observable in chess where stylistic differences used to be vast and
unmistakable, but have diminished to the point where the top ten players in the world play games
barely distinguishable without seeing their names. Even a game like Jeopardy, which has seen a strategic
resurgence thanks to more aggressive betting and creative methods of hunting for daily doubles, was
probably just quite far from optimal play. This allowed a new series of players to come in and crush the
game by making higher ​EV​ decisions. Once this “style” is recognized as clearly superior, there will no
longer be any stylistic differences, just the right move and the wrong move.

In poker, your “style” is the one that makes the highest EV decisions regardless of whether that
decision is a call, fold, or raise. This way of playing is called a ​Nash Equilibrium​ and is the perfect
unexploitable strategy. Fortunately, or unfortunately, only computers will ever be able to play this way
because it involves betting hands at frequencies like 52.3% of the time and knowing every hand we
could ever play a certain way, knowing every hand our opponent could ever play this way, and exactly
the right way to ​maximize​ our expectation against their strategy.

Every human opponent you will ever play will deviate from this perfect strategy and will
therefore have weaknesses that you can attack. Your job is to come up with the best mental model of
their play and figure out how to reshape your game to take advantage of them. Another way of stating
this idea is that you can view your poker game as sculptor’s clay. Your shape is undefined and flexible.
The weaker your opponents are, the more they will be rigid and inflexible like a mold. Your job is to
adapt your play to be the exact counterpoint to their play.

In the section where I discuss small stakes strategy, I outline two consistent mistakes that
amateur players make and discuss how to exploit them. This is an intentional oversimplification to help
you get started. We are now going to examine opponent types from a more nuanced perspective. This is
once again an oversimplification as we ideally should be thinking about individual mistakes our
7
opponents are making at specific decision points rather than general classifications. Some amateur
players will also exhibit characteristics of one of these profiles, but have a few tendencies that fall in a

7
An example of a specific read a high stakes professional might have is that at 50bb his opponent double ​barrels
too ​merged​ on ​dynamic​ textures after c-betting flop and is therefore vulnerable to thinner value turn check
shoves).
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 46

completely different profile. So while the methodology I’m about to outline will be foundational for your
poker game, always challenge yourself to go deeper and develop more nuanced reads.

Below is an x and y axis upon which we can place two different spectrums:

Some players fall in love with the idea of style which causes them to make mistakes. A
prototypical example of this mistake is trying to play “loose aggressive” in a low stakes cash game or
tournament. Players in these games play far too many hands, make lots of poor calls, and do very little
hand reading. Their thought process rarely stretches beyond “I have ​top pair​” or “flushes are good
hands.” Against these players, trying to run big bluffs is virtually suicidal.

Think of your poker game as sculptor’s clay. Your shape is undefined and flexible. The weaker
your opponents are, the more they will be rigid and inflexible like a mold. Your job is to adapt and
conform your play to be the exact counterpoint to their play. If they call too much, you bluff less and
value bet more. If they 3B too often, you raise fewer hands and 4B wider. If they fold too often to your
continuation bets​, then you bet very often and maybe even trap with your best hands (the last thing AA
wants on A83r is too much fold equity).

I’ll leave you with a famous quote.

When asked by a reporter if he played a particular style, Phil Ivey responded, “Meh, I take what they
give me.”
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 47

Loose Passive
This will be one of the most common player types at low stakes games and is also quite common
at mid to high stakes live games. This player type seeks to win by playing lots of hands, calling lots of
bets postflop, and by getting to showdown. Their philosophy could probably be summarized as, “These
guys are crazy, I’m just going to let them try to bluff me,” or “I’m going to make a lot of money when my
draws start to come in.”

Because this player plays so many weak hands and likes to call so much, they are very
susceptible to ​thin value betting​. This is particularly effective on the flop and turn when draws are
available for this player to call. While generally we won’t make money bluffing this player, on very
draw-heavy boards when the river is a ​blank​ or brings in very few draws, we might find some profitable
bluffing opportunities. This player calls with so many draws that when most of them miss, he will end up
with weak hands on the river.

Another pattern I’ve noticed with loose players in general is that even the passive ones will
sometimes make wild bluffs. Imagine this loose passive player checking and calling flops and turns with
weak draws hand after hand and continuing to miss them. He understandably might start to get
frustrated with reaching the river with ​busted draws​. That can lead to him check-calling the flop and
turn and wildly leading out on the river with lots of bluffs.

The important takeaway is that these player classifications are simply generalizations. They are
much more sophisticated than the first generalizations we started out making, but they can’t possibly
encompass every hand, situation, or even every mood of that particular player.

Adjustments

Once we’ve identified the particular player type we’re facing, our next step is to craft
adjustments that exploit this player’s weaknesses. Before reading further, take a moment to imagine
how you would adjust to a loose passive player who breaks out frustration bluffs.
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 48

As you probably concluded, bluffing is not the wisest choice. Value betting should be effective
and is precisely how we want to attack this player. In NLH, any top pair, even with a weak kicker, might
be enough to get two ​streets of value​ against this player. In PLO, depending on how ​dry​ the board is,
any two pair might be enough to value bet multiple times. In PLO, our best draws tend to be so strong
that they are pushing equity against even very strong made hands, so the concept of value
betting/bluffing breaks down here slightly, but such hands will be great bets against this or any other
type of player.

Tight Passive
The word I most often associate with this player is “frustration,” though the most common
poker term is “fit or fold.” ​Fit or fold​ means that this player needs to hit the flop strongly to continue.
Since it’s relatively hard to hit a flop strongly, this player typically misses and folds. That’s where the
frustration can come in since constantly missing the flop and folding or catching a reasonable piece of
the flop but then folding on the turn isn’t much fun.

This is one of the prime examples of why the adage “You can’t bluff at low stakes” is so
inaccurate. You can absolutely bluff this player on the flop since they fold too often. You can also make
this player fold on the turn when they catch a reasonable piece of the board but don’t want to call your
second large ​barrel​.​ Do not, however, try to bluff this player for the final street. That’s because they
probably have folded so many weak and medium strength hands by this point that everything they hold
by the river is quite strong.
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 49

Adjustments

As you might have suspected, bluffing should be quite effective against this player type. What
you might not have anticipated is that value betting too thinly can actually be a mistake. The reason is
that this player folds so much that when we bet with very thin hands for value we actually get folds from
a lot of the hands that we want to call us.

Imagine betting a hand like top pair with an extremely low kicker in NLH. Yes, we can get value
from second pair and strong draws, but those have reasonable equity against us. When we get called by
a better top pair, we are in sorry shape. This doesn’t mean that we can’t ever bet a hand like K2 on K87r.
It just means we should probably wait for future information. If the flop checks through and the turn
comes a 3x making the board K87r 3x and this player checks again, his unwillingness to bet probably
indicates that our K2 has gotten stronger relative to what he is currently holding.

Loose Aggressive
This player type is most associated with the word ​“​maniac​” ​and facing them can mean that you
are in for a wild ride. It can also mean some of the biggest winning (and losing sessions) you’ve ever
experienced. In fact, I would estimate that if I made a list of the biggest pots I’ve ever won or lost, most
of them involved a maniac at some point in the hand.

This player plays a lot of hands, usually with big bets and raises. Some of these players are
capable of bluffing off three streets with absolutely nothing while others will go absolutely crazy when
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 50

they hit a piece of the board. Many will not think in clear value or bluffing terms and can even turn
hands like top pair into bluffs accidentally.

An interesting pattern I’ve noticed about this player type is that many of them love to trap with
their very strong hands. I’m not exactly sure what the psychological mechanism behind this pattern is to
be honest. Maybe they feel that when they want to make their opponent fold, they bet and when they
really don’t want to make their opponent fold, they check. The problem with this is, of course, is that
when they bet, they have a lot of garbage, and when they check and we don’t bet, they fail to get value
with their best hands.

A PLO-specific pattern I’ve noticed is that some of these players will go crazy when they have
equity or any piece of the board on the flop or turn, but tend to tighten up on the river, making fewer
suicidal bluffs. While plenty of these guys are perfectly capable of launching huge river bluffs, some will
just give up once their draws have missed. This is the exact counterpoint to the loose passive player who
will mostly call and once in a while blow up with a frustration bluff.

Adjustments

Against this player type, we really won’t be doing that much betting overall. This player is so
willing to bluff that we make more money by letting him drive the action. In fact, if I were out of position
against this player, I might simply never bet. If we are in position, we will need to bet some hands
because we want to start building a pot with our value hands.

Notice that I actually excluded some of the very best hands from the betting diagram. This is one
of the few player types against which you should consider ​slow playing​, but be careful. Trapping without
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 51

the proper justification can cost you lots of money. What I would be looking for is a player that will go
crazy on the turn after I check back the flop, but is less willing to go crazy against my flop bet. If he is
willing to check-raise me on the flop, I would simply bet my very strongest hands and allow him to raise
me.

When I do attempt to bluff this player, I would primarily use only my strongest semi-bluffs and
would be ready to shove or re-raise his check-raises. It’s true that you will occasionally run into a strong
hand, but the majority of the time, you will get plenty of folds. Occasionally, this player type will ​stack
off​ with worse draws which you ​dominate​.

Tight Aggressive
This is a slightly unusual opponent type at low stakes. If you observe an opponent playing this
way, there’s a strong chance they are thinking reasonably about the game of poker and aspiring to
improve. Most beginning poker literature encourages players to play this way because most weak
players play loose and passively and tight aggression is the equivalent of throwing rock against a player
that always throws scissors in ​RPS​.

Adjustments

You may have noticed an unusual feature of the way we are selecting our bluffs against this type
of player. While we are using some of our best semi bluffs, we are also using some trashier bluffs and
checking back some of the middling strength bluffs. This is an idea called ​Equity Preservation​.​ What this
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 52

means is that when we hold some equity, but not a lot, we don’t always want to bluff. One reason is that
we simply will be betting too many bluffs if we bet every time we have a draw. Additionally, against
opponents who don’t fold too often and can check-raise bluff us, routinely folding when we have
35-40% equity in the pot is disastrous.

Here is an example from NLH and one from PLO to help illustrate what kinds of hands we’ll
consider checking on the flop:

1. In NLH with 100bb stacks, we open either Tc 8c or 5h 4h from the button and get called by the
big blind. The flop comes Jh 9h 3s. The big blind checks to us and we opt to check back with both
hands. Why? Aren’t we simply giving up and letting our opponent off the hook by not bluffing?

a. There is an implicit assumption in this logic that if we don’t bluff the flop, we can’t bluff
later. Why can’t we bluff later?
b. In fact, you’ll have plenty of hands that won’t bet the flop, but either improve by
connecting with the turn or improve in the sense that they didn’t see a bad turn. ​(Think
of a hand like JT which sees a 2x turn. That’s a big improvement.)
c. If you have value hands that want to ​delay continuation bet​ on the turn, you’ll want
bluffs as well, so why not use these hands? Try to imagine what value hands you might
represent on the turn when you bluff with these draws.
d. Given those two particular hands, we should also ask ourselves, “What would I do if I
were check-raised on the flop?” My response is “I would feel terrible.” That’s because I
have decent equity against some hands and can easily improve against others, but if I
call I might be dominated by superior draws and have to put a lot more money in the
pot with a ​non-nut draw​.
e. Against a turn bet, I can often call with these hands or even consider bluff raising
occasionally, depending on the card.
2. In PLO with 100bb stacks, we open to pot with either Kh Qh Td 8s or As Ks 3d 2c and the big
blind calls. The flop comes 5h 5d 4h. The big blind checks to us and we opt to check back with
both hands. Why?
a. These are draws that don’t relish being check-raised. They will need to fold against a
raise because they could be ​drawing dead​, but against all the possible hands that BB
could have when he checks, these draws do fine.
b. When we bet and get called, we often get called by draws that are stronger than us.
Notice the KQT8 hand has both the Kh and Qh. That makes it even harder for OOP to call
us with a worse FD. The same is true for AK32. The straight draws that call will all be
higher and the FDs take away some of our outs.
c. By checking back, we increase the likelihood that our high card outs are still good.
Checking back and hitting a K against a range that is wide is a solid out. Betting and
narrowing ​villain​’s range increases the percentage of 5s he has which makes our K much
worse.

Adding Nuance
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 53

Once you have a firm grasp of these categories, challenge yourself to go deeper with your reads
and analysis. It’s very possible that the players you face will fall into different categories on different
streets. Some players will be loose passive preflop and then proceed to fold everything that doesn’t
connect with the flop making them tight passive postflop. Some players will be tight passive generally,
but when drinking (something you’d only know if you were with them in person), they become maniacs.
Some will play crazy on the flop and preflop, but by the river they become quite ​nitty​ and fearful of
bluffing.

Final Note
The players in these examples occupy space in the extreme corners of each quadrant and are far
from the origin (the center point). While you will encounter recreational players with these types of
strategies at all stakes, as you climb higher, the serious players and professionals will move towards the
center. That’s because the players who played extreme strategies and tried to play very often (as is
required of professionals) either went broke, moved down, or learned to make their strategies more
reasonable. Reasonable play means bluffing sometimes, but not always, playing passively sometimes
and aggressively other times, and playing fewer hands in early position and more hands in late position.

Most professionals will fall into one of the two aggressive classifications or a classification such
as Neutral Aggressive. Some will even be so Loose Aggressive that they are bordering on maniacal. Don’t
disrespect them because they play far too many hands, but don’t be fearful either. Too many hands
almost always = too many bluffs. Be prepared to make some tough calls.

Reciprocality

In ​Elements of Poker, ​Tommy Angelo writes:

In the world of reciprocality, it’s not what you do that matters most, and it’s not what they do. It’s
both. Reciprocality is any difference between you and your opponents that affects your bottom
line. Reciprocality says that ​when you and your opponents would do the same thing in a given
situation, no money moves, and when you do something different, it does.

This was a revolutionary concept at the time (2007). It changed the perception of profit at
poker.

Let’s imagine a simple poker scenario from No Limit Hold’em. You hold a pair of aces preflop and
your opponent holds a pair of kings. You both get all of the money in and you win. Did you actually win
money? Well, if roles were reversed and you had a pair of kings, you would have also lost all of your
money to your opponent’s aces. (In fact, it would probably be a mistake not to go broke. This is known
as a ​cooler​.) Therefore, those mirrored scenarios cancel each other out and neither player truly wins. If,
however, your opponent loses all of his money with a hand like a pair of sixes or a weaker off suit hand
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 54

like King-Jack vs your AA, and you would never go broke with those hands against this opponent if the
roles were reversed, then you ​do​ in fact make money.

This means that we can make money by folding. If you only lose $50 in a given hand when your
opponent would have lost $75 in your shoes, you just won 25 theoretical dollars in this specific scenario.
This “A penny saved is a penny earned” approach accumulates over time until you “earn” all of your
opponent’s money.

This leads us to the following conclusion:

The amount we win or lose in poker is simply the differential between the decisions we make and the
decisions our opponents make.

This thought process is a kind of ​counterfactual thinking​ which will be discussed later in the
book. Thinking like this is essential to understanding poker strategy.

Another powerful conclusion from this method of thinking is that there are actually two ways to
“keep score” in poker. Most players only think about the obvious score which is how much is won or lost
on a given hand. With an understanding of ​reciprocality​, you will be able to visualize the true score that
lies in the ethereal mathematical world, hidden from view. Just as our senses limit our ability to perceive
reality, a lack of understanding of reciprocality limits one’s ability to accurately detect the underlying
truth of the poker universe. This new superpower gives you a clear lens on reality. Use it responsibly.

Stack Depth
Every decision point in poker is an opportunity to play better than your opponent. The more
decision points available in the game, the more chances the better player has to make a call, a fold, or a
raise that their weaker opponent could not. This is the essence of making money in poker.

Imagine a scenario when both you and I have two big blinds left in our stacks. When we are
dealt our hands, we will either be forced to go all-in or fold. There is almost no skill involved at this
point. This version of poker is even more simple than rock-paper-scissors.

Now imagine the converse of this scenario. Both players are hundreds of big blinds deep (say
$1200 at a $1-$2 dollar table). Here there is room to call raises and re-raises preflop, to raise flops, and
bet turns and rivers, and still get shoved on. The number of possibilities in this game, known as ​game
tree complexity​,​ are enormous. We are now playing a game that is at least as complex as Chess or Go.
There are plenty of opportunities for a more skilled player to make better choices than their opponent
and as we’ve seen from our Reciprocality discussion, this is how we truly make money in poker.

Stack depth also has a dramatic impact on the value of certain hands as you will see in the
following sections.
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 55

Draws
As stacks grow, draws that make the nuts become more important. Imagine making the second
nut flush on the turn in ​Pot Limit Omaha​ with $200 dollars in your stack and $100 dollars in the pot and
the board is not paired. In all but the most contrived circumstances, we will want to stack off. There are
just too many worse hands that can call us.

Now imagine holding the second nut flush with $100 dollars in the pot and $1300 in our stack.
We bet $100 and get raised to $400. How happy are you with your hand now? Is it possible for our
opponent to be raising worse hands for value? Against a decent player the answer is a resounding “no.”
Our opponent can only have either the nuts or a bluff (which should contain the ​nut flush blocker​,
which is the ace of the flushing suit). While your ​absolute hand strength​ remains extremely strong, your
relative hand strength​ just plummeted making your hand a ​pure bluff catcher​. It still may be correct to
call the raise against an aggressive opponent, but sadly your hand now has little value. Using the thought
experiment we discussed earlier, the invisible number floating above your 2​nd​ nut flush which tells you
how much your hand is worth will now be close to zero.

So how should we approach playing the draw to the second (or worse) nut flush? While we
shouldn’t constantly be fearful of the worst case scenario, we should be aware that it’s a distinct
possibility.

Made Hands
The value of weaker made hands will also decrease as stack depth increases. The challenge is to
still extract value from these hands without building a pot that’s too large for a given hand. This may
mean either checking the flop slightly more often with good, but not great value hands like KJ on Kd 8d
4h in NLH or Qh Th 8s 7s on Ks Qs 2s in PLO, or betting flops and checking turns back more often. With
deep stacks against passive competition, we should often prefer to bet the flop and the turn and then
check the river with these types of hands since we are unlikely to get bluff raised on the flop or turn. We
also want to give ourselves a chance to improve by the river and bet a third time. (For example, with KJ
on Kd 8d 4h, 3x, Jx we now have a hand that is strong enough to bet three times.) Against aggressive or
tricky competition, who can check-raise us with bluffs and value hands, we’re better off checking earlier
on. This also gives them the opportunity to bluff the turn or river when we have a relatively strong hand.

Playing more defensively is especially important when we’re out of position and can’t control
the size of the pot. For instance, imagine we’re in the CO against a tough player on the button 200bb
deep. Betting KJ on Kd 8d 4h will probably just get us into trouble. Against a passive player, we could bet
and expect to get called by draws, but this player might raise us with a draw and play his sets the same
way. This could lead to us playing a huge pot out of position with a mediocre hand. Instead, if we check
and check-call, the pot stays small, and his weakest bluffs – which we are currently crushing – stay in his
range.

Stack to Pot Ratio (SPR)

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As your poker game continues to develop, you will begin to think less and less about the actual
money at play and more in terms of multiples of the big blind preflop and SPR postflop. The ​stack to pot
ratio​ (or ​SPR​) is simply the number of times the current pot could fit into our current stack.

This concept is relevant to all ​big bet​ poker games, but is especially valuable in Pot Limit Omaha.
This is because bets larger than pot are not allowed so if you would like to leave yourself the option of
getting all-in by the river, you will need to plan.

Here are a few important numbers to bear in mind:

● When the SPR is four on the turn (400 in your stack and 100 in the pot), and you bet 100, once
you are called, the SPR will be one on the river.
● When the SPR is 8.5, betting half pot on the flop and then pot on the turn will leave you with an
SPR of 1 on the river. You could also choose to bet three quarters pot on the flop and turn and
reach the river will a slightly smaller SPR.
● When the SPR is thirteen on the flop (1300 in your stack and 100 in the pot), if you bet 100 on
the flop and get called, you will reach an SPR of four on the turn.
● At SPRs greater than thirteen, some ​overbetting​ of the pot will be required.

My recommendation is that you test yourself by coming up with random stack sizes and random
pot sizes and determining what your stack to pot ratio is and what size bets are required to get all of
your or your opponent’s stack in the pot by the river. As you may have suspected, there is a formula to
compute the correct bet size for any given stack and number of​ ​streets​; however, I’ve chosen to omit it
since you’ll never be able to use it in game. With a small amount of practice, you’ll develop enough
intuition that you’ll be able to guess the right bet sizes with a high degree of accuracy.

Conclusion
The examples above are the worst case scenarios and should not deter you from going for ​value
with strong and ​non-nut​ hands. Indeed, going for ​thin value​ against weak opposition is the key to
beating smaller stakes poker. The point is rather to illustrate how the additional stack depth alters the
value of hands, diminishing the value of strong but non-nut hands.

Another way to think about this is the shallower the stacks, the more we can completely ignore
situations like flush over flush or straight over straight because it’s easier for the other player to get all
the money in with weaker hands. As we get deeper, we need to be more concerned with those rare
worst case scenarios because the penalty is just so large.

Below is a diagram of how you can think about scenarios like being ​over-flushed​, ​over-setted​, or
any other cooler like AA vs QQ preflop in NLH:
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Introduction to Ranges
One of the largest conceptual leaps you will need to make in order to reach a high level in poker
is to shift your thinking from considering individual hands to thinking about entire ​ranges​ (every hand an
opponent could ever have in a given spot). In fact, the best players are not only thinking about every
hand their opponent could have in a given spot, but also every hand they themselves could have in that
spot and then how their range of hands interacts with their opponent’s range and the specific ​board
texture​.

In order to reach this level, we need to take several incremental steps, the first of which is
identifying and reading your opponent’s range. This first skill is the only one that is really required to
beat weak competition, the kind you will see at low stakes. Even at higher stakes, the largest percentage
of your profit will still come from the fish at the table, so this is a skill that never becomes obsolete.

How do we start?

Visualize a series of smaller and smaller funnels suspended above one another with the largest
funnel on top and the smallest on the bottom. Each action your opponent takes pours their range
through one of these funnels with some of the hands discarded each time. This gradually reduces the
number of hands they can hold at each decision point. The better you become at hand reading, the
more efficient your funneling process will become, allowing you to narrow their range earlier in the
hand and to react accordingly. You will need to continue improving your funnels because as you climb to
higher stakes, players will become better at disguising their range, making the process more difficult.

Slightly Ahead/Way Behind

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When it comes to analyzing what our opponent can hold, we know it’s incorrect to “put him on
a hand” and play against that hand alone, but how can we possibly consider every hand he could ever
hold in a given scenario?

Admittedly, this is no easy task so a great step is to consider which one of these three scenarios
you find yourself in. They are:

1. Slightly Ahead/Way Behind

2. Way Ahead/Slightly Behind
3. Way Ahead/Way Behind

The idea here is to break down ​villain​’s range into two general categories and think about how
your hand should play against these categories. If it’s easier, you can substitute an individual hand for
each category and pretend villain can only have one hand or the other. This is inexact, but it’s a nice
building block to reach the next level of range thinking.

Scenario 1: Slightly Ahead or Way Behind

Envision holding top and bottom pair in PLO on a board with no flush or straight and considering
whether to raise a bet or not on the flop. Your opponent can have all sorts of different holdings, but let’s
only think about the hands that are likely to stack off if we raise.

● Top Two Pair or a Set will ​stack off​ against us.

● Big draws like ​wraps​ or NFDs with SDs or weak pairs will stack off against us.

How does our hand fare in this scenario? We’re ahead of the draws and behind the made hands
so it’s okay, right? Actually this would be a huge mistake. Yes, we are currently ahead of the draws, but
many of these draws have tons of equity against us. Some of these draws could even be a slight favorite
against top and bottom pair. Ouch.

How do we do against the value portion of his range? Not well. Sometimes we’ll have less than 6
outs. This is utterly catastrophic for us.

Now let’s assume that he has the big draw half the time and we are a 55% favorite. Now let’s
assume he has a set half the time and we have 15% equity. Some quick math will tell us that we only
have 35% equity against that range. Not a desirable result.

Scenario 2: Way Ahead or Slightly Behind

Now let’s imagine a more delightful example. You open A2s on the button in NLH and get 3B
from the SB and call. The flop comes 8h 7h 2c giving you the nut flush draw and bottom pair. After his
c-bet you decide to raise and call his shove. He has 99 and you lose a big pot when your draw ​bricks​.
How do you feel about your play?

You should feel ecstatic. Against his particular hand you were roughly ​flipping​, but imagine his
disgust if he would have turned up with Kh Qh. He would only have 6 outs and even if he hit a king or
queen on the turn, you could still win with any ace, deuce, or flushing card. You created a scenario
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where you were either way ahead or slightly behind (or in this case, dead even). Don’t feel bad about
losing. Because the all-in was 50/50, no one makes any money, but even if that happens 9 times in a row
and then the 10​th​ time you get the A2 vs KQ scenario, you’ll be making a killing.

Scenario 3: Way Ahead or Way Behind

This situation occurs far more frequently in NLH than PLO due to each hand having more equity
in PLO. Here’s an example in NLH. The action folds to you in the Small Blind and you raise AQ and the big
blind calls with 100bb stacks. You bet half of the pot with AQ on Q52r and get raised by a strong,
thinking player. For value, he can have 55 and 22 as well as some Q5s and Q2s and probably 52s as well.
Against these hands, we have very little chance of winning.

We know, however, that villain is a tough player who can bluff as well. What kind of hands is he
using for that? He can have some 43s potentially which have decent equity against us, but the rest of his
bluffing hands are probably bare gutters like 63s or A3o. Imagine we are up against A3o. How many outs
does he have? He has 4 straight outs, but nothing else since an Ace will give us top two pair. In this case,
his bluffs have very little chance to beat us and his strong hands are crushing us. We are either way
ahead or way behind. What matter matters is how many bluffs he has as compared to his value hands.

In ​way ahead / way behind​ scenarios like this, we always want to call rather than re-raise.
Re-raising (also known as ​three betting​ the flop) will cause him to fold out his bluffs which were virtually
hopeless and isolate us against his strong value hands.

Natural Bluffs
On certain ​board textures​, it’s rather easy for an unprepared player to bluff too much or too
little. Recognizing on which boards this is likely to occur is an important hand reading skill that will take
you a long way in your poker development. Let’s consider two boards:

1. Kc Kh 2d 8s 7h
2. 8h 7h 3d Qd 2s

On which board do you think your opponent is most likely to bluff too often and on which board
do you feel he will bluff too infrequently? The technique we need to use here is an idea called “​natural
bluffs​.​” On KK2r 8x 7x, there are so few draws that a player needs to think creatively to find hands to
bluff. In PLO, hands with a 2 or 7 or small pocket pairs like 44 can be used for bluffs, but some players
will hesitate to bluff with these. In NLH, finding bluffs is even harder as 2x and A high may win and show
down. Facing an opponent who is betting aggressively into you on ​multiple streets​, it might be wise to
fold some extremely strong hands, even Kx hands with weak kickers.

873hh, Qd, 2x is an entirely different world. On this board there is a nearly endless supply of
bluffing candidates​. Notice that a second flush draw arrived on the turn which just adds to the
numerous flush draws and OESDs already available. Here, most players will struggle not to bluff too
often as they will wind up with garbage on the river so often. Most players will also not ​value bet as
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thinly​ ​as they should. Given these two pieces of information, we can imagine making some very ​light
calls​ ​with hands like 5​th​ pair in NLH or top or 2​nd​ pair in PLO.

Bear in mind that the technique I’m describing is designed to ​exploit​ non-expert players. Very
strong players will find creative bluffs on the first board to make up for their lack of natural bluffs and
will bet extremely thinly for value on the second board to make up for so many of their draws missing.
By folding often on the first board and calling often on the second, we are taking advantage of players
who do not have this level of sophistication.

Reading Their Range/Logic Chains

We’ve now reached one of the most enjoyable and stimulating parts of poker, actually using our
opponent’s actions to figure out what they have. This process is not magical. It uses all of the
information available and filters that information through the lens of deductive reasoning.

Here’s another way to think about reading your opponent’s range. Poker is a universe of its own.
Before any action is taken, the entire universe of poker is open to us. As players begin to fold, little slices
of the poker universe are stripped away. No eight, seven, six, or five way pots will be contested this
hand. There’s a big slice of the poker expanse removed right there. The action folds all the way to the
button who decides to raise to three times the big blind.

The button plays way too many hands and plays too passively. The button also gets scared with
the best possible hands and raises larger than 3 times the big blind. Let’s say he folds the worst 30% of
his hands, calls another 30% of hands and raises the top 3% to five big blinds and raises the remaining
37% of hands to three times the big blind. Since he chose to raise this time, we can strip away the 30%
of folded hands and 30% of ​limping​ hands from his range and from this fraction of the poker universe.
Since he chose to only raise three times the big blind, we can also remove the very best 3% of hands as
well.

The small blind folds and the big blind, who is generally passive and doesn’t re-raise often,
almost instantly re-raises to 10 times the big blind. While we don’t have a particular read on this player’s
sizing, the fact that we see a re-raise at all from this player indicates a lot of strength, maybe implying
that he only has the top 5% of hands. In hold’em, this range might look like AA-TT and AK and AQs. In
Omaha, this range might be good AA, good KK, the best QQ hands like ​AQQTds​ and the very best AK
hands like ​AKJTds​.

Did you pick up any other information from my description? The player acted instantly. While
some players just play fast and others act quickly to exhibit strength when they’re afraid, we might be
able to extrapolate that the quick timing implies an added degree of strength.

The button doesn’t think very long before calling. What could this mean? He probably folds
occasionally to the re-raise. If he’s aware of how passive the big blind is, he likely folds somewhat often.
Since we can’t be certain exactly how many hands he folds, we have to view his range probabilistically.
By that I mean, we need to consider that there is some chance he folds half his range to the three bet,
reducing it from 37% of hands to 18.5% of hands. There is also some possibility he rarely folds this range
and his overall percentage only drops to 34%
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How do we interpret his timing? He acted relatively quickly. This is probably not a strong piece
of information, but may indicate that he never considered ​Four Betting​. While we shouldn’t go crazy
with information like this, it’s important to remember that every piece of information is part of the
larger puzzle and allows us to funnel his range ever so slightly.

The flop comes AJ5 with two hearts. The tight passive player in the big blind grimaces and
checks. Care to venture a guess as to what he has? Against some weak players you might be able to
precisely put them on KK, QQ, or TT. We’ve been able to go from 1326 possible hands in NLH to 18 in
two actions.

Here’s a more sophisticated example from PLO. We raise Ah Jd 8h 5d from the CO with 80bb
effective stacks​ and get called by the somewhat tight, somewhat passive SB. We ​continuation bet​ half
pot on the flop on Js 8c 2c and double ​barrel​ pot on Ad. We see a river 3c and get donk shoved into by
SB. Let’s put the pieces together:

Tight passive player calls from SB Check-calls flop Check-calls turn Donk shoves river.

You are probably already looking at this sequence and thinking strength, but let’s tie it directly
to the board texture:

Tight passive player calls from SB Check-calls flop Check-calls turn Donk shoves river.

Board: Js 8c 2c, Ad, 3c

A player who is tight calls from the SB against our CO open. This implies some strength and a
range that is somewhat focused around middle to high boards. Given his passivity, we can’t even
remove good KK or QQ hands from his range because he may be reluctant to 3B them.

He checks and calls a flop that is quite ​dynamic​. We hold J8 so it’s somewhat more difficult for
him to have JJ or 88 and 22 is quite rare. Out of all the two pair, he’ll have J8 by far the most often
because J2 and 82 are again rare. KK and QQ with flush draws and straight draws are also quite
reasonable for him to have. Notice that flush draws + top pair are also plentiful on this board because
the J is not of the flush draw suit. Hands like AKJ, KQJ, JT9 all connect well with his range. He can have
TT/99 with FD or a good straight draw like T9 as well as very few 8xxx with FDs or a hand like KT98. For
bare draws, he can definitely hold plenty of nut flush draws as well as some K and Q high FDs, usually
with straight draws such as KQT. He will also have some QT9 or T97 wraps. Also recall his passivity that
we mentioned earlier. Due to his passivity, he likely check-calls most of these hands

The turn really starts to narrow his range. First of all, we bet pot which is quite a large sizing.
Plenty of his Jxxx hands had an Ace in them and the ones without an ace or a flush draw likely fold,
potentially even J8. He will pick up a few A8 and A2 hands as well. Notice that just like the flop, the ace
on board and the ace in our hand do not match the flush draw suit which means all of his nut flush
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draws improve to top pair + nut flush draw and will always continue. KK and QQ with a straight draw will
fold, but KK and QQ with a flush draw and straight draw will continue, just as second pair with flush
draw and straight draw will continue. Wraps will likely fold the turn and flush draws with straight draws
might go either way, but my guess is many of them without an OESD will fold.

Once we get to the river, villain’s range looks like a lot of flushes from the first through the 4​th
nuts. He will also have some AJ, A8, J8 and a very small number of sets. It’s really hard to imagine him
having many bluffs here and certainly not enough to justify calling. Even if he is willing to turn a hand
like Ac Ks Qs 8s into a bluff, he won’t have nearly enough hands like that to justify a call.

Mistakes Most Beginners Make:

● Concentrating only on their own hand.

● Trying to put their opponent on a specific hand: Unless your opponent is extremely weak and
takes a particular string of actions with only one particular hand, this is impossible. Players who
believe otherwise are deceiving themselves with ​confirmation bias​.
● Make extremely general statements about another player’s range: If asked why they took a
particular string of actions, this type of player is likely to make a statement such as, “I just didn’t
feel like they had ‘it,’” or “He seemed strong.”

Range Inelasticity
Elasticity of demand is an idea that is used in economics to think about how markets react to a
change in price. If the demand is perfectly elastic (meaning stretchy), every penny you add to the price
of a product should shrink demand. If demand was perfectly inelastic, no matter how you change the
price, the same number of people buy. This occurs in real life for lifesaving products like insulin.

How does this apply to poker? Well, every time you bet, you set a price for the market, which in
this case is just your opponent or opponents. Every adjustment to your bet size should directly alter
8
their calling and raising ranges. As your bet size increases, they should defend less and vice versa when
you bet smaller. These micro adjustments to a defending range are very hard for humans to make,
however. Our defending ranges are not as ​elastic​ as they should be. The better a player is, the more
elastic their ranges will be. Conversely, weaker players tend to react poorly to different bet sizes and
some are quite close to being completely inelastic. That means they might call with exactly the same
hands for a half pot bet or for a 7/8ths pot bet. If you recognize this tendency in your opponent, you can
pick whichever bet size serves your purpose best.

Imagine that your opponent calls the river with half his hands in NLH regardless of your bet size.
What size should you select with value and what size should you select with bluffs? I would bet
extremely small with my bluffs and lay him excellent pot odds. In theory, he should call me with all sorts
of weak hands, but since he is only calling 50% of hands, my cheap bluff is an excellent way to make him
fold hands like Ace high or underpairs.

8
When I say “defend,” I mean either call or raise
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What bet size would you select with your strongest hands against this player, assuming he
always calls half of his hands? If you responded with the question “How much money do I have left in
my stack?” then congratulations, you understand this concept well. Against this opponent, if there is
$100 in the pot and $300 in our stack, we would always want to go all-in.

Most players you encounter won’t be this inelastic. Additionally, betting three times the pot or
one eighth of the pot tends to give even the most thoughtless opponents pause. That being said, the
weaker your opponents are, the closer they will be to the inelastic side of the player spectrum. You
could experiment with betting 1.25x the pot with value and bluffing for 2/5ths of the pot and then
gradually adjust your sizing.

Clues Your Opponent Is Inelastic

To use elasticity, you will need to identify where your opponent falls on the spectrum of
inelastic​ ​elastic​. There are a few ways to do this:

1. The smaller the stakes or the weaker the competition, the less likely they are to even realize
that you are laying them certain pot odds.
2. Look for opponents who are absolute hand-strength oriented. These players think “flush =
strong” and “bottom pair = weak” rather than “weak flush on full house board against a tight
passive opponent = not very strong” or “bottom pair on a board where all draws miss vs a
maniac​ = possibly quite strong.”
3. Boards where many draws miss force your opponents to make light calls in order to defend
enough. These are boards where it can be correct to call a triple barrel with top pair or 2​nd​ pair in
PLO or ​A-high​ in NLH. If your opponent won’t do this, their inelasticity is skewed towards folding
too often in these spots.

Bigger Is Better
Many poker players have a fear of betting too large. They usually rationalize this fear with
statements like, “If I bet too large, my opponent won’t call,” or “Why would you ever bet big with a
bluff?” but my suspicion is that their fear really stems from diverging from the norms in the games that
they regularly play. Let me put a little extra emphasis on this point because it’s so important:

You want your opponents to think that you are bad. You want to make decisions that they don’t
understand and criticize. In fact, doing things that weak players believe to be bad is almost always a
positive sign for your game.

I cannot tell you the number of times that weak players have told me how terrible my play was
as I’m taking their money. Every high stakes professional can tell you similar stories as well. To win
money in this game, you have to diverge from norms and make decisions that set you apart. Otherwise,
you can’t hope to distinguish yourself from the pack.
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In the case of bet sizing, picking larger than “standard” bet sizes will often yield more profit.
Imagine a scenario where you can choose to bet half pot or a bet twice the size of the pot. For this
example, let’s assume you always win when called. When you bet $100 into $200, your opponent calls
half the time. When you bet $400 in to $200, he only calls 15% of the time. Which bet size yields you
more profit?
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The half pot bet yields you $100 half the time so your bet earns $50. ​Your 2x pot bet earns you
$400, but only 15% of the time which is $60. Do you find this result surprising? If so, play around with
different numbers and see just how much less often a large bet needs to be called to still be more
profitable. Here the smaller bet was called three times as often as the ​overbet​, but was still less
profitable.

If it’s clearly more profitable to bet larger, why do so many players, even thinking professionals,
choose to bet small? I think it’s a case of using ​heuristics​ instead of math. Daniel Kahneman gives a
similar example in his book, ​Thinking Fast and Slow,​ ​ where amateur stock traders often select stocks
they “like” rather than ones they believe to be undervalued. The poker equivalent is selecting a bet size
because you think you get called often rather than the bet size that yields the most profit. In both cases,
the mental short cut of “liking a stock” or “wanting to be called often” are poor stand ins for underlying
truths. In both cases, maximizing the money we make with each decision is the truth we need to pursue.

Equity Continued: Counterfeit Outs, Degraded Outs, and Equity Pieces

Let’s go back to a previous example for considering how many outs a given hand possessed. The
first example we used was JT on Q94r. As you’ve become a more sophisticated player, you probably
recognize that saying that we had 8 outs was an oversimplification. The number of outs we have is
dependent on the hand our opponent currently holds and exactly the version of JT we hold. Let’s look at
a few individual hand match ups:

● Against AQ, we do indeed have roughly 8 outs.

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● Against KK, we only have 6 outs as two of our kings are in our opponent’s hand.
● Similarly, against KQ, we only have 7 outs, but once again our ​implied odds​ are excellent when
we hit a king.
● Against A9, we actually have 14 outs as both a jack or ten would give us the best hand.
● Against T8, we are currently ahead and somewhat of a large favorite.

Additionally, it matters a great deal whether we hold ​JTs​ or ​JTo​. ​Having a suited JT when there is
a 3​ card of that suit on this board gives us what’s known as a ​Backdoor Flush Draw​. While it may seem
rd​

like a rare occurrence for the board to run out as a flush, this happens roughly four percent of the time,
which is the equivalent of roughly one extra out on the flop.

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Notice that because we assumed you always win when you bet, we can exclude the $200 pot from this
calculation since you would win that whether he folds or calls
10
Despite that unfortunate circumstance, if we do hit a king, our opponent will make 3 of a kind and we will almost
certainly win a huge pot. That means our ​implied odds​ are excellent
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Secondary equity pieces make up a huge portion of our equity in PLO where it’s possible to turn
some enormous hands. Take 8h 7d 6h 5d on Qh 4s 2c for instance. On the flop we currently hold only a
gutshot​ to the nut straight. After a 7h turn, we now hold second pair, a flush draw, and a wrap​. ​Against a
hand like AAQQ, we now have 20 outs when we previously had four on the flop. However, we also might
be in rather sad shape if our opponent holds AQ87 with a higher flush draw. In that case, we will lose all
our flush outs, our three of a kind out on the 7, and one of our straight outs, reducing us, tragically, to
just 9 outs.

Degraded Outs
Degrading outs​ is a term I use that I have not encountered elsewhere. While a ​counterfeit​ out
(or “gin card”) occurs when a particular card appears to improve us, but in fact improves our opponent
more, a degraded out is slightly different. Degrading an out is betting that narrows our opponent’s range
to take away our own outs, essentially counterfeiting our own outs.

Here’s an example from NLH to illustrate the idea:

Imagine you can hold Ah 4h or 7d 6d on Qs 8d 3h. You are considering whether to bluff with one
or the other. Which would you pick?

My preference would be strongly towards Ah 4h.

Consider what hands call our bet when we hold 7d 6d and how many outs we will have against
them. We will fold villain off some hands that are currently ahead of us like KJo and 22 which seems like
a positive outcome until we realize that we have quite a bit of equity against these hands thanks to our 6
clean pair outs and additional back door draw outs. We also may simply be able to bluff those hands
later as it’s unlikely 22 or KJo will go crazy trying to bluff us.

When we do bet 76 and get called, most of the hands villain calls with – like a Qx, JJ, TT, 99, 8x
–will have a pair larger than our 7 or 6. Suddenly a 7 or 6 are no longer outs against villain’s range. With
Ah 4h this is rarely the case because our ace out will almost always remain intact.

Some of you may object, “Well, hands like Qx, JJ, TT, 99, 8x were already in villain’s range to
begin with so this is more of a problem with 76 and less of a problem with betting.” While it’s true that if
our opponent currently held a hand such as K8, we never had the 7 or 6 out to begin with, the point I’m
making is a matter of frequency. Before we bet 76, our opponent may only have an 8x or better 40% of
the time. The rest of his range includes total ​air​ hands like A2o. Once we bet, our opponent will fold out
his garbage and now 8x or better will go from 40% of his range to 80% of it.

Board Texture
Before we can approach flop play, we need to consider how board texture should inform our
decision making. ​Board texture​ means the coordination of the cards that came on the flop, our
opponent’s relationship to those cards, and how the turn and river changes the nuts.

Some flops will be favorable for us and some unfavorable. To take a PLO example, after we ​Four
Bet​ ​we mostly have a lot of different versions of AA in our hand. That means that a board like A83r is
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 66

favorable for us. Conversely, when we see 987ss, we may have to fold our hand, even with a huge
amount of money in the pot.

The first step is to classify board texture on a two-dimensional grid, much like we did for
opponent type. The dimensions on this graph will be Static to Dynamic and Light to Heavy. The Light to
Heavy dimension refers to the rank of the cards. High cards are more often played in both NLH and PLO
therefore high card boards tend to hit ranges more strongly than lower rank boards.

The Static to Dynamic dimension is slightly more abstruse. Static (sometimes called ​dry​) to
Dynamic (sometimes called ​wet​) refers to how coordinated the cards themselves are and how many
possible draws are available. Boards with a flush draw on them tend to be more coordinated than those
without. Cards that are closer together in rank allow for more straight draws and are therefore more
coordinated than those where the spacing between the cards is larger. It’s difficult to say whether T85r
or K92hh are more coordinated, but exactitude doesn’t matter here. What matters is identifying the
general texture of the board and thinking about how it impacts your particular hand.

Since we are talking about NLH and PLO simultaneously, a couple specific board textures need
special notice because their nature is radically different in each game. A monotone board is a texture
where all three cards share a single suit, which makes flushes immediately possible. In NLH, any hand
that has one card of the suit that is on board has a flush draw (though if that 4​th​ card hits, some of those
flushes will be quite weak). The ability for some hands to improve to flushes – and the lower number of
flushes available in NLH – make this a reasonably dynamic board. In PLO however, we’re forced to use
two cards in our hand, so if you don’t have two of the monotone suit already, you can never improve to
a flush. This means that in PLO, a monotone board is actually extremely static.

Likewise, ​straight boards​ are generally always more dynamic in NLH than in PLO. One reason is
that it’s just harder to flop a straight in NLH than it is in PLO. As a consequence of this fact, the 2​nd​ and
3​rd​ tier value hands like sets, two pairs, and overpairs matter much less in PLO than in NLH since the
battle revolves around who has the straight and who doesn’t. Similarly, draws on these boards will be
far more relevant in NLH. Imagine the 76 OESD on Q98r in PLO vs NLH for instance. On a 5 turn, your
hand is much stronger on average in NLH than it is in PLO. The final reason why straight boards are more
dynamic in NLH is that sometimes straights just aren’t relevant. Imagine 652hh for instance. Will either
player have 43 often in NLH? In some cases, players will have 43s, but in many cases, no one will have
the nuts, which means this is a battle of overpairs and draws. In PLO, players can always have hands like
AK43ds or KK43ss so the nuts stays relevant, even when it occurs at a lower frequency.
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After we’ve developed our intuition regarding the structure of the boards themselves, the next
logical question we should ask is, “How do we tell if a board texture is favorable to us or unfavorable for
us?” We need to know what game we’re playing, the SPR​, ​and​ ​the ranges involved. The way to get good
at recognizing which board texture favors which player is to think about which groups of hands one
player can have that the other cannot.

Here are some general guidelines:

● The raiser tends to have a bigger advantage on average in NLH than in PLO because AA remain a
strong hand in NLH on almost any flop whereas there are a number of flops in PLO where AA
becomes quite weak.
● High card boards are usually more favorable to the player who was the last raiser preflop. This is
because hands like AA, KK, QQ, AK in NLH and AAxx, AKQx, and KK/QQ with high cards in PLO
generally keep raising if they are given the opportunity.
● With short stacks, high card boards become even better for the raiser because the preflop
11
opening ranges tend to focus on raw equity and high cards worry less about ​playability .
● Monotone Boards​ ​and ​Straight Boards​ ​tend to level the playing field and only give the preflop
raiser a small edge. Both players can have flushes and straights and the hands that the raiser has
that the caller can’t have – like AA/KK/AK – aren’t nearly as strong on these boards.
● Paired Boards​ ​depend a lot on the specific cards and situation. 553ss is quite good for the raiser
in PLO when the stacks are short but less good when they are deep. That’s because the raiser

11
Think about a hand like KK73 in PLO. You would never want to 3B this hand 100bb deep because it plays poorly
postflop and gets crushed by AA and stronger KK. At 30bb, you can raise hands like this much more often because
your opponent can stack off with worse hands like good QQ and AKJx more often
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can happily stack off with overpairs at SPR=2, but would run into a 5 or better way too often at
SPR=6+.

Let’s examine a few different scenarios and see what we can intuit about the ranges involved
and how they may correspond to specific board textures:

1. AK6r
a. CO vs BB Single Raised Pot NLH 100bb ​Effective Stacks​: We raised preflop and our
opponent opted not to 3B. In this scenario, we will have more high card hands and likely
more A-high hands in our range. This is because we will open raise with all of our Ax
hands while our opponent may fold the very worst Ax ​off-suit​ hands and will raise the
best Ax hands like AK/AQ/AJs. This statement is true of AA and KK as well. Both players
will have total misses like 22, Q7s, and T8s, but since BTN also has hands like AA and KK
and is in position, CO can easily use these hands as bluffs. BB cannot make calls with
these hands profitable and bluff raising hands with so little pot equity is unlikely to be
profitable as well. ​The key point to remember about the BB’s range is that hands that BB
folded and hands that BB re-raised are subtracted from the range we are currently
playing against​. ​While we may not know exactly which hands our opponent would fold
or re-raise, we can think about these in general terms and get a rough approximation.
b. UTG vs SB PLO Single Raised Pot PLO 200bb ​Effective Stacks​: This situation is much more
nuanced that the previous scenario. First, while UTG will open all of their AAxx hands,
they may actually fold some of the worst KKxx hands preflop. (KK72r comes to mind as a
hand that really only has one strong point.) Second, assuming that small blind is playing
well, they should be folding a lot preflop especially against a player who is open raising
as tightly as UTG should be. Thirdly, the amount of money both players have in their
stacks greatly influences how much SB should three bet. Re-raising with weak AKxx,
KKxx and even AAxx is also not advised for SB since they will have to play a large pot out
of position and will really struggle on boards like T95ss.
2. 8c 3h 2c
a. SB vs BTN 3B Pot NLH 80bb deep: The BTN raised 3bb preflop and the Small Blind
re-raised 11bb and BTN called. This board should be quite favorable to the SB for a
number of reasons. His 3Bing range should include a lot of overpair hands. Often players
will 3B most or all of their pocket pairs from the SB vs BTN so he may genuinely have
every combination of AA-99 on this board as well as 88 for top set. SB will also have
some hands that were bluffs preflop but turned into genuinely strong ​semi-bluffs​ on
this flop. Think of hands like A5-A2 with a flush draw which are currently ​flipping​ or a
favorite over hands like 87. Even when SB has air hands like KQ, he still has two
overcards​. BTN, on the other hand, will probably not have any overpairs better than TT
and no two pair. While he may have 88 and even 33, 22, those are relatively rare and
aren’t enough to dissuade AA from going for value across multiple streets. BTN will also
have lots of hands like KJo that will have to fold when facing a bet.
b. SB vs BB Single Raised Pot in 6 max PLO 40bb deep: Here this board is quite poor for the
SB. While he occasionally will have sets, he will almost never raise with hands that make
two pair on this board. Very often he will have bare overpairs at best and these are
much weaker in PLO than in NLH. BB, on the other hand, is calling IP vs a single raiser
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 69

and will defend rather wide. He can much more easily make two pair or sets on this
board and has a lot of strong draws at his disposal with which to bluff.
3. 8d 6d 4d
a. UTG vs BTN vs BB NLH Single Raised Pot 100bb deep: It becomes even more difficult to
think about board texture when we add an additional player to the pot, but is a useful
exercise because many pots at small stakes are contested ​multiway​. Since the board is
monotone and contains a straight, no player should have a massive lead. BB will have
the widest range because of the pot odds he received preflop, so he’ll be worst off. UTG
and BTN should have the most nut flushes with their A-high suited hands and BB will
probably have more of the weaker flushes. UTG and BTN will both lack for straights,
sets, two pair while BB will have some of all of these. UTG will have more overpairs that
also have a flush draw with them (As Ad for instance).
b. CO vs BTN PLO Single Raised Pot 100bb deep: The statements we made above will all be
generally true here. The board will level out the ranges quite a lot. CO will probably have
slightly more nut flushes, but both players will have plenty of flushes and mostly miss
the board otherwise.

To add some final clarification, when I say that a board favors us, I simply mean that we have
more strong hands on that board than our opponent does. This will allow us to value bet more thinly.
The more we can value bet, the more bluffs we can “get away” with having in our betting range. In most
cases, the preflop raiser will maintain an overall equity advantage even when the board is considered
“bad” for him or her, because by “bad” we mean relative to other boards.

Reading Your Range

We are now reaching a topic, the mastery of which will completely separate you from the poker
playing masses. Fair warning though, this is a challenging skill to master and essentially requires you to
double your work load throughout the hand. If you do master this topic, you can expect to be on of the
best players at any live poker table and one of the better regulars at the low end of midstakes online.

Important Note: This skill is only relevant when playing against opponents who can think about
what you have with a moderate level of sophistication. Against someone who is only thinking about how
to play their own hand, you should simply try to read their range and then maximize against it.

We’ve discussed reading your opponent’s hand, but against someone capable of reading your
hand, you need to go one step farther and figure out what he sees when he reads your hand. This means
that you essentially need to read your own hand from the perspective of your opponent.

What are we trying to achieve when we read our opponent’s hand? We want to figure out what
he has, but in most cases, we’ll only be able to come up with a range of possible hands. Therefore, what
we’re really trying to determine is: Does this opponent have too many bluffs or too many value hands? If
he has too many value hands, we should probably fold or occasionally bluff raise him and if he has too
many bluffs, we should call or raise if we can’t already beat those bluffs.
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Now realize that your opponent is also trying to determine the same thing about your range. If
possible, we would like to convince him that we have too many value hands when we’re actually bluffing
and lots of bluffs when we’re value betting. How do we do this?

● You can hide information by trying to keep your sizing consistent with all of your hands, whether
you’re bluffing or not. Most strong players will choose a reasonable bet size and use that size on
every flop. Some players will use a different size on different flop textures, but their sizing is
based on the board rather than their particular hand strength.
● While playing one of your value hands, try to think about what you would be bluffing in that
same situation. If it’s hard to come up with bluffs, then your opponent will also probably believe
you don’t have enough bluffs. This would be a great time to find creative ways to get some more
bluffs in your range.
● Find creative spots to bluff. Whenever you read your opponent’s range and conclude, “It’s really
hard to have bluffs here,” that might be a spot for you to find bluffs when the roles are reversed.
● Go for very thin value on boards where lots of draws miss. These boards just scream, “Missed
draws. Call!” to your opponent so finding extra value hands is a sure way to make money.

Opponent Tendencies Based on Postflop Lines

As your game evolves, you’ll find generalizations about opponent type to be less useful and you
will wish for more specific reads on how players approach particular “lines.” By ​line​, I mean the series of
actions that occurred in the hand. Just saying someone is “loose aggressive” gives you some hint as to
how they will approach most spots, but it can also lead you astray if you cling to it inflexibly. Knowing
that a loose aggressive player bets a lot on the flop and turn, but then tightens up on the river is much
more informative.

Whenever a player follows a weak pattern, there are at least two ways we can take advantage
of that mistake. That’s because their range of hands is usually divided between checking hands and
betting hands. Putting too many strong hands in the checking range leaves the betting range weak or
vice versa. The important thing to remember here is that we can exploit a range with too many strong
hands just as well as we exploit a range that has too many weak hands. We just do so by folding a lot.

Here’s an example of this in action. My opponent ​continuation bets​ way too often. How do I
exploit him two ways?

● I exploit his betting range by check raising often. He just has too many hands and will probably
fold them to a raise.
● When my opponent doesn’t continuation bet, I suspect that he is really weak. That means when
he checks back, I’m going to really attack him on the turn.

Here’s another one. You 3B out of position and get called. You bet and your opponent calls. You
know this opponent likes to make light flop calls and then bet the turn. This is known as a ​float​ ​and is
very effective against players who check and fold too much on the turn. How do you adjust to exploit
him?

● I would keep bluffing my really weak hands. If he calls the flop with the hopes of bluffing the
turn cheaply with really weak hands, I won’t give him the opportunity.
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● I’ll check my strong hands, my decent value hands, and my ​high equity bluffs​. I do this because I
know I’ll get bet into a lot. When this happens, I’ll happily check-raise all-in. If I think he can keep
bluffing on the river, I’ll keep calling with my really strong hands.

Here’s a final example. Your opponent continuation bets a normal amount, but when the flop
checks through, he ​delay continuation bets​ extremely often:

● I would check a lot of strong hands here in the hopes of getting a check-raise in.
● When he doesn’t delay continuation bet I suspect that he will be extremely weak and I will bet a
lot on the river.

You can apply this thinking and methodology to any series of actions in poker. Come up with
more of these yourself and try to figure out how you will adjust. Most of this work should be done away
from the table so you’ll know how to react without having to think too much. Keep an eye out for when
your opponent seems to bet or check in one situation very often and remember that there are two ways
to take advantage of them.

Flop Play
Flop play is an enormous topic and one that could easily occupy a full book by itself. To give you
a faster start, here is a framework for understanding flop play that you can fill in as your play develops.

There are at least five essential ingredients that go into flop play. (Let’s for now restrict
ourselves to just two players playing the hand.) We need to know:

1. What kind of player are we facing?

2. What was the preflop action and how does that impact the preflop ranges? Are we the preflop
raiser? Did we call from the big blind? Did we ​three bet​ preflop? Etc.
3. Are we in position or out of position?
4. What is the ​SPR​?
5. Whom does the board texture favor?

Let’s examine one combination of ingredients:

We raise three times the big blind from the ​Cutoff​ with 100bb stacks in a NLH cash game and get
called by the Big Blind. The flop comes Kh Jh 4c

Question #1: What kind of player are we facing?

● Let’s imagine that we just sat down at this table and know nothing about this particular player.
● In this case, we want to revert to playing our solid default game plan and take what we learn
from this hand and apply it to future hands.

Question #2: What are the preflop ranges likely to look like here?

● The BB didn’t three bet preflop so we can probably remove some hands like AA-QQ, AK, AQs,
maybe JJ, AJs, KQs, or QJs. He also might three bet bluff with hands like A4s, 87s, 76s, 86s and
occasionally an off suit ​broadway​ hand like KJo. This particular player likes to call quite a lot so
we can expect him to have all the suited and off suit broadways.
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 72

● Our range will likely consist of about 30% of hands. In NLH, this will consist of hands like K4s, J8s,
T9o, A8o all the way up to extremely strong hands like AK and AA.

Question #3: Are we in or out of position?

● We are in position and have all the strongest hands preflop on the vast majority of flops. That
means our opponent will probably check to us and we will have the choice of whether a bet
goes in or not.
● If we face bets from the out of position player too often, it’s likely he’s betting too many weak
hands into us and we should both call and raise a lot.

Question #4: What is the SPR?

● We raised 3bb out of our 100bb stack and got called by the BB. That means there is 6bb in the
pot, plus the small blind which folded. This means that the current pot has 6.5bb in it (minus
rake).
● 97/6.5= SPR=14.9. (The higher the rake, the more money will be taken out of the preflop pot so
our SPR will actually be higher at low stakes games than at high stakes games.)
● With such a deep SPR, we’ll generally want to start building pots on the flop with our strong
hands. We can slowplay occasionally with a hand like top set because when we hold KK, it makes
it hard for villain to have top pair, but generally we should just start betting and hope he has a
hand he is able to go to war with.
● Don’t let the urge to be deceptive encourage you to check strong hands here. It’s just as
deceptive to bet bluffs along with your strong hands.

Question #5: Whom does the board texture favor?

● First of all, favorability is a relative term. In terms of whose range will have more equity, the
preflop raiser will almost always maintain the advantage when reaching the flop (especially in
no limit hold’em since AA and KK are so strong).
● On this particular board, the CO should do quite well. His range will hold all of the sets as well as
KJ and may also have K4s. It will also have the only available overpair and several strong top
pairs.
● CO could also hold a number of relatively strong draws. Aside from nut flush draws, CO will also
have QT and gutters like AQ and AT. These may not seem that strong, but when we compare AQ
to a hand like J9, we see that not only do we have 4 nut gutshot outs, but also 6 overcard outs as
well.
● The BB will not do so well on this board. His range will be lacking in sets except for 44, though he
will have KJ and maybe some extra K4 and J4. He will lack AA and AK and some of the best
draws.
● Most importantly, it was stated above that BB likes to call somewhat wide preflop. That means
that he will have a significant amount of total misses like 87 and 96s or weak gutters like T9.

Question #6: What do we do with this information? Again the board texture is Kh Jh 4c.

● The correct answer is probably bet often.

● A lot of the betting hands will be somewhat straightforward and obvious: Sets and Two Pair and
AA and AK. Draws like nut flush draws and QT will be excellent ​semi bluffing candidates​.
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 73

● Hands that make surprisingly effective bluffs are hands like A8 with the Ace of hearts.
o The idea of this bluff is that it makes it impossible for villain to have his strongest draw
which would always call or raise.
o When a heart comes on the turn, we have a strong draw and prevent him from having
the nuts.
o We occasionally get lucky and turn or river an Ace which will win us the hand quite
often.
● Let’s think about some hands we’ll want to check.
o A hand like TT has little incentive to bet.
▪ If it gets called, it will often be by hands like top pair and second pair that are
way ahead.
▪ If it gets folds, it will probably be from hands like 33 or 87 which have very little
chance of winning.
▪ It can get called by draws, however most of those will have a lot of equity since
they will often have one overcard to the TT so that’s not a major victory
▪ Being check-raised will force us to fold a hand that could easily be best.
o A hand like Q9 or T9 without any suits that match the board may also prefer checking.
▪ While a hand like this may seem like a reasonable bluff and sometimes is, when
we get called by top pair or second pair we’re not in great shape.
▪ When we get called by stronger draws, we’re in really sorry shape as they will
often taint our outs with flush draws and occasionally will make higher straights
when we make lower straights, which is deadly.
o For similar reasons as Q9 and T9, our weakest flush draws will prefer checking.
o Weak top pair hands like K6s and second pair hands like JT/J9 will have similar problems
to TT.

Here is a PLO hand for us to consider:

We open to pot under the gun in PLO at a 6-handed table and get called by the big blind, 100bb
deep. The flop comes down Jd 8s 5c.

Question #1: What kind of player are we facing?

● Let’s imagine we are facing a player that loves to call preflop. He’s almost never seen a hand
with four cards he doesn’t like.
● He tends to be passive, not re-raising much preflop either.
● He prefers calling on the flop and likes to call whenever he gets near the board

Question #2: What are the preflop ranges likely to look like here?

● Our range will be tight and somewhat easy to define. We’ll only have about 15% of hands and
will have every AA combination.
● His range is extremely wide and hard to pinpoint.
o Some people end up being fearful of these players because they can have “anything” on
the flop.
o While it’s true that they can make sets and weird two pair hands that most players
cannot, for the most part, their wide range will make garbage or weak draws and weak
made hands much more often than ours will.
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 74

o That means that we will have the strongest hand more often than not.

Question #3: Are we in or out of position?

● We’ll act last in this hand because villain is in the big blind.

Question #4: What is the SPR?

● A pot bet preflop is 3.5bb so there will be 7.5bb in the pot (before rake) and 96.5bb in the
stacks.
● The SPR will be 12.9 or slightly higher depending on the exact rake structure.

Question #5: Whom does the board favor?

● The most important information for us to notice is how loosely the BB calls preflop.
● While it’s true that a loose player can have “anything,” in reality, they just have a whole lot of
nothing most of the time.
● Our range is very tight preflop since we are under the gun. We have a lot of overpairs and not
that many truly strong hands like sets. Our overpairs and top pair hands often have either a QT,
Q9, or T9 in them so we frequently have a good straight draw with our hand too.
● We almost never have truly weak hands on this board. Even a hand like AKQ4 with two
backdoor flush draws has a lot of potential.

Question #6: What do we do with this information?

● If this player was aggressive and didn’t play quite so many hands, I would probably check
back here often. Most of our hands are good, but not great. My value bets would mostly
come from hands like AA97, KKT9, AKJ8, and AJT9, while our bluffs would be hands like
A998, AQT9, and AKJ5.
● Against this opponent though, our hands like AAQT will be stronger than they appear
because he will have extremely weak hands like KJ72, T866, and A962.
● We also won’t be check-raised often by a passive opponent so the chances are that when
we bet, we’ll either get called by a weak hand or get a fold.

It may seem daunting to consider all of this information so early in the hand, but pretty quickly
you’ll find that answers to most of the questions I posed will come automatically. It might even be
helpful to write this list on your phone or on a sticky note and reference it between hands. Constant
reminders like this will keep your brain actively engaged and strengthen your poker muscles.

Check Raising the Flop

One of the first techniques we learn to attack our opposition is the flop continuation bet. It
punishes players who call too wide preflop and then play “​fit or fold​” postflop. While this is an excellent
weapon to put in your arsenal, let’s face it, most other players have this weapon at their disposal too.
Bringing a knife to a knife fight won’t cut it. You want to be the player that invents gunpowder.

My game really began to take off when I learned how to properly check-raise the flop. My
opponents would indiscriminately continuation bet hands that wanted to check and see a free card and I
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 75

would punish them with constant raises. This forced them to either fold hands which could have
certainly been best or call and risk being dominated by my nut hands or outdrawn by my high equity
draws.

There should be three components to every check raising range:

1. Your nutted hands.

2. Your strong nut-making draws.
3. Weak draws and hands that interfere with calling hands.

Let’s further break down each category and think about any exceptions to these guidelines:

Nutted Hands

What we classify as a nutted hand will change based on the game and board texture. Sets and
top two pair are generally nutted in NLH on most boards. In PLO, middle set and top set are usually
considered our nutted hands along with hands like top two pair with a flush draw or straight draw.
Against players that bet the flop a lot then check back on many turns, we’ll want to always raise these
hands on the flop. Against players that can bet flop and then bet turn again, we can consider ​slow
playing​ and raising turns when the pot is bigger. Our default should be to raise many of them on the flop
though.

Strong Nut-Making Draws

After reading the pot equity and fold equity section, playing these hands should be somewhat
intuitive. These hands are your premium bluffs and make the nuts relatively often. That means that
when they build a pot, they sometimes improve to beat the current nuts in a pot that is huge.

On boards that have a flush draw, these will be your nut flush draws or flush draws with a
straight draw in NLH. In PLO, they will be nut flush draws with an OESD or nut flush draws with other
pieces like bottom pair and a gutshot. Having several components gives these hands lots of ways to win
(pot equity) and also makes it hard for your opponent to call since he can’t have a nutted draw (fold
equity).

On ​rainbow​ boards, open-ended straight draws will be our best semi-bluffs in NLH and wraps
with or without additional pairs will be our best draws in PLO. In both cases, be sure to pick the higher
draws rather than the lower draws. For instance, 86 on K97r is significantly worse than JT or T8 because
its draws are not to the nuts. With 86, we’ll probably want to call to keep the pot small. In PLO, the gap
between JT8 and 865 on K97r is even larger.

Weak Draws

Many find playing this category confusing. It may be where you’re missing the most
check-raises. Weak draws have little prospect of improving, but can make hands occasionally. Their main
aspiration is to grab fold equity right now. They do this by ​blocking​ ​hands your opponent wants to call
with.

An example of this in PLO would be Q833 with one club on Qc 4d 2c. While it might seem
strange to check-raise top pair, this hand is so weak that calling isn’t really an option. We do, however,
have a hand that interferes with his strong draws by holding 33 and one club and we interfere with
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 76

strong value holdings like QQ or Q4. Q883 with no club is much worse at blocking and probably needs to
just get folded.

On this same board in NLH, we might look for hands like Ac 3s as a check-raise bluff. We will get
lucky and make the best hand once in a while, but even if we won’t, we’ll still have a great bluff when a
third club comes.

On paired boards, it can be harder to find those high equity draws to bluff. If the board is a dry
one like KK2, then any potential bluff will be a low equity one. In that case, you’ll want to think about
hands that have the best chance to get lucky (even if that chance is very slim) and hands that are the
happiest to see a fold. Hands with a 2 or a low pocket pair are probably your best bet even though they
only have two outs.

Turn Play
Before we consider how to approach the turn, we need to examine two different inputs to help
us determine what situation we find ourselves in. We need to know:

1. Was this a single raised pot or a 3bet pot?

2. Was there a continuation bet, or no bet at all?

With this information, in addition to the board texture, preflop ranges, and stack sizes, we
should be able to orient ourselves in the hand and make the right decision. Remember the exact action
so you can calculate the ranges in use.

Single Raised Pots

The following two scenarios will be the most common situations in your poker career. Although
the pots will not yet be large, systematic mistakes in either of these spots will be costly due to how
frequently they occur.

The turn is a great time to look for opponent mistakes because you’ll see how they play these
spots very often. Look for opponents who bet the flop way too often. Have you noticed anything about
their turn play? Some players will give up after being called on the flop. The rare times they do bet, they
are often value-betting. Players who bet the flop way too often and then bet the turn too often will
mostly have weak hands. Putting these principles together with the other ideas discussed in this chapter
should give you the ability to adjust well against your opposition.

Flop Was C-bet

After a flop c-bet, the IP player will mostly have the strongest hands and some weak hands and
OOP will usually have hands somewhere in the middle with a few traps or draws that improve. That
frequently results in OOP checking on the turn with everything, even if he improves. He does this
because IP should have all his strong hands. Having all your strongest hands gives you a lot of cause to
bet and bluff a lot. That means that the best way for OOP to make money with his strong hands is to
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 77

wait for a double barrel and to check-raise them on the turn. Along with these really good hands, we can
throw in some really high equity draws to try to get some fold equity along with our pot equity. Just be
careful to do this against opponents who a) bet the turn somewhat often and b) can actually fold
reasonable hands. If these aren’t true, then just check-raise your strong hands and get called.

Generally, turns that bring ​overcards​ or ​blanks​ will favor the player who continuation bet the
flop because the current nuts either remained the same or his overcards improved to new top pairs or
top two pairs. Cards that bring flushes or straights tend to hit both players and devalue the bettor’s best
flop hands. A board pairing card can favor either player depending on which card it is. For instance Qc 7s
4c Qh will favor the caller in PLO because they will call with a lot of Qxxx hands while a 7 or a 4 would
favor the caller in NLH because the bettor rarely bets those hands and the caller often calls with them.

Flop Checked Through

While NLH and PLO have a large number of similarities, turn play when the flop checks through
is probably one of the largest differences between the games. Many ranges that can reach the turn in
this line in PLO.

When IP checks back the flop in NLH, IP’s range rarely makes huge improvements on the turn.
That’s because there are just fewer draws and fewer ways to improve your hand in NLH. The flop
redistributes the hand strengths from preflop and there they remain to the end. Of course, there are
draws in NLH, but they hit far less often and exist less frequently to begin with. In PLO, this couldn’t be
farther from the truth.

In PLO, we have a great diversity of draws and often find reasons to check them back on the
flop. That means that when we do check back on the flop, we will still be able to make the nuts on
12
various turns​. ​The redistribution of preflop ranges doesn’t terminate with the flop; it continues
throughout the hand in PLO. This is one of the elements that makes the game so challenging. It also
means that our objectives are slightly different when delay c-betting.

In NLH, since we rarely improve significantly on the turn and most of our strongest hands bet
the flop when IP, we are mostly looking to thin value bet on the turn with hands like medium strength
top pair that weren’t strong enough to bet the flop. Our bluffs will often be new draws that were
created on the turn or the few draws that didn’t see a reason to bet the flop.

In PLO, we’ll also be looking to get thin value with hands like top and bottom pair (similar to
medium top pairs in NLH), but we’ll also be able to represent the nuts or a range that improves
significantly sometimes. Imagine a board like Q96hh. Both NLH and PLO players will find an Ax turn
appealing, but it’s far better in PLO than in NLH because we have more AA and AQ when checking back
the flop.

In NLH, when we are out of position and the flop has checked through, our opponent almost
always will have removed the strongest hands from his range. This can allow us to do a few interesting
things:

● Against opponents who bet the flop a lot, we should be able to go for thin value as OOP.
12
In PLO, we also have additional overpairs and top pairs that check back and make strong hands on blank turns
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 78

● This is especially true if our opponent won’t bet into us when we check the turn. We need to
start getting value and they won’t build the pot for us so we do it ourselves.
● We can also consider massive bets even twice the size of the current pot. If our opponents really
don’t have any strong hands, it might be hard for them to ever call us here. Don’t feel obligated
to do this, just try to stretch your brain and think about the game in ways that others don’t.

In PLO, we need to be a little more cautious as out of position because IP can once again make
strong hands. We really want to make sure we have a decent draw when bluffing as the out of position
player and just give up until the river with garbage. We can also slow play more with really strong hands
hoping to check-raise. If you want a visual refresher on how IP vs OOP ranges look, go check out the
position chapter from the previous section for the diagrams of position.

In both games, deciding when to bet or check-raise as OOP will often depend on opponent
tendencies. If someone rarely delay c-bets the turn, betting yourself will probably be the right path. If
they often delay c-bet, feel free to check-raise them more.

3B Pots
One of the major challenges to playing the turn well in a 3B pot is the fact that we are out of
position with a somewhat well-defined range. Our opponent knows roughly what our strongest hands
are and can quickly tell whether the flop was good for him or for us. This usually means that thinking
opponents can put a lot of pressure on us here and we sometimes need to make big calls with weak
hands after checking the turn. Just remember when the roles are reversed, you’ll be the one putting
pressure on them. Figure out what’s difficult to face and then add it to your own game.

Flop Was C-bet

Turn play in 3B pots after a continuation bet requires a lot of nerve because the pots are large
and all-ins are imminent. As much as possible, we want to focus on the SPR and the ranges involved.

Usually the SPR will be somewhere between 2 and 4 on the turn and we’ll have the option to
either bet a size that can easily allow us to go all-in on the river or check and try to keep the pot small or
check-raise all-in. Here are a few things I consider when trying to decide whether to check or to bet:

● Was the flop good or bad for me? If it was good, you will get to bet a lot on the flop, maybe
every time. You may get to the turn with some weaker hands and sometimes need to give up,
whereas your opponent will probably fold many of his weak hands on the flop and have stronger
hands on the turn.
● Is the turn favorable or unfavorable to me? Turns that bring straights and flushes are often poor
turns for the 3Ber who relies on their top pairs, overpairs, two pair hands, and sets. Conversely,
blanks and especially overcards to the board are generally favorable to the 3Ber because they
improve high cards hands.
● Does my opponent like to ​float​ the flop and ​stab​ turns? This would make me check the turn a lot
to catch light bluffs.
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 79

Flop Checked Through

One of the benefits of studying poker in a systematic way is that you can familiarize yourself
with many situations ahead of time while your opponents have to figure them out during the hand. This
is a prime example of a spot few players take time to consider and one where you can get a large edge.
Try to imagine which hands you would check on various flops and then imagine how well they do against
your opponent’s range. Remember that when the player who calls the 3B is in position, they will usually
bet their strong hands on the flop, so when they check back, they are missing a lot of value hands. Here
are some more factors to consider:

● Is your opponent particularly stabby? Does he bet a lot when you check? If so, what does that
say about the range of hands that doesn’t bet?
● Was this a bad flop for us? Surprisingly, this is a great situation for us. When the flop was poor
for us (7d 6h 4h in PLO for instance) and our opponent checks back, that often tells us he’s very
weak. Additionally, if we checked all of our hands on the flop, we still have our very best hands
while the IP player almost certainly doesn’t. That means we can quite often bet the turn.
● Were any new value hands created? If an Ace or King comes on the turn we might easily be able
to represent it.
● Did the board improve our mediocre hands that checked the flop? For instance, we may have
checked AA22 on Jh 7s 4h in PLO, but when a 4d comes on the turn, our AA22 becomes
significantly better. His draws just got weaker and now a hand like QJ98 no longer has any two
pair outs to beat AA.

River Play
Once you reach the river, you will have the maximum amount of information that you can ever
have in a poker hand. You’ll have knowledge of villain’s preflop open size, their position at the table,
how many other players started the hand and then folded, how villain acted on the flop and turn, and
any physical information he or she gave off throughout the hand in addition to specific reads you have
about their play.

While this may sound like a daunting amount of information to keep in your working memory at
once, it will eventually become second nature – much like a golfer does not have to think “I now sweep
the club back and start to rotate my hips as I cock my wrist…”

Here are some guidelines that will help you navigate your most important decisions on the river.

Thin Value Betting

The number one way you can crush small stakes is by going for thinner value than everyone else.
This topic alone might move you from being a break-even player in a low stakes game to a substantial
winner.
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 80

Most players bet too small or check too often when they reach the river simply out of fear. They
use position, they evaluate their opponent, and hand read like a champion until the end of the hand.

Then their mind goes blank.

The pot looks huge, their opponent could be trapping, better just play it safe.

This notion couldn’t be more wrong.

Imagine if they could see those invisible numbers over their hand. Let’s say this player has bet
the flop and turn in NLH with AK in on K74r 9x 2x and the pot is $100. If this hand checks, it probably
wins at least 75% of the time, so $75 dollars. That seems like a decent result. The problem is that the
number floating over their hand is actually $100 and every time they check, they fail to capture that last
$25. How? Well let’s imagine we bet $75 on the river with this hand. Even if AK only wins half the time
it’s called and villain folds the other half of the time, we make way more money betting. Here’s the
math: Let’s put $75 to one side and say we’ll pick that option unless betting makes more money. Now
when we bet and our opponent folds, we win the current pot, $100. That will happen about half the
time, which yields us $50. The other 50% of the time we’ll bet and either win $175 (the $100 pot and
their bet) or lose our $75 (our river bet). Once we crunch the numbers we’ll see that the real number
over hand was $100 all along.

Here is the equation written out:

0.5($100) + 0.5($175-$75) = $100

Estimating that AK only wins half the time when called is quite pessimistic on this board. How
can our opponent have a better hand? Just about the only way I can imagine losing here is if villain
rivered two pair, but this is quite rare.

I think the fear of making these big bets on the river comes down to two psychological factors,
one of which is more relevant in live poker. The first factor is that when we make a large value bet and a
better hand calls, it’s extremely memorable and painful. There is a feeling of inevitability and a sense
that we were tricked by our clever opponent when in fact, this is an extremely rare occurrence. Often
they either fold or make a call with a weaker top pair and never show the hand. The other factor is social
pressure about transgressing from the norms of the game and the fear of being ridiculed. I’ve said it
before and I’ll reiterate it again because it’s so important: No one ever became successful in poker by
playing in a conventional way.

Poker success is often about mastering fear.

Selecting Bluffs
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 81

Often players have a difficult time regulating their bluffing frequency on the river and tend to
default to bluffing too much or rarely bluffing. It’s better to focus on the board texture, our opponent,
and how much betting there was in the hand. If we consider these variables, we should have all the
information we need to weigh whether our bluff is wise or not.

Since we’ve previously discussed board texture and opponent type, here we’ll cover how to
think about scenarios where few bets have gone in and those where multiple bets have gone into the
pot and how that alters our bluff selection.

When No Bets Have Gone In

In pots that are checked to the river, we often want to pick our bluffing hands from the range of
hands that had no business bluffing at other times. These are hands that had few draws and almost no
hope. For instance, in NL we might bluff the flop or turn with a single overcard like A4 or K4 on Q82r 9x,
but we should probably wait until the river to bluff 54. That’s because we can hope to fold our opponent
off hands like T high that beat us on the river and occasionally will hit a 4 or 5 and win. In PLO, we might
wait until the river to bluff with J762 on the same board because our draw is quite weak and our two
pair outs are not particularly strong either. Notice that we might just give up with J763. Holding the 2 in
our hand makes it a little less likely that villain will have a two pair that can call.

When Multiple Bets Have Gone In

When we’ve seen significant action in the hand, having cards that interfere with or ​block​ ​our
opponent’s strong hands becomes increasingly important. Try to imagine what your opponent’s best
possible hands are in a given situation and try to find bluffs that interfere with those hands. This doesn’t
mean you should always try to “block the nuts” though. If your opponent has checked and called at
some point, chances are that he doesn’t have the nuts that often and it might be better to interfere with
hands like the second nuts or 3​rd​ nuts. You could do this by bluffing with the Qh rather than the Ah in
your hand on 853hh 2x Jh.

The idea of having a “blocker” matters in all poker games, but is more relevant in PLO than in
NLH. Sometimes in NLH, having a hand with a blocker​ ​will also be too strong to bluff and would rather
check and hope to win. In these cases, we’ll mostly bluff with missed draws, but we can try to bluff with
draws that give our opponent the greatest chance of also having a missed draw they’ll fold. For instance,
I’d much rather bluff with 8s 7s than Ah Qh on 962hh Kx 3x. This at least gives my opponent a chance to
have the missed nut flush draw and fold the river.

Putting It All Together: Part 2

Hand 1

You’re playing a live $500 dollar buy-in PLO cash game at your local casino. You’ve been playing
for a few hours and have seen your stack shrink and then grow back up to $700. Your opponent has
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 82

$1000 and opens from the CO for pot. You look down at 8876ds in the small blind and decide to 3B. Only
the CO calls.

Your opponent in the CO is probably the best player in the game. He’s somewhat loose and
aggressive generally. You’ve also noticed he likes to stab a lot when checked to in position, but doesn’t
often follow through with huge bluffs after betting a couple times.

The flop comes Th 8s 6h, giving you middle set and a gutshot straight draw and an SPR of about
5. Your first thought is “Whoa, I’ve got a strong hand!” but then you reflect. Your hand is strong, but this
is one of the worst boards for your range overall. You’ll have a lot of bare AA and KK that will be quite
weak and will probably fold to one bet while your opponent’s hands (lots of middling ​rundowns​) that
open and call a 3B smash this board. You remember your opponent’s tendency to stab when checked to
or when he perceives his opponents as weak. You also consider that by checking, you represent having a
weak hand when in fact you have a strong hand. Against a player that is aggressive, bluffy, and can read
your hand, this is excellent.

You check and your opponent quickly fires a half pot bet. You think for a little while and consider
check raising. While this would be a reasonable option, given that your opponent likes to stab when he
perceives weakness, you decide to just call and let him continue to bluff you on the turn.

The turn is Kd, the SPR is a little over 2 and you check again, continuing with your plan. Your
hand is still quite strong and you’ve represented some weak hands like AAxx, QQTx, or AQ86 that villain
may try to make fold on the turn so it makes sense to let him keep firing. He bets about 2/3rds of the
pot and you once again try to look pained as you make the call. While your opponent could easily have
97 here, you still have decent equity to win against that hand. He also has plenty of bluffs and could
even be value betting a worse hand like KT93 with a flush draw. That means that you are not even in a
way ahead / way behind scenario​ ​yet.

The river comes Jd and you check for a third time and the SPR is about 0.5. Your hand now has
gotten considerably worse and you start to get a sinking feeling in your stomach. You decide that since
you’ve seen your opponent give up a few times on the river, if he does go all-in you may need to fold
despite the excellent pot odds. The CO shuffles chips around for a few seconds, looks like he is going
through internal deliberations and finally decides to check and flips over Qd Js 8s 2c and seems surprised
when you show your hand.

“Would you have folded the river?” he asks.

You shrug, keeping your reads to yourself, flip your cards to the dealer and scoop the pot.

Analysis

Once you see villain’s cards, play back over the hand in your mind to see if the evidence
matched your hypothesis: that this player is loose and likes to stab a lot on the flop and turn, but may
not follow through on the river.

● Villain’s preflop hand seems somewhat weak in the CO so this gives us a tiny bit of confirmation
about our “loose” read.
● His flop stab seems quite reasonable with a nut gutter and second pair. This neither confirms
nor contradicts our read about him liking to stab often.
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 83

● His turn play also seems reasonable with the nut OESD though he’d probably rather have a heart
in his hand to make it a little less likely that you have a flush draw and that might help him bluff
on flush rivers.
● His river decision seems mostly okay. He could consider turning this hand into a bluff, trying to
move you off sets and K high two pair, but he might perceive that with such great pot odds,
players in your shoes rarely fold. He also might believe that you would have folded too many
hands earlier. In that case, you’ll get to the river with lots of strong hands.

Notice that we weren’t really able to draw too many conclusions from this hand. Other than
playing too loosely preflop, villain played pretty well and so did we. That doesn’t mean that neither of us
makes mistakes in hands like this, just that with these exact pieces of our range, we both played well.

Hand 2
You have been playing an ​uncapped​ $5/$10 NL game in Vegas all night, and as people start to
drop out of the game to sleep, you ask the player across the table if they'd like to play ​heads up​ for a
few hours to keep the table open. Your opponent agrees.

You take note that you've both accumulated big stacks over the course of the game. Your stack
is sitting around $6,000 and they have you covered. This player is not the best player around and you're
excited to have this opportunity to play a big spot with a big potential ​winrate​.

Your opponent played passively while the game was full, and made a lot of strong hands calling
with draws. Later, in one of the biggest pots of the night, villain grinned and showed a very loose bluff
after getting their opponent to fold on the river. You know that loose-passive players can be
unpredictable and, combined with the threat of very deep stacks, decide that you will take a cautious
approach focused on extracting value in small to medium pots.

After a few uneventful hands, you get dealt AdAh in the big blind and face a standard raise to
$30. Being deep and against a loose player, you make a large 3bet to $150 and get called. The flop
comes Ts 9c 8s and any excitement you previously felt has now eroded. With an SPR of 20, holding just
one pair on a very coordinated board, you reluctantly check and villain quickly checks behind. The turn is
the As and your attention snaps back to figure out how to handle this spot. Immediately, a couple
thoughts come to mind:

"Wow, this could be a big pot! As long as he doesn't have a flush...."

"The flop check looks weak, they could easily put me on AK here."

Your opponent holding a flush is unlikely, but so is any hand strong enough to call a big bet.
Knowing that a small bet with AK here is very reasonable to charge draws, you decide to make the same
play with your set of aces. If the small bet induces a raise, we have enough equity to call and decide
what to do on the river. You bet $80 and your opponent thinks for a moment before raising to $500.
Sticking to the plan, you call and see a river. 5s. The board now reads Ts 9c 8s As 5s, and you silently
curse your luck as you check. "Two Grand" is announced from across the table, as you sit in disbelief and
toss your three aces to the muck, knowing they can't possibly win. At least, that's what you thought,
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 84

until your opponent casually flips over a pair of ​red deuces​ and proceeds to drag the first big pot of the
match. Stunned, you wonder where the hell you went wrong.

Analysis:

-We knew going into this match that our opponent was capable of some wild stuff, but generally wanted
to stick to a plan of pot controlling and going for value.

-We followed this plan accurately, but failed to identify the opportunity to make a big bluff catch on the
river. What reads did we gather as a result?

1. Our opponent spent a little time considering the spot on the turn before raising big, but quickly stuck
to the plan on the river, making another extremely large bet. It will be important for us to watch for
both timing and sizing as the match continues, because we have multiple data points on how our
opponent plays a big bluff.

2. They were confident enough to verbalize the bet while bluffing, and showed pride in the bluff by
flipping over both cards. This indicates that it's unlikely they are using a specific range to bluff, and are
instead choosing spots that they think will work. We can identify these spots more accurately as the
match goes on.

The river bet size in particular is striking, because this bluff needs to work extremely often to be
successful since villain bet over the size of the pot. Of course it's painful to have folded the best hand,
but did we actually make a mistake? Let's think about what hands we would arrive with on the river.

On the turn, we bet $80 into a pot of $300 and were raised to $500 which is just over a pot sized
raise. We had decided we would play AK this way, as well as AA, and it's realistic that we would have
some AQ, a small number of flushes, and perhaps some bluffs with KQ, KJ, 77, 66. Some of these bluffing
hands, as well as top pair hands, will contain a big diamond. Perhaps we would have made a speculative
call on the turn with AQ without diamonds, but otherwise only call with our sets, big flush draws, and
made flushes. Given that we thought the flop was bad for many of our hands and that we wanted to be
able to bet for thin value with AK on the turn, it makes sense to also check a hand like Qd Jd on the flop,
bet small with our made flush and then to call when we’re raised. This is an excellent example of a way
ahead / way behind spot​.

On the river, when the flush draws all complete, villain risks $2k to win $1300 - a bet that must
13
work over 60% of the time to show a​ ​profit .​ ​Are we necessarily folding 60% of the time, just because
three aces hit the muck in this one hand? No! We will reach the river here with a large number of
flushes, and mostly strong ones. When you consider our overall range in this spot, villain made an
extremely reckless bluff that is likely to fail too often to make money.

It's extremely valuable, especially in heads up poker, to be able to recover from getting bluffed.
We can move forward from this hand knowing that our opponent likely made a mistake, but we were
unlucky to let them win the pot this one time. We are still heads up against a weak opponent, over

13
Villain risks $2000 to win $1300+$2000 so we divide 2000 into 3300 and get 60.6%
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 85

500bb deep, and we gained several pieces of key information to play even better for the rest of the
session. Keep on moving, the game has only just started.

Hand 3
We sit down with 100bb at an anonymous 6 max, NLH, 50 cent $1 Table on Runitonce Poker and
wait for our blind. We fold for a few hands until we are dealt Ah Qh under the gun and decide to raise 3
big blinds and get called by the button as well as the Big Blind. The flop brings Ad Qs 9h and the Big Blind
checks to us. First, we recognize that this is a delightful board for our exact hand, but then catch
ourselves. Is this a good board for all of our hands? How does the board texture hit the hands we are
likely to play? Is this a spot where we should be betting a lot with most of our hands?

Well Under the Gun shouldn’t be playing too many hands in general and a lot of them will have
an Ace. UTG will also hold many of the best pocket pairs while BTN and BB may not always have them.
With that in mind and the fact that our hand can easily get value from worse hands like AK that didn’t
re-raise or draws like JT, we go for a half pot bet. Only button calls.

The turn is the 7s and we see no reason to deviate from our plan. It’s possible our opponent
could have us beat with 99, but it’s far more likely that he just has a decent top pair and can call another
bet before the board gets too scary. We bet about 2/3 pot on the turn, leaving an SPR of about 3 on the
river.

The river is the 2s and we pause for a moment. A backdoor flush hit the river, but it’s pretty hard
for villain to hold that hand because he called two bets from us and would have needed additional
equity to call the flop since there was only one spade on the board at the time. It’s possible that button
floated our flop bet light, but with the BB left to act behind him, that would be ill advised. We fire out
another 2/3 pot bet hoping to get a call from AK, AJ, A9, A7 and maybe Q9 if button was loose preflop.
Villain quickly raises the rest of his stack all-in.

Well that didn’t quite go as planned. You take a second to regain your composure and consider
what he could have. You accepted all along that he could have you beat with 99, but he may have raised
the flop or turn with that and why would he raise it now? You start to think villain is full of shit and has a
missed draw like JTs or T8s when your eyes narrow in on the Ace of diamonds on the flop. You realize
that most of the aces button should be playing will be suited and that some of those suited hands will
have two spades in them. You also recognize that some of the draws like JTs, T8s, KJs, KTs will also have
two spades in them. Once you really start considering the possible flushes, you realize villain can have
quite a few!

Now you start to consider what bluffs he can reasonably have. You don’t know anything about
this player, so as a default, we don’t want to assume he’s capable of making a crazy bluff. KJ and KT
without a turned flush draw would likely have folded to our turn bet. JT and T8 are possible, but would
villain be willing to raise all-in with Jh Th when we could have the nuts and have shown so much
strength? That seems unlikely.

You keep coming back to one hand in particular: AK with the Ace of spades. Would villain be
capable of turning this hand into a bluff? You decide that doesn’t seem like a very natural hand for the
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 86

average player to be bluffing with as most players don’t consider turning top pair into a bluff. You decide
to fold.

In the chat, villain asks you what you had and you tell him you folded AQ. “What?? Are you
f$^%ing kidding me? I would have never folded that hand,” he replies. Despite winning a sizable pot,
villain’s ​tilt​ ​is apparent and he quickly loses his whole stack in the following hands.

Analysis

This is very similar to a hand I played where I actually did turn top pair into a bluff. Running into
a player capable of this at low stakes is rare, though, and a good assumption is that most players won’t
find such an unusual bluff. After calling a flop bet with a player behind and calling your turn bet, it’s just
difficult to actually come up with a hand for bluffing that doesn’t have a pair in it. When it’s difficult to
find hands without a pair, villain has to get creative and bluff with a hand like ​KsQ​ or ​AsK​, but most
players will see these as either calls or folds since they seem to have ​showdown value​. That leaves
villain with a lot of flushes.

Villain’s reaction to your fold shows that you won the ​reciprocality​ battle since you made a fold
that he would not have if roles were reversed. Looking for indicators like this is a great way to determine
that you’re winning in a game in the long run, even if you’ve been losing lately.

By the way, your river bet was probably too thin. Because the river is relatively bad for a lot of
our hands like AA, QQ, and AQ, we’re probably better off checking and trying to catch a bluff from JT
rather than a bluff raise. You made up for the mistake by making an excellent fold, however.
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 87

Choosing Your Game

Now that you’ve developed some universal poker skills, it’s time to find a game in which to
specialize. While it’s possible for elite poker players to play a number of games well, at the early stages
of your career, it’s better to focus on one particular game, develop your ability for a while, and then
branch out later. That will allow you to take specific ideas you’ve learned in one game and apply them to
others. It also helps you develop a poker work ethic.

The following sections compare and contrast the most common games. I estimate that these
games make up 80-90% of all the poker traffic you’ll see online or in casinos so I would strongly
encourage you to start with one of these.

No Limit Hold’em vs Pot Limit Omaha: Where to Start?

As of the writing of this book and for the foreseeable future, the two most popular poker games
online and in most casinos are No Limit Hold’em and Pot Limit Omaha. Since the games are closely
related, it may seem difficult to choose between the two at the outset of your poker career.
Understanding the differences between the games will not only help you make the choice, but will also
help you understand the games at a deeper level.

No Limit Hold’em
I have heard NLH described as a more polar game than PLO and I think the description is apt.
Given that we are only dealt two cards preflop, it is harder for a worse hand to beat a better hand in
NLH than in PLO. This significantly reduces the ​variance​ of the game and makes it harder for weak
players to win in the short term. While this may sound appealing, if you happen to find yourself as the
weaker player, the feeling of being crushed is sometimes palpable. The feeling of having no shot to win,
alongside so much theory developed around the game, often discourages amateurs from jumping into a
NLH, causing them to prefer PLO.

Another way that the polarity of the game manifests is in a concept called ​“​Way Ahead / Way
Behind.​”​ The idea is simple. If your opponent can either have a hand that completely destroys you or
that you completely crush, your options are really only call or fold depending on how often they have
each hand.

Let’s put this in the context of a contrived, but not entirely unrealistic, NLH hand example. You
hold A9 on K94r 2x and your opponent bets into you. For the example, our opponent either has AK
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against which we only have two outs or A3 for a gutshot straight draw. This hand has only 4 outs
against us. In this scenario, does it ever make sense to raise with A9?

No, to raise would be a huge mistake. By raising, we will likely fold out the hand that we want
our opponent to keep bluffing (A3) and isolate ourselves against the hand which crushes us (AK). Calling

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His ace ​blocks​ our two pair outs by giving him a better two pair
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allows us to see the river and try to determine the ratio with which our opponent is betting the A3. If he
bluffs often, we’ll call again and win some of the time, and if he rarely or never bluffs, we will have to
fold because we’ll be facing the AK at a frequency that exceeds our pot odds. To put numbers to this
example, if our opponent bets $100 into a pot of $100 on a blank river with AK, he needs to bet A3 less
than half the time he has it in order for us to profitably call. Way Ahead / Way Behind situations occur at
a high frequency in NLH and less often in other poker games.

Pot Limit Omaha

If No Limit Hold’em is a “polar” game then Omaha is a much more “​merged​” game. By that I
mean that the equities run closer together and that in some cases, shoving and trying to make your
opponent fold is a better choice than calling and letting them try to bluff you.

It’s harder to learn to play Pot Limit Omaha well because preflop play is harder to master,
mainly because PLO has 270,725 starting hands rather than the 1326 starting hands in No Limit Hold’em.
Postflop play will also be more challenging as subtle variations in similar hands should cause you to
dramatically change your play. Take AA with a flush draw on K86dd for example. Won’t we play all
variations of this hand the same way? Well AAK7 with the nut flush draw is a very strong hand and can
be played aggressively in most cases since it both makes the nuts and reduces the chances our opponent
has KK by holding the King ourselves. AA73 with a 7 high flush draw is weaker and needs to be played
with more caution.

The lines between value betting, semi-bluffing, and bluffing are also a lot less well defined in
PLO than they are in NLH. This is once again the result of having four cards instead of two. Let’s take a
hand like AKJ2 with the nut flush draw on Q92hh. Is this a value hand? It almost certainly can’t win
unless it improves. Is it a bluff? We’re actually ahead of a number of value hands our opponent can have
so it’s difficult to classify it as a bluff. In some sense, it’s a bluff against certain hands villain can hold and
a value bet against others, but for the most part, I would classify it as a strong semi-bluff which benefits
from fold equity and can improve to strong value bets.

Don’t let the complexity of PLO deter you. Increased complexity means that the room for an
edge over your opponents is larger and the game is less well studied, so you may find areas of the game
that even strong players don’t play well. The higher degree of variance in the short term also ensures
that losing players can win for longer, which convinces them to keep coming back to the table.

Cash Games vs Tournaments

Another critical decision is whether to specialize in tournaments or cash games. While it is
reasonable to play cash games full time and mix in the occasional tournament or to play tournaments
professionally and selectively jump into soft cash games, attempting to do both on a full-time basis will
likely result in poor outcomes.

Below, I list the advantages and disadvantages to each game type so that you can make a more
informed decision:
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 89

Advantages of Cash Games​:

● The lifestyle is significantly more flexible. You can generally show up (live or online) when you
want, play until you no longer feel like playing or the weak players leave, and then go home.
● Poker is all about having as many little edges over your opponents as possible. Selecting which
hours you play and quitting when you no longer feel you can perform at your best are two more
advantages you can have over your opponents. These kinds of edges are not so relevant when
your competition is weak and your card playing edge is significant. They can make all the
difference, however, at high stakes where almost everyone is very skilled.
● A cash game player’s knowledge is more specialized. This specialization creates a narrower
poker world for this player and allows them to study the game with more precision. An extreme
example of this is the ​heads up specialist​ who plays one type of poker against a single opponent
at a time. The number of situations that can arise, while still enormous, are dramatically fewer
than those that can arise in a 9-handed cash game where 3 or 4 players might see the flop. This
makes the game much easier to analyze which can increase this player’s edge. As of right now,
heads up cash game players have the largest edges over their opponents on average.

Disadvantages of Cash Games:

● The skill level of professionals at reasonable stakes is still significantly higher than that of
tournament professionals. That gap is closing with new advances in software, but still currently
exists.
● Many recreational players prefer the lottery element of tournaments and don’t think about
maximizing an ​hourly rate​. They crave the dream of winning the huge first place prize and
disregard losing $10 an hour for every tournament they enter. These are exactly the type of
player you will want to be playing against and unfortunately, many of them won’t play in your
cash game.
● Poker playing ​bots​ will show up in cash games before they show up in tournaments. This is
because the constantly changing stack sizes in tournaments make programming a competent
algorithm more difficult. 100% of poker sites claim to monitor and prevent bots from playing;
probably only about 10% of them are telling the truth.

Advantages of Tournaments​:
● Most players, even many professionals, play poker for reasons other than money. Some players
seek the rush of the gamble while others are inspired by the competitive drive to demolish their
competition while others simply want to win the lottery. All three of these player types show up
in tournament poker at a high frequency.
● While the skill gap between tournament players and cash game players is closing, tournaments
are still significantly softer than their equivalent cash games. This means more money sooner.
● Even when playing in a tournament, you should be thinking about how much money you are
making per hand or per hour rather than how much you hypothetically could win. That being
said, you will almost never win a life changing amount of money in one day of playing cash
games (unless you are playing in a game where the stakes are way too high for your bankroll)
whereas this is frequently possible in tournaments. I discourage my students from thinking like
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 90

this, but if poker is less about maximizing profit for you and more about the thrill of a potentially
large score, tournaments will likely be more inspiring for you.

Disadvantages of Tournaments​:
● The ​variance​ is staggering. Because edges generally decrease as stacks get shorter (and stacks
are always getting shorter due to the structure of tournaments) and all-ins are more frequent, it
is completely within the realm of possibility to lose for months on end in tournaments based
purely on bad luck. This can be incredibly taxing both emotionally and financially.
● Randomly drawn seats remove the cash game edges of choosing a seat or table.
● Are there particular times of day when you feel more focused and energized? While a cash game
player can choose to play during these hours, tournament players are stuck with the poker site’s
schedule. If you’re a morning person, starting a tournament at 16:00 and playing until 3:00 the
next day might be a nightmare. Are there more interesting activities planned at the same time
as a major Sunday tournament? Unfortunately, if you plan on playing tournaments
professionally, you’ll likely have to choose to stay at home.

Aside: The Independent Chip Model or ICM

Imagine for a moment that you are playing in a cash game where there are 10 players and
everyone buys in for $100. Let’s also imagine you can’t just pick up your chips whenever you feel like it
and the game only ends when one player has $1000. This would function exactly like a 10-player
tournament with a $100 buy in (I’m ignoring rake in both the cash game and tournament for this
example). A $5 chip is worth exactly $5 and a $25 chip is always worth $25. Winning first place nets you
a cool grand and second place nets you a sore back.

Now imagine that instead of first prize receiving $1000, first only receives $500 and second
receives $300 and third receives $200. How much is winning all the chips worth? Half as much as it used
to be. How much is second place worth? $300 more than it used to be worth since previously it won you
nothing. Even holding a single chip in third place is worth $200. Quite a substantial increase in value for
that chip!

The ​Independent Chip Model ​or ​ICM​ ​describes how payouts distort the value of chips. ICM is an
analysis of these distortions and how they change the value of those invisible numbers floating over our
hands. After all, a hand in poker is a tool to leverage the value of our stack and our stack only has value
because there is money to be won.

Here is an extreme example of the invisible number over our hand changing dramatically as a
result of the number of chips we have and the pay outs. Imagine the number floating over AA in a NLH
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cash game. The number is quite high, probably at least two to three times the big blind. Now imagine a
tournament scenario where there are 4 players remaining and three spots pay an entry to the WSOP
Main Event (worth $10,000) and the 4​th​ spot pays nothing. This is known as a ​satellite​ because the

15
The reason it’s not higher is that sometimes everyone just folds. Unfortunately, you can’t guarantee you’ll get
action with your AA
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 91

winners get an entry into a larger tournament and the payouts have to be equal. Also, since the payout
is the same for all players once the fourth player is knocked out, play stops with three players remaining.

You have 40,000 in chips and are cruising happily toward the finish line. In fact, there is only one
stack larger than yours with 45,000, a short stack with 10,000 and a micro stack of 2,000 who is about to
go ​busto​. The blinds are 500 and 1,000 and you look down at AA and dreams of Ferraris and speedboats
race through your brain. You raise to 2 times the big blind in the CO (you should have just shoved) and
micro stack folds on the button. The small blind is the biggest stack at the table and shoves on you and
the small stack in the BB folds so fast he sprains his wrist. What’s your play?

AA wins roughly 85% of the time against a random hand and is the absolute nuts preflop, how
could you ever consider anything but calling? Take a moment and consider the payouts though. What
are the consequences of losing and winning the hand? How likely are you to win the prize if you fold? Do
you think your chances of winning the prize when you fold are over 85%?

As you’ve probably concluded from the questions I asked above, calling would be a massive
mistake. Even if your opponent shows you some ridiculous hand, you can still lose. Losing costs you
$10,000. Winning the hand doesn’t even “win” you $10,000 because you still haven’t even knocked this
player out. In fact, your chances of winning the $10,000 have probably only improved from 95% to a
99% chance. Not really much of an achievement. Folding probably decreases your chance of winning the
prize by only 1% or 2%.

Here’s some quick math so that we can visualize the number floating over our AA in this
scenario. When we lose, it costs us $10,000, but this only happens maybe 15% of the time so the value
of this scenario is -$1,500. When we win our stack increases in value from being worth $9,500 to $9,900.
Remember, our stack can’t be worth more than that since we the maximum payout we would ever win
is $10,000. The scenario of our stack increasing from $9,500 to $9,900 is 85% since that’s how often AA
wins vs a random hand. To calculate our potential upside we take $400 multiplied by 0.85 for a net of
$340 in this scenario. If we add $340 to -$1,500 we see that our call with AA is worth -$1,160.

How much does folding cost us? Let’s be extremely pessimistic and say that folding decreases
our chances of reaching the prize by 5%. If our stack was worth $9,500 before and but now we only win
the prize 90% of the time, folding loses us $500. That means that the option to fold is worth -$500 and
calling is worth -$1,160. Another way to look at this is from the perspective of the current decision. In
this case, we would say that folding costs us zero and calling “wins” us -$660. In that case, the number
floating over our AA is $0 because folding is by far the best option.

The above example is certainly somewhat contrived, but it illustrates how radically different
tournaments can be from cash games. Don’t let this intimidate you. Increased complexity and weird
scenarios like this can be studied and the more studious player will make more money in the long run.

Here are the two main principles we want you to walk away with after reading this section:

The chips you win gradually decrease in value in tournaments and your last chip is worth way more
than your 100​th​ chip.
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 92

And:

The payout influences the value of our chips which influences the value of our hands. The closer we
get to the payouts, the higher the impact of our play.

HU vs Ring Games
If you choose to go down the cash game route, you’ll face another choice. Should you focus on
Heads Up (HU)​ or multiplayer games? Though I’ve played both, I will admit to having a bias towards
heads up games. There is a higher level of focus and intensity required that I find similar to playing
speed chess. I also feel that my brain is better suited for short bursts of intense focus rather than long
hours of lower intensity focus. These are just some of the factors to consider if you decide to specialize
in one particular game. I’ve outlined the remaining differences below:

Advantages of HU:

● The game space of heads up is smaller than in a ring game which means that the game is easier
to study with greater depth. This allows diligent HU players to probe deeply into the game and
become incredibly skilled.
● HU players are able to deeply analyze and learn from the play of individual opponents since they
see so many hands against that individual (especially if they are playing across multiple tables).
This allows them to quickly learn from and demolish their competition if they understand the
correct adjustments.
● In HU, you will need to play most of your hands. This results in far more marginal situations
where one is forced to ​bluff catch​ or value bet with lighter hands. Making marginal decisions
correctly is what separates strong players from weak players, so more marginal decisions allow
the better player to have an even larger edge than a six-handed or nine-handed player would
have.
● Given that you will be forced to make more marginal decisions on a regular basis, HU players
have become consistently the most skilled poker players. That means they have an easier time
learning new games and adapting to multiplayer games and tournaments.
● As a result of the above factors, HU players are capable of having much higher ​winrates​ than
ring game players in general. Having a huge winrate can lower variance somewhat and reduce
your bankroll requirements. It also gives you a greater feeling of certainty that you are indeed a
winner when you sit down to play.
● Although it’s still somewhat of a taboo subject, collusion does occur online. Two or more players
working together well and sharing cards will always beat the lone individual. Playing HU
completely circumvents this problem.
● If you want to learn alternative forms of poker like PLO8 or Stud and play online, there will likely
be almost no one playing. This means that to get practice in these games, you’ll have to play HU
with the one other person playing the game.
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 93

Disadvantages of HU:

● No one “has” to play hands against you. When you sit down at a ring table, while some players
may try to avoid a confrontation with a player they view as superior to them, it’s virtually
inevitable that they will collide at some point. In HU, someone who knows you are better can
just sit out. This means that you can only really get action from A) Recreational Players, B)
Professionals that believe they are winning against you and are mistaken or C) Professionals that
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believe they are winning against you and are correct.
● The variance can be stunning in HU forms of poker. At the time of writing, I am currently more
than 100 buy ins ​Under EV​ in HU PLO. That means that if we were to correct for the all-in luck
(losing as a 70% favorite when all-in or winning as a 40% underdog), I “should” have won 100
buy ins more than I actually did. This is rare, but can happen and is more likely to happen in HU
than in other forms of poker.
● Bots​ will likely destroy this form of poker before others since it’s much easier to calculate the
full solution of a two player poker game than a multiplayer poker game.
● The lifestyle is sometimes unpalatable. Often a HU professional will have tables open for hours
before anyone sits down to play.

Advantages of Ring Games

● There are a number of recreational players who will never even consider playing HU poker. Their
very idea of the game is playing at a table full of people. As a ring game player, you will have the
good fortune of playing with these players on a regular basis.
● It’s almost impossible to play HU at a casino because financially it does not make sense for them
to dedicate a dealer to only two players. This is clearly not a problem if you are comfortable
playing ring games.
● Action is more consistent. When I was playing 6 max NLH full time, I could easily set my schedule
to play from 11am until 3pm every day and almost never had trouble finding four or more tables
of games running at even high stakes.
● Playing ring games is likely easier at the beginning of your career. The number one piece of
advice I would give to a beginning player is to play tight. Most players won’t know how or won’t
17
have the discipline to adjust to the fact that you only have strong hands. This allows you to
start winning money relatively quickly in poker. It’s simply not possible to play tight in HU
because you are constantly in the blinds and folding too much just pours money down the drain.

Disadvantages of Ring Games

● There is a lot more information to learn and it’s difficult to be as precise with your analysis. In
HU for instance, you might have determined that you are supposed to call with 52% of your
hands against a 3x open raise. With practice you might learn exactly which hands make up that
52%. It takes a lot more work to figure out what you should call vs UTG, MP, CO, BTN, and SB.
You’ll also have to figure out how many more hands to call from all of those positions when your
opponent picks a smaller raise size than three times the big blind.

16
Occasionally there is a fourth category D) Players who want to improve their game and are willing to accept
some losses to learn. This is rare, however
17
Clearly they should fold some very strong hands to you
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 94

● Winrates will generally be smaller. You will have fewer opportunities to play hands with the
weakest player at the table because everyone else will be vying to play with them. There are
also fewer hands that are profitable in the early positions at the table. This means more folding
and also more coolers when both hands have to get all-in and no one makes a mistake.
● Collusion is absolutely a concern. While a few poker sites will be monitoring cheating and
actively trying to protect their players, most would rather sweep it under the rug and pretend it
cannot happen.

Deep Stacked Play vs Short Stacked Play

When playing cash games, you are very often given the choice to buy in for various amounts.
Most players disregard this choice or feel that buying in for less than the maximum somehow impugns
their masculinity. If, however, you look at the highest stakes cash games online with the best players in
the world, you’ll see wildly varying stack sizes. Why is this the case? Allow me to explain. However,
before I do, I would like to make one purely philosophical point:

While good players can make mistakes too, when you see a good player making a conscious strategic
choice such as playing with a smaller than normal stack, it’s best to assume this player knows
something you don’t.

It’s amazing how many amateurs in poker and many other sporting or academic pursuits
presume that they know better than experts despite little to no study. This is an example of
“​unconscious incompetence​”​ or not knowing enough to realize how little they know. Be humble and
suspicious of your own beliefs. As the aphorism states, “Pretend you know nothing and you will learn
everything.”

How to Think About Your Stack in Poker

Your stack is not your life blood. It’s not your pulse and for the video gamers out there, it’s not
your health bar telling you how much life your character has left.

Your stack is an investment tool. Nothing more and nothing less.

This investment tool allows you to leverage the value of the cards you hold, increasing their
value by making your opponents fold stronger hands when you are bluffing and call with weaker hands
when you are value betting. Your stack allows you to invest in draws that can mature into the nuts by
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the river. Your stack may also encourage you to fold some hands when there’s too much being risked
and too little of a reward.

You stack can also change the hands you elect to play preflop. As the ​effective stack​ increases,
hands with less raw equity, but greater ​playability​ and a greater capacity to make very strong hands go

18
Often slightly ahead / way behind hands
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 95

up in value. For instance, in NLH, which hand do you think will give you a better chance to win a 400bb
pot? A9o or 76s? Almost certainly 76s. Conversely, if you have 10bb, which would you rather shove? A9o
will perform much better in this case.

Recognizing how play changes at different stack depths is a hugely underrated skill in poker
today and is one that has allowed me to make a lot of money by creating situations my opponents don’t
understand well. Below are some upsides and downsides of playing at shorter and deeper stacks.
Ideally, you’ll want to be able to do both, so here are some comparisons to get you started.

Advantages of Short Stacking

● Remember the discussion of effective stack sizes? This is partially why short stacks are so
powerful. You may sit down with $10,000 at a $5-10 game, but if I only have $300 dollars, you’re
playing $300 effective. I have completely negated your whole approach to the game and forced
you to play in my world of micro investments.
● Many players who play with a full stack don’t bother to study short-stacked play. This means you
get to play a game on your own terms against players who are non-experts in the format. This is
almost always a recipe for profitability.
● Players at your table may actually be correct to make mistakes against you. In PLO for instance,
the preflop raiser can’t play too many hands vs a short stack. This is because the short stacker
will be dealt ​QQxx​ or better 7.8% of the time and ​AKxx​ 5.6% of the time. Opening too wide
allows the short stacker to 3B extremely often and then stack off on almost any flop. However, if
the open raiser is also deep stacked with a recreational player, they will try to open as many
hands as possible because those hands will be very profitable against the recreational player.
That means that the preflop raiser is consistently incentivized to make mistakes against you and
not care. Another winning formula!

Disadvantages of Short Stacking

● Some players will actually refuse to play a short stacker (more of a problem in HU) because they
recognize that they will be losing in this version of the game, believe that playing with a short
stack is all luck, or want the rush of playing big pots.
● Most poker sites limit ​ratholing​ ​which means that after a few double ups as the short stack,
you’ll be forced to play deeper.
● The variance is likely higher than playing with deep stacks because all-ins are more frequent.

Advantages of Full Stacking

● As stack sizes grow, so do your potential returns on your investment.

● Against players who focus on their absolute hand strength rather than relative hand strength,
playing deep stacked can be tremendously profitable because when we make hands like the nut
flush, we can expect to get our very large bets paid off by hands like weaker flushes.
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 96

● A lot of players tend to play too loose and splashy when they are deep. While they should play
more hands in some instances, other times the added depth can work against them. They
rationalize that they only need to call 3bb to play and they have 400bb in their stack. What often
happens, though, is that they get sucked into playing more pots out of position and are forced to
call large bets with a marginal holding throughout the rest of the hand. This can result in them
getting coolered for 100s of big blinds in pots they should have never entered in the first place.
● Deeper stacks tends to force you to play turns and rivers because there will be less all-ins on the
flop. This can benefit the more skilled player.

Disadvantages of Full Stacking

● Especially in PLO, many online games only run with short stacks so you’ll never have the
opportunity to play deep. This tends to be less true in NLH.
● There is a whole set of games called “cap” games where the most you can ever have on the
table is between 20-40bb even if you double up. Some recreational players like these games
because there are lots of all-ins and the weaker player will lose only a small amount at a time.
Unfortunately, if you aren’t well versed in playing with short stacks, it will be difficult to justify
playing these games.
● Short stacking also prepares you well for various stages of tournament play and makes it easier
for a cash game player to jump into a soft tournament. Without those skills, the tournaments
have less value.
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 97

Introduction to Game Theory

Congratulations on reaching this stage in your poker journey. You have truly stepped into
rarified air if you’ve made it this far and mastered all of the material up to this point. While the material
that follows will be well known to many online professional poker players, there’s a chance virtually no
one at your local casino has heard of ​Game Theory​, let alone applied it to their game.

Up to this point, we’ve mostly been thinking about poker from an exploitive perspective. We’ve
been imagining what kind of mistakes our opponents are likely making and building a strategy around
taking advantage of those mistakes. The problem is, every exploitive strategy is vulnerable to some
counter exploitive strategy. This is true not only against strong players who can figure out what you’re
doing, but also against weak players that play radically different styles.

Imagine that you’ve built your game around thin value betting because you believe that most of
your opponents call too much. You also fold a lot when they raise those thin value bets because you
believe that most of your opponents are very passive. Essentially, you are throwing Rock in ​Rock, Paper,
Scissors​ ​against opponents who always throw Scissors. That’s an excellent decision. But what happens
when I join your game? Soon, I determine that you’re throwing Rock, so I start to throw Paper. In this
case, “throwing paper” involves folding marginal hands to your thin value bets and raising often with a
lot of bluffs. Suddenly, your strategy doesn’t look so great, but that’s okay. Maybe there aren’t many
professionals at your table who are thinking on a high level.

Imagine once again that you are playing your thin value betting strategy and folding to raises in
NLH. Your opponent this time is unknown, but you assume that he is passive and calls too much like
many players in your game. You go for thin value on the river against him and he raises you. You fold.
This happens three more times. The fourth time he raises you and you fold, he shows the table second
pair and says “I just didn’t feel like you had it.” As it turns out, this opponent is a loose aggressive
maniac​ who isn’t thinking in terms of value bets or bluffs and thus is inadvertently turning hands like
second pair into bluffs. While his strategy is a highly exploitable one, it perfectly counter-exploited your
exploitive strategy. This is essentially the problem with playing a particular “style” in poker. We might
leave ourselves open to getting crushed accidentally.

What we want then is a strategy that does well against all other strategies while we search for
mistakes in our opponent’s game. This is called a ​balanced​ strategy or a ​Nash Equilibrium​. Theoretically,
this equilibrium is the perfect defensive strategy that can never be beaten and is ready for any attack
from any direction. I visualize it as a Judo master standing in the center of the mat stoically, just waiting
for the assault. Attackers come from all directions, but the Judo master never charges or runs to the side
of the mat to avoid the attack. Instead he simply waits and uses the attacker’s momentum against them
by ducking or taking one step to the right or left at the last moment, leaving the attacker to gracelessly
fall on their face as they whiz past him.

While this is certainly an elegant way to play, it will rarely land a huge knockout blow because
it’s purely reactive. Now imagine the Judo master that knows his opponent tends to strike only with his
right hand. In that case, he might deviate from his balanced approach, anticipate the right side attack
and plan a wicked counter attack. This might end the fight immediately. The problem now is that the
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 98

expected value​ of the attacker switching to a left side attack just went way up. Suddenly for the first
time, the Judo master might be in danger.

This back and forth of exploitation is known as ​leveling​. If each player keeps jumping from
“always attack right” to “always attack left” then both combatants keep spinning around in a circle of “I
know that he knows that I know that he knows…” endlessly taking turns exploiting each other. The
equilibrium starts to emerge when one combatant says “Instead of going right 100% of the time, I’ll only
do that 80% of the time.” That makes the counterattack a little less effective. The counter attacker will
then have to prepare slightly more to face the left side attack. This makes the counter attacker a little
less vulnerable to the counter-counter attack from the original attacker. The process iteratively will
move closer to an equilibrium where the attacker is attacking on each side evenly and the defender has
to be ready for anything.

The following topics are all designed to help you be ready for anything in poker. If you don’t
know where you stand or what your opponent is doing, you can always fall back on these ideas.
However, your goal is not to rely exclusively on them. Poker is still a game of humans finding patterns
and flaws in the play of other humans and the “knockout blow” is where the real money is. Ideas like
Minimum Defense Frequency​ just keep you centered when you don’t know if the attack is coming from
the right or the left.

Polarization and Indifference

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In poker, our ultimate goal is to maximize our EV. However, since the game itself is ​zero sum​,
driving down our opponent’s EV is exactly the same as increasing your own. In this way, poker is like a
teeter-totter; you can lift one side up or push the other side down and the result will be the same.

With that objective, how do we go about reducing our opponent’s EV? We create polarized
ranges that render as many hands in their range as possible indifferent to their actions.

To make sense of this, let’s define some terms: ​polarization​ ​in poker means that when we bet,
we bet a range of strong hands and bluffs and check back the middling hands. When we say that our
opponent is ​indifferent​, we simply mean that our opponent has one or more actions which have the
same value. When facing a polarized range, that value is often zero and our opponent will have to
choose whether to call or fold.

If we return to the analogy from the beginning of the book where we imagine dollar signs
floating over each hand, we should recognize that some of those hands will have a zero over them. That
means that if you play them, in the long run they won’t make you any money. However, folding also
wins you zero dollars. In this case, that hand will be indifferent to the choice of raising or folding
(​limping​ might just lose it money so it wouldn’t be indifferent to that third option).

What does indifference look like postflop? Imagine facing a pot sized bet in PLO on the river on a
flush board​ after your opponent bet the flop and turn. You may be holding a weak flush, a set, two pair,
or top pair. Is there truly any difference between these hands? In terms of absolute hand strength, the
hierarchy is obvious, but if we consider the hand from a relative hand strength perspective, the case is

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Technically due to rake, the game is typically negative sum, but the ideas discussed will still hold
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much less clear. Will your opponent ever consider betting with a value hand that is worse than your
weak flush here? No chance. Will he ever bet a bluff that is better than top pair? It’s possible, but
probably not. That means that a weak flush wins roughly as often as the two pair hand. The only
difference is that the weak flush will have at least two cards of the suit in its hand which makes it slightly
harder for the other player to have a flush.

When polarization like this happens, the exact strength of our hands become less meaningful
and the ratio of value hands to bluffs in our opponent’s range means everything. This is where pot odds
becomes an essential concept. Imagine you are facing a bet of $100 into a pot of $100. You are being
laid 2 to 1 odds and need to win more than 33.3% of the time for your call to be +EV. That means that if
your opponent has 10 value hands and 5 bluffs, your hand wins exactly 33.3% of the time and your EV is
exactly zero. If your opponent adds one more bluff to his range, you now win 37.5% of the time. To
figure out how much that mistake is worth in dollars, we multiply 37.5% by 200 (how much you’ll win)
and subtract it from 62.5% times 100 (how much you’ll lose). In this case, our call won us $12.5 dollars.
On the other hand, if we subtracted a bluff from villain’s range so that the ratio of value to bluffs was
now 10 to 4, our call would be losing money.

Combinatorics and Blockers

Before delving into the mathematics of ​combinatorics​ and ​blockers​, let’s start with an overview.
While the number of possibilities in a poker hand is enormous, a deck of cards is finite. Thus the cards
we hold hand must restrict what our opponent can hold in their hand. Using this information correctly
will help us bluff at times that reduce the chance of getting called and bluff catch at times that increase
the chances our opponent is bluffing.

Since in Hold’em is combinatorically much simpler than PLO, let’s start there. One question you
might have is, “How often do I get dealt AA or AK?” Here’s some basic math to help you calculate that:

First we need to determine the total number of possible hands in the game itself. We do this by
multiplying 52 times 51 (since there are 52 unknown cards and we could like to consider two of them)
20
and dividing that by 2! or 2 factorial. After doing this math, we can determine that there are 1326 two
card hands available in NLH.

To determine how many combinations of AA exist in a NLH game, simply multiply 4 times 3 (the
initial number of aces in the deck and the number that remains after the first has been selected) and
divide that by 2. Here we will find that there are 6 combinations of AA which is also true of all pocket
pairs. From here we divide 6 into 1326 and find that AA is dealt to us once every 221 hands.

Instead of memorizing these numbers, here is a quick way to visualize the combinatorics for
each starting hand in Hold’em. There are 4 ways to make each suited hand because there are four suits.
There are 16 combinations of every non-paired hand including the suited combinations. Let’s use AK as
an example. The way to determine that there are indeed 16 combinations of this hand is to imagine (or
actually do this with a deck of cards) two vertical lines of cards. In the left column, place the four aces, in

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2! Is simply 2 times 1, whereas 5! would be 5 times 4 times 3 times 2 times 1
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 100

the right column, place the four kings. Now imagine drawing a line from the top Ace to each King. Doing
this for each Ace will yield 16 combinations or the same as multiplying four times four.

Now let’s imagine that while dealing the hand, the dealer accidentally flipped over two Kings
and one Ace (not his day). Now how many combinations of AK exist once those cards are discarded? We
remove one Ace from the left column and two Kings from the right column and we either multiply or
draw lines from each card to see that only 6 combinations are now possible.

The visualization works slightly differently for a pocket pair. Take four aces out of your deck and
place them in a two by two square. Imagine all the ways you can draw lines connecting two cards. There
will be two vertical, two horizontal and two diagonally. Since Ac Ah is the same hand as Ah Ac, we can
ignore the order of the cards which is why there are 6 combinations of AA rather than 12.

Weighted Combinatorics
We have only been examining combinatorics from the perspective of an outside observer who is
considering the full deck of cards. In fact, the particular range of cards your opponent is playing greatly
influences the possible combinations of cards he can hold. Additionally, the cards in our own hand
further restrict our opponent’s possible holdings. These effects, called weighting, will be even more
strongly felt in Omaha since there are more known cards.

We first need to weight combinatorics after the preflop betting round. Determining which
boards hit which ranges is actually an act of weighting combinatorics since some hands are always
folded preflop. In No Limit Hold’em for instance, while there are 16 combinations of the hand 63, we can
very easily state that UTG should never have any of them and thus can’t have the nuts on 542. In fact,
UTG may never have the second nuts or any of the sets on this board either. In PLO, UTG may
occasionally have 55 or a 2 on 522, but the chances of him having 52 are very slim and overall, his range
will have few hands better than AA.

Using Combinatorics in Game

It's virtually impossible to use combinatorics in game in PLO because ranges are so vast and so
much math is required so this section will focus exclusively on NLH. If you want to get a deeper
understanding of combinatorics in PLO, I would encourage you to use a program like PokerJuice which
can easily enumerate all the combinations and help you develop your intuition.

In NLH, it’s entirely possible to make reasonably accurate estimates of your opponent’s range
while playing a hand. This is especially true live when you’ll only be playing one hand at a time and that
hand will move more slowly than an online hand. Let’s look at an example:

Your opponent – who is tight preflop, but very aggressive postflop – raises UTG​ ​and you alone
call from the big blind. He proceeds to bet flop and turn and then shove the river on Qs Jh Jd 5d 2d. You
hold Kc Qc. What should you do?
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 101

First of all, let’s use combinatorics to break down his potential value range starting with the
absolute strongest possible hands and moving to the weakest we can imagine him holding.

● Given that there are two Jacks on the board, there is only 1 combination of JJ left in the deck.
● Given that there is one Queen on the board and one in your hand, there is only one combination
of QQ left in the deck (# of total combos that beat us is 2).
● There are 16 combinations of QJ in a full deck of cards, but given that this player is tight, he will
only have the four suited combinations. In this case however, none of the suited combinations
are available because the Qc/Qs/Jh/Jd are all visible to us. That means QJs can’t be in his range
(Total number of combos to beat us remains at 2).
● Neither J5 nor J2 will be in this player’s open raising range so it’s impossible for him to make
these full houses (2).
● Our opponent is most likely open raising both 55 and 22 which is twelve combinations in total.
Once the 5 and 2 show up on the board, that cuts the total number of combinations in half to 6.
We also don’t know whether our opponent would play either of these hands this way at a high
frequency (remember that he would have to essentially turn 22 into a bluff on the flop and turn
in order to get lucky on the river. This play is most likely a good choice from the early position
raiser, but requires a high level of poker sophistication that not all opponents will have). As a
show of our uncertainty we can say that our opponent will play these hands this way 50% of the
time and assign them a total of 3 combinations. After we receive more information about how
this opponent plays, we will go back and refine our estimations for future hands (5 combos that
beat us, plus or minus 3)
● AJ is statistically the hand we need to be most concerned about. There are 16 combinations of
all AJ preflop. Two are on the board so now we simply multiply 4 aces by 2 Jacks and find that
there are 8 combinations left. Our cards don’t interfere with the A or J at all and our opponent is
very likely to play this hand this way every time. The only degree of uncertainty that exists is
whether he would open raise preflop with all his AJo or if he would restrict himself to just the
suited combinations. If he only has the suited version of AJ then he only has 2 combinations
available instead of 8.

Conclusion

Weighted combinatorics is another opportunity for self-deception in poker. Do you genuinely

believe that your opponent folds AJo preflop or did you convince yourself it was true in order to
discount the number of hands that beat you, allowing you to rationalize a call you have the strong desire
to make?

To combat this form of self-deception, I often elect to evaluate the composition of villain’s range
using thresholds rather than absolute numbers. If my opponent can have between 40 or 50 value
combinations based on the error in my assumptions, but my call is correct in either case, I don’t have to
worry. If my call would be widely unprofitable against the higher boundary of his potential value range
and only slightly profitable against the lower boundary, I’m better off folding.
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 102

Mitigating self-deception is the key to successful gambling.

Capped and Condensed Ranges

When we say that a range is ​capped​, we mean that the best possible hands have been removed
from that range by some previous action. In No Limit Hold’em, when the BB doesn’t 3B preflop, he will
end up being capped on a board like AK6r since he will not have AA/KK/AK, though he will still have 66
and A6. If someone never slow plays a strong hand as OOP on the flop, at those times when they
check-call, they will be quite weak on turns that don’t improve draws.

If we identify that our opponent’s range is capped at the fourth nuts, then the 3​rd​ nuts is almost
identical to the 2​nd​ or 1​st​ nuts and we can start polarizing.

Does this mean we should slow play more hands out of position to avoid capping our range? In a
few cases, yes, but for the most part, no. The majority of the time we just want to start building a pot
with our value hands before the board changes and just suffer a bit more when we check-call out of
position. The draws that we check-call will also help us defend our check-calling range.

● We generally slow play more in NLH than in PLO since almost every board is drier in NLH than
the equivalent board in PLO.
● The difference in ​betting structure​ between the two games also inclines us to slow play more on
the flop in NLH. That’s because overbets on the turn and river are possible in NLH whereas in
PLO, the largest our opponent can ever bet is pot.
● On extremely dry boards like ​monotone boards​ in PLO, slow playing some of our best hands
makes sense because the nuts will rarely change.
● Exploitatively, if we feel our opponent double barrel bluffs too often, we’ll want to slow play
more and check-raise the turn to take advantage of this.

Minimum Defense Frequency

Minimum Defense Frequency​ (or ​MDF​)​ ​is probably the most misunderstood concept within the
game theory segment of this book. Misapplying this concept can lead players to make significant
mistakes so we will need to tread with caution and apply theoretical concepts when they are relevant
and not for the sake of demonstrating our vast knowledge.

The idea of Minimum Defense Frequency is simply that if we fold too much, our opponent can
just indiscriminately bet into us and make money regardless of what his exact hand is. While it’s
important not to allow this to happen to us, we also need to question whether our opponents are even
close to bluffing us this much or whether they could make the proper adjustment if they knew we were
folding too much. If our opponents are betting a reasonable amount, we can use a minimum defense
frequency to determine how often we need to continue in the hand.

Here’s some relatively simple math that you can quickly master to help you determine whether
you have reached a minimum defense frequency:
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 103

When our opponent bets, he is laying himself a price. When he bets 100 into a pot of 100, he
risks one to win one. If we convert this into a percentage, that’s 100 to win the whole of 200 which is ½
or 50%. If his bet works more than 50% of the time, he automatically makes profit. To stop this, we need
to defend the complement of that number, which is 50%. The “complement” is a mathematical term
that means the difference between the first number and the whole, which is 100% in this case. If our
opponent bets 25 into a pot of 50, he risks 1 to win 2. We convert this to a fraction by adding 1 to 2 to
get a denominator of 3 and get the fraction 1/3 or 33.3%. The compliment in this case is 66.7% which is
how often we need to defend.

There are a number of important caveats to remember with Minimum Defense Frequency. All
the following ideas are regularly misunderstood or misapplied:

1. We can’t simply ignore what our opponent is doing in favor of reaching a MDF. If your opponent
is betting too little or not bluffing enough, you may be burning money by trying to reach this
threshold. A MDF is designed to make their bluffs indifferent to bluffing (putting a zero over
those hands to reuse our analogy); if they don’t have many bluffs, we’ll just run into strong
hands more often.
2. MDF applies globally, but not to every specific situation we find ourselves in. What this means is
that if we average all rivers together, in theory we would defend the minimum, but there are
some rivers that are so bad for us, we end up folding way more than a MDF would indicate.
3. There is more than one way to meet a MDF. You can do so by calling or by raising. Raising also
tends to count more than a call does when defending since it adds fold equity. That means that
check-calling 30% of the time and raising 15% might be enough to meet a 50% MDF. There are
also times when you end up betting so aggressively that you don’t need to worry about
defending enough when you check. This usually happens on the river rather than on early
streets. In this case, we are essentially “defending” with aggression.
4. We often exceed a MDF when IP and slightly fail to meet it when we are OOP. If we go back to
earlier discussion of position at the beginning of the book, you’ll recall how the exact same hand
will have a higher EV when IP than out of position. That leads us to conclude that there are some
hands we could defend when IP that will have to fold OOP.

Why Ever Play A Hand (Other Than The Nuts): Expert Explanation
Remember the early discussion of why we would ever play a hand other than the nuts? At that
point, I answered with two levels of complexity. Now you’re ready to add a final layer of nuances.

We’ve established that we want to play every hand as profitably as possible and that there are
more profitable hands we can play than just the nuts itself. We’ve also established that the reason that
hands other than the nuts are playable is a direct result of the blinds. The final pieces to this puzzle are a
previously discussed concept (​Minimum Defense Frequency​) and a new concept known as ​board
coverage​.

Consider that invisible number floating over our preflop hand which tells us how much a hand is
worth. We know that we need to fold when the number is negative and we need to play a hand when
the number is positive. What do we do when the number is exactly zero? While this may seem like a
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 104

rare occurrence, it actually happens far more often than you’d expect and is another example of a hand
being​ ​indifferent​ to its choice of actions.

If the number above these hands is zero, can’t we simply always fold or always call without any
repercussions? In fact, we can’t. One reason is that if we always fold, we don’t meet the ​MDF​ ​preflop.
When that happens, our opponent can start raising us more because more of his hands have positive
floating numbers over them since we give up too often. If we defend too many hands, the numbers over
villain’s best hands will improve. His main exploit will be to continuation bet into us extremely often on
the flop. With too many weak hands, we will ​overfold​ on the flop and he will capture the pot too often.

The next reason we can’t just fold all those zero dollar hands is because we need to have some
coverage on all possible boards. If you imagine a player in NLH who only plays hands that have two
broadway​ cards in it, how would their range perform on a board like 764r?

There are two major problems here. One pair hands would be the best value hands this player
could have on this board. Additionally, their bluffs would be quite weak and have no positive blocking
qualities. This means that any time their opponent had a hand that beat an overpair (even 64), they
could treat it as the nuts and build a huge pot with it and try to get all of the money in. If any two pair or
better is effectively the nuts for this player, he will also get to bluff a lot, pushing even our best possible
hand (AA) to indifference.

It’s important to not get overly carried away with this concept. Using board coverage as a
rationalization for playing poor hands will just result in you playing hands that have negative numbers
floating over them rather than a zero or a positive number. There are also just some boards we are
going to miss because our preflop range dictates that we miss it. In a ​Four Bet​ pot in PLO, we will mostly
have AA which means we don’t hit many straight boards very hard. That’s okay because the SPR is often
21
extremely low and four betting weak hands in the hopes of hitting these boards is not recommended.
This concept is more applicable to NLH than PLO. That’s because the ​side cards​ ​in PLO often help you
cover boards in surprising ways, whereas in NLH, you don’t have that luxury.

If these concepts seem abstract and difficult to grasp, that’s okay. Come back to this section
after you play for a few weeks or months and reread it. You will very rarely face opponents who have
the skill to make the adjustments I described in this chapter. In fact, there are plenty of high stakes
players who can’t make these adjustments. There are, however, plenty of players who don’t cover
boards well or fold too much or too little preflop. The real value then is imagining yourself on the other
side of these examples, using your observations to exploit the mistakes of your opponents.

Putting It All Together: Part 3

Welcome to the final series of hands in this book. Like all of the previous hands, this collection
will build on topics we’ve covered in the previous theoretical chapter. The decisions in these hands will
reflect our range, our opponent’s range, optimal strategy, and how our opponent might be deviating
from it. You may find these hands overly complex or at a level that isn’t relevant in your games. That’s

21
Meaning we will still be able to stack off sometimes
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 105

okay, just push yourself to try to understand what’s happening. The better you become, the more
relevant the ideas will seem and the more opportunities you’ll find to use them.

Hand 1:

You’re playing 40bb HU PLO with another tough, thinking, professional player at $1-$2 online.
You open Ad Jd 6d 5h on the button for 3 times the big blind and get​ ​flatted​ ​by the BB. The flop comes
Kd Qd 5d giving you the nut flush. You consider your options:

Betting with the nuts is a high value option, but there are a few components to this particular
hand that make you hesitate.

You begin by recognizing that holding Ad has a profound blocking effect on your opponent’s
value range and that the impact is even more consequential in PLO, where the nuts plays a larger role
than in NLH. You also hold the Jd which prevents BB from having made the second nuts and eliminates
one of the most profitable scenarios in the game. Holding a third diamond in your hand further restricts
your opponent’s ability to have a hand strong enough to pay you off. The 5h, a seemingly irrelevant
piece of the hand, even has a slight blocking effect on villain’s range as it reduces the number of possible
two pair and set hands villain can call with (as well as reducing the chances that a hand like QQ can
improve to a full house and beat our current hand).

After considering the blocker implications of the hand, you reflect on whether there are
strategic reasons to ever check this hand back. While building the pot should be the primary objective
with the nuts, always betting the nuts removes it entirely from our check back range. When this
happens, villain’s second nuts gains value and never has to fear running into better. This incentivizes
villain to bet the turn wider for value which also allows villain to bluff more. If villain creates a properly
balanced​ betting range, the expected value of the hands we check back will be extremely low. By
throwing a few extra combinations of the nuts in our check back range, we can effectively catch bluffs
and still raise the river for value against very strong hands.

One final consideration before making your decision is an opponent specific one. The villain in
this hand is capable of attacking ​capped​ ranges rather ruthlessly. After playing a series of hands against
this opponent, you began to feel that when you chose to check back the flop and bet the turn, you
would face a check-raise rather often. This also happened a number of times after you bet flop, checked
back turn, and bet the river as well. While at first you assumed that villain’s check-raises were largely the
result of variance which caused villain to make value hands in these situations, after the 5​th​ and 6​th​ time
you faced a check-raise and folded, you became suspicious. If indeed villain is adding extra bluffs to his
check-raising ranges to exploit what he perceives as a capped check back range, your incentive to slow
play value hands increases since they will induce more bluffs which they can call or raise.

You check back and retain the nuts on the 2c turn. Your opponent checks. You think about your
bet sizing and consider what your hand looks like. While you will have some weak flushes that check
back on the flop, your range will largely consist of sets and two pair hands that decided not to c-bet for
thin value on the flop. You will also have hands like top pair that hope to check down and air without a
flush draw blocker that decided to give up on the flop and maybe bluff later.
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 106

Your opponent has checked so that likely removes some percentage of very strong flushes from
his range alongside a number of flush draw blocker hands that would like to bluff. This particular
opponent however likes to check-raise against delay c-bets at a high frequency, so it’s likely he will have
some strong hands in his turn checking range as well as blocker bluffs that are waiting to check-raise. He
may also perceive that you are folding so much to his check-raises that he starts including pure air
check-raises.

With your own somewhat weak range in mind, you decide to bet $6 into a pot of $12, hoping for
a raise, and your opponent calls. You feel somewhat disheartened that your plan didn’t pan out, but
given the blocker qualities of your hand, you realize that getting any value at all is a decent result.

The river is an 8h and your opponent checks a third time. Again you recognize that you will have
few truly nutted hands in your range when you reach this spot, so you choose to size down, betting $12
into $24 with the intention to go for value with sets. Your opponent thinks for a moment and raises just
short of all-in. You joyfully shove your remaining stack in and your opponent folds after a few seconds of
what was likely confusion.

Hand 2:

You sit down at a NLH $500 buy in table online and fold until you reach the button. You raise 9s
7s and face a call from the big blind who is a professional and likes to thin value bet. The flop comes Qh
8s 3d. Your opponent checks to you and you decide to check back. While this hand should probably bluff
occasionally, you recognize a few elements that encourage you to check back. One element is that your
opponent only has a few draws on this board and they will often​ ​dominate​ your hand. This means that
when you bluff with 97 and get called by J9 or T9, you have very little equity because a 9 turn will give
him a superior pair. Another element that persuades you to check back is the number of ​backdoor
draws​ available to your particular hand. You’ll be able to continue on the turn on cards that give you an
OESD or a flush draw. You’ll also have a nice bluff when checked to on cards like a 5. Lastly, you’ll
happily check back when you make a 9 or 7.

You check back and the turn comes 7h. You face a ¾ pot sized bet and consider your options.
Firstly, you do some quick minimum defense frequency math and determine that your opponent risks
three to win four and so his bet needs to only work 3/7ths of the time. That means you need to continue
at least 4/7ths of the time in order to not allow his bluffs to auto profit. Additionally, you don’t have a
read that this opponent is ​underbluffing​ this spot. After reflecting on your range, you conclude that this
hand should be defended so you discard folding as an option.

Raising is an interesting and creative option so you consider it for a moment. You would be
representing a hand like 77 or Q7s for value, but recognize that you have very few combinations of
these hands so you won’t be able to have many bluffs here either. You also decide that there are likely
better bluffs to choose than this hand, namely hands with draws or hands with less ​showdown value​.

You decide to call and an off-suit 8 falls on the river giving you a final board of Q83r 7h 8x. You
face a half pot bet from your opponent and are left to contemplate your hand. You go through the
process of reading both your opponent’s hand as well as your own. First let’s break down villain’s hand:
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 107

1. 88 is combinatorically unlikely since there are two 8’s on board. Occasionally 88 will also get 3B
preflop or trapped on the river. This means that of the one combination that exists, villain may
only have that hand here 20-30% of the time.
2. Villain is very unlikely to hold QQ since that hand would have 3B preflop almost always.
3. The other sets and full houses are plausible although 83 is very unlikely. You also block both 87
and 77 which is very useful.
4. 8x hands seem quite unlikely for villain as they have little reason to bet the turn
5. Qx hands seem plausible but somewhat thin for value. His best suited Qx will 3B preflop and
some hands like QT/Q9 have a blocker to hands he would like you to call with like TT/99. You had
noticed previously that this opponent likes to thin value bet so you put slightly more weight on
these combinations than you would against other opposition. This is the region that I would focus
the most on trying to attack.
6. Villain has a myriad of bluffs here, from gutters and OESD to turned backdoor flush draws. Try to
add up all the combinations remembering that some hands like T9s may 3B preflop and that
some bluffs may try to check-raise the turn or give up on the river. Coming up with an exact
number for this particular opponent is impossible so estimate a high and low threshold.

Now you consider what your hand looks like:

1. Your most likely value hands are 87 and 77 which likely would have checked back on the flop.
You may also occasionally slowplay QQ especially against an opponent who is capable of
value-owning​ ​himself.
2. You do have a considerable number of 8x hands here. Consider the action; if you had to describe
one hand that might like to check back the flop more than any other hand, you would probably
point to 8x. Try to determine how many combinations you are likely to have here.
3. Most of your AA and KK bet so the next strongest hand you are likely to have is Qx with various
kickers.
4. You will also hold JJ-99, some 7x hands that didn’t bluff the flop and an occasional 3x. All of
these hands will be ​pure bluff catchers​ as your opponent will not value bet anything weaker.
These hands should be roughly indifferent to calling or folding against a perfectly playing
opponent.

This spot is rather interesting because all of our options are on the table. Given that we believe
villain can value bet thinly, if we estimate his number of bluffing combinations to be on the low side
because we think he gives up with them, he may be underbluffing. In that case, we should likely fold. If
we estimate that he continues with most of his bluffs on the river, then it might not matter that he has
some thin value hands because he will still be ​overbluffing​ and we should call. The final option is my
personal favorite though.

By raising here, it’s true that we simply make him fold his bluffs, but we also may be able to
make him fold his thin value hands. Your hand looks a lot like 8x or better and your value range is not so
narrow as to be implausible. Your 7 also serves as a good blocker and you don’t hold a heart in your
hand so you don’t interfere with any of his bluffs. A final point that encourages me to raise is that most
non-elite players don’t find enough bluff raises in this spot. That means that strong players exploit them
by betting and folding the river at a higher than normal frequency. You decide to raise about 4 times the
size of his bet which lays him 2-1 odds to call you. You feel the slightly smaller size helps represent that
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 108

you are raising 8x or better and that your ​trips​ are strong, but not necessarily nutted. Your opponent
uses his entire time bank and eventually calls with AQo.

Analysis

How do you feel about this result? You lost a reasonably large pot by making what some players
would consider a crazy bluff. In fact, I believe we learned a lot of valuable information about this player
and probably made the most profitable play. Let’s think about what we learned:

● He didn’t 3B AQo preflop in a spot where most players will so we need to update our
assumptions about his postflop ranges. It’s a possibility that he isn’t 3Bing enough preflop if he
doesn’t include this hand.
● He ​tanked​ ​a long time with one of his strongest bluff catching hands. While we don’t know
exactly how often he calls this hand, it’s fair to estimate from his time usage that it’s not a 100%
snap call for him and probably more like a 50/50 decision. This may be an indication that he is
folding too much in this spot overall, especially if he frequently folds worse Qx.
● His river sizing could potentially be a tell of hand strength. Would he bet this sizing with a
rivered full house? A really strong player might because he’ll recognize that some parts of his
range want to bet small and will also bet his strong hands that size. Most players, however,
won’t think this deeply and will leak a little information which we can use to our advantage.

Hand 3

You are playing in a High Stakes live NLH cash game. The game is soft except for one extremely
loose aggressive professional. Both you and the aggressive pro have been scooping up the recreational
players’ money until the pro stacked you with a set. You rebought for 100bb and opened 3x from the CO
with Ac Jc. It folds around to the loose aggressive player who calls from the big blind.

The flop comes Jh 4s 2s and he checks to you. You decide to c-bet half pot and face an almost
instantaneous check-raise to 4 times your bet. You take a breath and consider your options. Clearly your
hand is too strong too fold, but should you call – and let him continue bluffing – or re-raise with a hand
that is strong, but clearly not the nuts?

You think back to the range construction principle of slightly ahead / way behind. If villain has a
set or two pair you’re way behind while if he has a big draw you’re only slightly ahead. That inclines you
to call with this hand.

Before acting, you take another breath and think a little more deeply. While the above principle
is true for most players, this player is exceptionally loose and very aggressive. He regularly check-raises
and barrels off and frequently shows his bluffs. He is probably loose enough to have hands like 52s or
J4s, but probably not J4o. This reduces hands like J4 from 6 combinations to one combination since you
also block Jc 4c. While it’s true that his combination draws like As 3s have a lot of equity generally, you
notice another interesting feature of your hand. You hold an Ace which is a blocker in an unconventional
sense. It doesn’t prevent him from having As 3s, but it does remove the Ace out from his hand, reducing
his equity. You also reduce the outs of a hand like 53 just slightly by holding an Ace. Lastly, if he’s check
raising a hand like Js Ts, you currently dominate his top pair so he needs to hit spades or a ten to
improve. You decide that while you are often in a slightly ahead / way behind spot, the hands you are
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 109

way behind occur rarely and the number of hands against which you are slightly ahead is significant. As
long as you run into those hands often, you can justify the occasional way behind scenario.

You decide to re-raise about 2.5x his bet in the hopes of inducing a shove. Your opponent
obliges and you snap call. The turn brings an Ah and an 8s falls on the river. Villain turns over 6s 3s and
scoops a big pot.

Analysis

Poker is a game of degree and frequency. While we should avoid scenarios where we are slightly
ahead or way behind, the ratio of those hands is what really matters. Being slightly ahead or way behind
when the ratio of hands is 1 to 1 is terrible for us. Being slightly ahead or way behind when the ratio is 5
to 1 is quite good.

The last takeaway from the hand is our unconventional use of blockers. Since a deck of cards is
finite, every single card has at least a slight impact on the remaining cards. Recognizing all of the subtle
ways cards interact with ranges can help you make decisions in marginal situations.
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 110

What I Wish I Had Known

Even though poker theory has reached an advanced state, superior theoretical knowledge alone
is not enough to be successful. Poker requires you to master certain “soft skills” to achieve a reasonable
amount of success. I wrote this section to help you cultivate these skills. There will be no discussion of
looking for neck pulses or eye twitches here. That stuff is mostly for the non-poker literate audiences of
Hollywood movies. What we’re going to concern ourselves with are the thought patterns which will
bring us success in the game and outside the game as well.

The Process
Many non-poker players that I talk to assume that the game is all about psychology. The way to
win at poker is to stare deeply into your opponent’s soul, sense his or her unresolved father issues and
fear of abandonment, determine how those issues manifest themselves in a subtle lip twitch, and then
call their obvious bluff. If you’ve made it this far into the book, then you will have seen that this notion
of poker is completely invalid. Of course we should construct models of how our opponents play, but
this is less about psychology and more about using data and observation to determine how they
construct their ranges.

The psychology you need to master to play poker well is your own.

Other than jobs where lives are actively placed in the line of fire, playing poker is one of the
most stressful professions imaginable. Your paycheck is dependent on every decision you make and in
online poker, you may make as many as 3000 to 4000 decisions every day. If you begin to make poor
decisions or face competition who make better decisions, you may spend your entire day working for
nothing – or worse, losing money. Factor in the randomness of variance and the fact that you can get
unlucky for weeks or months on end, and you might find yourself questioning everything you know
about the game or whether you’re winning at all.

Some of this thinking is actually healthy. If you don’t question whether you’re winning and
blindly plow forward, you might play one hundred thousand hands only to find out you were a loser all
along. If you don’t acknowledge that your opponents are better than you in some aspects of the game,
you can’t hope to learn from them.

You must strike a balance between self-confidence and self-criticism. You must be a
self-directed learner while also recognizing the time to reach out to others for help. You must learn to
recognize what you don’t know and how to find answers. You must recognize when your opponent is
making mistakes and when those “mistakes” are actually exploitive adjustments to the mistakes you’re
making. In short, you must learn The Process.

The chapters to follow are all pieces of The Process. While your process may be slightly different
from mine, all successful players include these in their approach:
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1. We regularly examine our own thinking.

2. We encourage constructive thoughts. These are thoughts like: “What is my opponent doing
well?” “What do I need to learn next?” “What would I be bluffing here?” “I wonder what his
range looks like against this value hand,” “I wonder if he has enough bluffs here.”
3. We redirect or replace unhelpful thoughts. These are thoughts like: “This guy is so bad”, “How
can I run this bad”, “I’m the unluckiest person alive”, “This moron is never bluffing me here”
4. We ignore events outside our control.
5. We spend time in focused, intentional, and active study.

Heuristics and Metacognitive Thinking

Many, if not most, people go through life without ever examining their own thinking. They
assume that they are operating in the logical sphere making well considered, rational decisions every
moment of every day. This couldn’t be farther from the truth.

Human beings mostly operate on ​heuristics​ or cognitive shortcuts which help them make rapid
decisions without consuming much energy. This makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective.
The early humans that instinctively ran from lions passed on their genes successfully. Those who had to
rationally contemplate whether the lion was indeed worthy of their attention were lunch.

The problem is that we no longer live under the constant threat of being eaten. This fact makes
our deeply ingrained split second reactions far less valuable. Instead, we live in a mostly civilized world
where reflection and higher order thought generated by the neofrontal cortex provides for our daily
meals. In fact, many of society’s largest problems stem from heuristic biases. Racism, sexism,
homophobia, and superstitious thinking are all potent examples of what can happen when we don’t
think deeply enough to override our heuristic programming.

Don’t let this completely dissuade you from the notion of using heuristics as some can save your
life. Heuristics like “Don’t walk down a dark alleyway,” or “Look both ways before crossing the street,”
are excellent cognitive shortcuts.

Heuristics are useful in poker as well. In fact, many of the ideas in this book could be classified as
poker heuristics. However, while it’s useful to have a heuristic that tells you to fold preflop with weak
hands like 63o or 7774r, it’s not a good idea to rely on heuristics alone when making complex river
decisions, especially against strong players.

A trap I fell into for a long time was relying on heuristic thinking that I had trained from smaller
stakes. I would arrive to a turn or river and say to myself, “A weak professional is generally not capable
of bluffing like this,” and then I would proceed to make an exploitive fold. The situations I was referring
to were those that required a fair bit of planning and hand selection in order to have enough bluffs and
most straightforward players did not have it. This heuristic served me well until I reached high stakes
when the professionals I faced were generally more thoughtful and understood poker on a deeper level.
Here, I needed to engage the analytic part of my brain and deeply consider the whole hand and make a
decision specific to that particular spot rather than a global generalization. Of course, I didn’t do this
because I wasn’t aware of the flaws in my thought process.
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 112

The cure for the malady of over utilizing heuristics is ​metacognitive thinking​ ​which means
“thinking about your own thinking.” This is the inner voice that stops you mid-thought and asks you, “Is
that really true? Do you really believe that? Or is that just more convenient than the truth?” Since the
truth and convenience are often mutually exclusive, you need to train the truth muscle so it can
overcome the well-honed convenience muscle. Here are some tools to train your metacognitive abilities:

1. Read about ​cognitive biases​ and ​logical fallacies​. Nothing else will cultivate your ability to think
concretely about the limitations of our cognition.
2. Learn about statistics, randomness, and ​Apophenia​. Our brains seek patterns where there are
none and make heuristics out of white noise. We can turn clouds into animals, blurry images
into bigfoot or the Lock Ness Monster, and see faces in just about everything.
3. Turn off auto-pilot.
4. Play a game with yourself where you try to catch yourself every time you make an assumption.
5. If you are learning poker with a friend, make an effort to challenge each other about what the
other was specifically thinking during the hand then look for errors and weaknesses in that
analysis.
6. ATTEMPT AT YOUR OWN RISK: Watch videos of politicians or religious leaders on the fringes of
society and think about all the little fallacies, assumptions, and downright lies they use to
persuade audiences with less mental acuity. If you’re really brave, do the same for the comment
section below the video. This will train you to look for bias and flaws in logic and to generally be
more skeptical.

For more on this topic, I highly recommend Daniel Kahneman’s book ​Thinking Fast and Slow​,
which is an opus on our psychological short comings as humans.

Mindset and Stoicism

Have you ever wondered how two people can look at the exact same situation and perceive it
through an entirely different lens? Often this is the result of what the Stanford psychologist Dr. Carol
Dweck calls “mindset.” In her eyes, there are two mindsets on opposite ends of the spectrum; one pole
is a “fixed mindset” and the other pole is a “growth mindset.”

When we are stuck in a fixed mindset, we believe talents, skills, intelligence, and athletic ability
are constant and usually something that is innate. Either a person is intelligent or they’re not. Either
they’re a gifted musician or they’re doomed to amateurism.

This thought process becomes increasingly toxic when a person’s identity becomes wrapped up
with being intelligent, for instance. This person may ​self-sabotage​ by refusing to study and then either
blame their bad result on a lack of preparation or revel in their natural brilliance if they have a positive
result. They might avoid challenges where they are likely to fail and quit early.

A growth mindset doesn’t care whether we are talented or not. In fact, it doesn’t much believe
in talent. A person with a growth mindset looks at an incredible athlete or intellectual and sees hard
work and struggle rather than inevitable success and superior genetics. Of course, there are people like
Mozart or Shakespeare whose talent is undeniable, but do you honestly believe they didn’t work
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extremely hard at their craft? It’s almost always the case that the “most talented” people have also
worked the hardest and/or the most efficiently at their craft.

Think back to the discussion earlier in the book about excluding irrelevant hands from our hand
reading. We can actually apply that concept to talent. No one knows how much talent they have, there’s
no way to measure it, and no one really cares about the world’s most talented painter who never
bothered to paint. Talent is out of your control, so my advice is to simply forget it exists. Work to
become a bit better each day and someday some pontificator might tell the world about how naturally
talented you are.

Here are a few fixed mindset statements I’ve heard in poker:

● Some stakes are just unbeatable.

● I could never win against “x player.”
● Will I ever be good enough?

Here are some growth mindset phrases we can practice saying to ourselves:

● I made some mistakes, so I’m going to study them and be a bit better tomorrow.
● I don’t understand this now, but after I reread this section or rewatch this video a couple times
I’m going to get it.
● I love learning and the struggle of learning something new.
● I’m a really hard worker.

Stoicism

There is no good nor ill, but thinking makes it so. – Shakespeare

The way we frame reality is more important that reality itself. In fact, our thoughts create our
reality and color the way we see the world. Deceptive people see deception everywhere, wounded
people with a fixed mindset perceive every word as a slight, and dictators who fear losing power hold
military marches to remind everyone just how strong they really are.

We can choose a different path. Our thinking is a choice and can be trained and with willpower
and ingenuity, we can root out the weakness in every obstacle and bend it to our will. This is the heart of
Stoicism.

Stoicism has a close philosophical kinship with Buddhism with origins in Greece rather than
India. The philosophy essentially states that our perception constructs our reality and that perception is
a skill that can be trained. If we learn to see obstacles and injustice as mountains to climb rather than a
wall that’s impossible to scale, every step forward brings us closer to the top. Every weakness you have
– every impediment that stands in your way – is an opportunity to show the world what you’re made of
and to become better than you were. In fact, I imagine a stoic rubbing their hands together gleefully
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 114

when presented with a supposedly insurmountable problem and thinking, “When I overcome this, I’m
going to be a legend.”

Poker, the growth mindset, and stoicism are uniquely suited to each other because all three only
care about the process. Results come and go, new obstructions stand in our way, but the process is
unimpeachable. Master what you can control and forget about everything else. That’s the way forward,
the way over, and the way through.

Here is a list of some problems you might face in poker and life and how a stoic would approach
them:

● Don’t have a poker bankroll yet? Good, you’ll be forced to learn the skill of living frugally and
start from very low stakes which is the best way to hone your fundamentals.
● Don’t have time to study? You’ll learn how to prioritize and make the most of the time you do
have.
● Don’t have supportive friends and family? You’ll learn how to be self-reliant and seek out those
who will lift you up rather than break you down.
● Poker is illegal in your country? What a great opportunity to try international travel. You’ll learn
about visas, a foreign language, and make new friends along the way.

If this way of thinking is interesting and inspiring to you, check out ​The Obstacle Is the Way​ by
Ryan Holiday. I regularly reread this book when I need a boost and recommend it to anyone who will
listen.

Self-Deception Is the Reason Gambling Exists

One of the fundamental reasons gambling exists is that humans have a unique capacity for
self-deception. This has actually been an adaptive trait throughout our evolutionary history. For
instance, if you knew objectively that going up and introducing yourself to an attractive stranger would
yield a 10% chance at a date and only a 0.01% chance of this person becoming your future spouse, you
might be discouraged. If you dramatically overestimate your chances, you might be significantly more
inclined to take a chance. Since the risk is low (a bruised ego) and the reward is high (love, happiness,
kids, etc), you might as well take a shot at winning the romantic lottery. Convincing yourself that you
actually had a 60% chance of success actually caused you to make a good decision.

How is this relevant to poker? Go to your local casino and take a poll asking every poker player
one simple question: “Are you winning money in the long run playing poker?” (Please don’t actually do
this.) Based on psychological research performed by Dunning and Kruger (known as the ​Dunning-Kruger
Effect​), I would happily bet you that 80% or more of the players responding to your poll will say that
they are in fact winners. Since poker itself is a ​zero sum game​, no more than 50% of players can be
winners. Now if you factor in the rake, you realize that poker is actually a ​negative sum game​. This
means that even if you’re good enough to beat the other players, you also have to win more from them
than the house takes from you. This results in a much smaller fraction of players actually winning. What
we’re left with is a reality where 20% of players are actually making money and 80% of players believe
they are winning money.
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 115

Of course, there are some recreational players who play poker with the awareness that they are
losing. These players generally value the comradery, competition, and entertainment they experience
from playing poker more highly than they value the amount of money they are losing per hour. For
them, playing poker is no different than paying to go see a movie. I would prefer to always play with
these players because there is no deception and a mutual exchange of value (I get money; they get
entertainment). Unfortunately, these players are a small minority.

Why This Matters:

You may be interested, but still find yourself asking, “Why is this psychological trivia relevant to
me?” If you want to take the game seriously or to become a professional, you will need to confront all
the little lies you tell yourself. You will need to look deeply into your own shortcomings as a player and
person, break them apart, and rebuild yourself piece by piece.

If this seems like too much work to do for a game, just remember that this kind of
self-improvement carries over into every aspect of life. I know for a fact that I have become more
intelligent (by the way, if you believe that intelligence is static, please read the mindset chapter) and
more logical as a result of studying poker concepts. Thanks to these skills, I am much better equipped to
write, invest, or start a company of my own. After working hard on yourself, I’m confident you will be
too.

To get you started, here are some examples of the little lies we tell ourselves:

● “I’ve spent 10 hours this week studying.” (In fact, you watched 4 training videos while looking at
your phone or falling asleep and spent the rest of the time looking at hands in your ​database
without deeply analyzing them.)
● “I’m still playing well right now.” (In reality, you’re so ​tilted​ than you’ve gone from being a
marginal winner in the game to a loser without noticing.)
● “This is a good river bluff.” (When you actually know that your opponent folded too much to you
on the turn so when he does call your turn bet, he’s too strong and you should just give up.)
● “My bankroll is big enough for this game.” (Without properly using a poker variance calculator
and without acknowledging that this live game is often straddled or restraddled, effectively
doubling or quadrupling the stakes.)
● I can play well on a short bankroll. (No, you can’t.)

Counterfactual Thinking
Counterfactual thinking​ is one of the most important skills of mind you will need to cultivate to
reach a high level in poker. In fact, this subject may be the most important topic I cover in this entire
book. While it’s not strictly poker strategy, counterfactual thinking is critical to understanding ranges.

Counterfactual thinking is imagining realities that did not occur. If you think of every decision in
life as a forking of a road, there is the road taken and the road not taken. While the road not taken may
not have a significant impact on the road taken in life, in poker, it does.

In poker, you are required to walk down both paths simultaneously. Let’s say there are two
paths before you. (There could be many more, but let’s restrict the example to two.) One is the option
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 116

to check and the other is the option to bet half the pot. Before you choose one path, you will have x
number of hands. Unless you plan on betting all of these hands, when you start to walk down the “half
pot” path, you will leave the remaining hands to walk down the checking path since hands you take
22
down one path cannot be carried down the other .

If your opponent carries all of their sets or two pair hands down the betting path, they no longer
exist on the checking path. That will mean that the checking path has a significantly weaker range of
hands and might be ripe for us to bluff and thin value bet against This isn’t to say that a player should
always have an equal set of strong hands in both their checking and betting lines. Often they shouldn’t.
You should, however, be highly aware of the absence of such strong hands in both your or your
opponent’s range.

When facing a bet, you should be asking yourself, “What does this bet say about his checking
range?” If you believe that his betting range contains mostly strong hands, you should therefore be
more aggressive in the future when facing his checks. If your opponent chooses to bet large, ask
yourself, “Have I ever seen him bet small here?” If so, he might have too many strong hands in the big
betting range and too many thin value hands in the smaller betting range and his checking range might
be extremely weak. Against this strategy, you might fold a lot to the large bet, bluff raise the small bet,
and bet frequently against his checks.

Life Balance Is Overrated (at the Beginning)

No one ever became a great pianist, physicist, author, chess player, or poker professional by
being exceptionally well balanced at the beginning of their career. In the modern era, the level of skill in
any of these fields is too high for a neophyte to distinguish him or herself with little effort. Think you are
particularly talented? That’s great, with hard work you’ll probably improve twice as fast as other
beginners, but don’t think you’ll be able to make it on talent alone. Obsessing about the game, finding
creative ways to study in between other obligations, and abstaining from activities you’d rather be doing
are the only way to achieve a high level of performance rapidly. In fact, if you’d rather be doing
something else, you may need to assess whether you really want poker success badly enough.

The phase described above is the “framework” phase where you begin the construction of your
mental model of poker. Imagine a bare table on which you will construct a one-thousand-piece puzzle.
This is a true blank slate. Without the outer edges of the puzzle, you’ll have a very difficult time
constructing the center and other regions of the image. You need boundaries on which to arrange your
knowledge.

Once you achieve a level of success that is satisfying to you, life balance will then become
significantly more important. Poker can still occupy a central place in your life, but it should no longer be
the crux of your identity. You will also have the established framework in which to quickly place new
poker information. This is the “filling in” phase. You already have the outline and big chucks on some of
the sides and maybe the center. You even have a reasonable idea of how the final image will look. You

22
Unless you decide to bet a hand 70% of the time, but even in that case, you can only take 70% of that hand down
one path at a time
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 117

just need to drop a few more pieces in the bottom right hand corner of the puzzle and a little more in
the top center. You are aware of what you don’t know and know where to find that information.

In the “Filling In” phase:

● Separate poker and life as much as possible. Do not play online poker on the couch next
to family and friends. If you want to play, give it 100% of your attention. If you want to
spend time with loved ones, then do so in a way that allows you to be fully present.
Giving half of your attention to your friends and half of your attention to poker will just
ensure that you will fail at both.
● We all waste a tremendous amount of time each day. If you have a full-time job and still
want to play poker seriously, but think you have no time to study or improve, do an
audit of your non-working hours. I guarantee that you will be able to identify at least
one full hour of wasted time each day which is separate from time you allocate for
family.

Transitioning to Professional Poker

If you are considering becoming a professional after winning a tournament or after a large cash
game win, STOP! This decision can radically alter the course of your life, often in ways that are
unforeseeable and potentially irreversible. Please give careful consideration to the advice I’m about to
give. There is no conventional wisdom, no clear career trajectory, and very few people who can give you
realistic advice about the process of becoming a professional. You may not even know a single
professional poker player (this was true for me when I started) and many you talk to won’t paint an
accurate picture of the realities.

Almost everyone makes this decision with too little forethought and with too little experience
and skill. By “skill” I don’t just mean poker skill either, but rather all the soft skills surrounding being a
self-employed individual.

Only you are in charge of your personal and career development. No one is going to tell you
when or how to study, when to play, and most importantly, when you need to stop. No one will tell you
to keep a proper bankroll and then set additional money aside for an emergency fund or retirement
account. No one (other than you) can help your friends and family understand what you’re doing. They
will often question or resist your decision, creating added tension in your life. If you struggle with
depression, anxiety, or insomnia, there’s a good chance poker will make them worse.

There are also issues that exist in certain countries that make it more difficult to play than in
others. Since poker is in a grey area legally in the United States of America, withdrawing or depositing
money can be difficult, time consuming, and expensive. Paying taxes on poker winnings is also
particularly problematic in the U.S. as you can’t count your losses. This means you can get stuck paying
taxes on money you currently don’t have, just because you withdrew too much and lost some later. For
safety reasons, in some countries, you may need to learn to lie and have a completely fabricated (and
boring) backstory about what you’re really doing for a living due to the legal status of the game and or
to prevent “follow home robberies,” or kidnappings, or worse.
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 118

The most challenging part of playing the game for a living is learning how to properly teach
yourself. If you come from a background like chess or are a self-taught musician, you were forced to be a
self-directed learner and to study theory constantly. This will probably give you an upper hand. If you’ve
never learned a skill without being told to do so, learning poker might be a monumental task.

Below is a list of assumptions you should make as a player who is aspiring to play professionally.
You may not want to accept the assumptions, but I can tell you from experience that they are about 99%
correct.

● You are not as good at poker as you think you are.

● You have not even gotten close to seeing the worst that variance can throw at you.
● Until you’ve experienced a profoundly negative stretch of variance, you cannot truly understand
how difficult it can be to play well under these circumstances.

Here’s the truth:

1. Variance is mind boggling and distorts your perception of reality. It is completely within the
realm of possibility that your last three months of cash game winnings (especially if you are
playing live) or your last tournament win was completely the result of luck. If you aren’t
rigorously tracking your results, expenditures, and tax deductions, you are not ready to go pro.
2. Online games will only get more challenging and perfectly playing bots are closer to reality than
science fiction.
3. Live high stakes poker games are often more about knowing the right people and ingratiating
yourself with them than playing poker well.
4. Your poker playing schedule will frequently and necessarily conflict with the time most of your
friends and loved ones are off work, making socializing difficult.
5. Having a one or two-year gap in your resumé while you attempted to play poker professionally
will hurt your prospects for future employment.
6. If you intend to play poker for a living for any extended period of time, you will have to dedicate
significant time to studying and improving.

So here’s my advice as to when you should turn pro:

Do not quit your job to become a professional poker player until not doing so becomes a large
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financial mistake

For instance, I was making $40 an hour teaching chess and winning enough money from local
chess tournaments that I could sustain myself. Even after I was making a similar amount from poker, I
kept teaching chess so that the money I made from playing poker could be reinvested into my bankroll.
It was only at the point where I started making two or three times as much playing poker that I finally
gave up teaching. Even so, my bankroll probably should have been larger and I definitely should have

23
This is Cory’s perspective. Tommy Angelo disagrees and says, “If your situation totally sucks and you’re not
making much money anyway, you might as well try to maximize your happiness and just go for it as you won’t be
any worse off if you fail and things could work out well.” Since thoughtful and well intentioned people can disagree
on this point, it’s up to you to find what’s true for you
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 119

sought more mental training. I let the negative emotions I experienced during poker filter over into my
real life and hurt my relationships. Don’t let this happen to you.

How to Study
I never learned how to study in school. I was mostly able to listen to the teachers and
regurgitate the concepts they discussed, only to quickly forget many of them after the exam. I was fine
with that outcome because I wasn’t inspired by the topics. Once I started to play chess in high school,
my interest was piqued and learning became paramount. Unfortunately, my lack of learning skill caused
me to waste a lot of time.

Below are some of the ideas I learned by brute force and applied to my poker learning when I
switched from chess to poker. I can’t give you a perfect recipe because your brain is different from mine,
but these are the ideas I found useful. You’ll have your own I’m sure.

1. Identify your style of learning. I am a strong visual learner so I often create graphs or images to
help me remember new concepts. Some people learn better through repetition or through
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conversations. Do some research and self-reflection to figure out how you learn best..
2. Strike a balance between learning new concepts and mastering old ones. If you notice that on
some days you perform at a very high level and on other days you’re playing terribly, it’s likely
that you need to shore up the fundamentals rather than learn some new ideas. For more on this
topic, see ​The Mental Game of Poker​ by Jared Tendler (the inchworm / performance bell curve
section).
3. Take hand-written notes in a poker journal and essentially write your own poker book. Even as a
high stakes professional, writing this book forced me to look at “elementary” concepts in a new
way and has increased my understanding of the game. Write down hands you play and try to
unite them under groups like “semi-bluffs” or “slightly ahead / way behind spots.”
4. Learn actively. Don’t turn on a poker training video and watch it as you would Netflix. Have a
notebook and write down concepts you’re learning. Write down questions immediately so you
can go back to focusing on the video rather than thinking about the perfect way to phrase the
question.
5. Create a Skype group of motivated learners and challenge each other.
6. Play lower stakes and try out some extreme strategies to see just how far you can push the
envelope with certain plays. I remember having a “check back the flop, raise every turn” day in
NLH and was amazed at how often I could get players to fold.
7. Don’t waste time on close spots. If you conclude a spot is close, that means that making a
mistake won’t cost you much money and getting the decision right won’t win you much money.
You really want to find spots where the decisions are not close, but you’re making the wrong
choices.
8. Don’t just study the spots you struggled with in game. If you play online, use your ​database​ to
filter by ​line​ ​and examine some “boring” hands. For instance, my play greatly improved when I
started to care about playing well in lines like check, check, bet.

24
Beware of the tendency to deceive yourself here. Plenty of players like to think they learn best by playing when,
in fact, they are simply making an excuse to play rather than study
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 120

9. Hire a successful coach.

Managing Relationships, Reducing Stress and Maintaining a Healthy Life

This may seem like a strange subject to encounter in a book about the fundamentals of poker,
but I attest from personal experiences and failures that this topic is worth the space.

Over the course of my seven year poker career, I have had three long-term romantic
relationships lasting over two years each. Poker contributed to the ending of two of them. I’ve also seen
my blood pressure rise to unnaturally high levels and then fall once I started incorporating healthy
stress-relieving activities like yoga, meditation, rock climbing, and cycling. Of course, the game itself had
little to do with it; my reaction to the stress and uncertainties of poker was the culprit. I offer you a
guide to avoiding these painful experiences and keeping poker in its rightful place rather than allowing it
to dominate or worse, ruin your life.

When enduring a prolonged downswing, I feel as if under threat by some unnamed force. My
heart rate and blood pressure both remain slightly elevated for an extended period of time. I feel
agitated, sleep shallowly, and disconnect from the people around me. I’m sure there are some
professionals that handle losing better than I do, but just as many, if not more, handle it worse.

What I experience must be physiologically similar (but in no way as severe, of course) to what
soldiers with long periods of battle exposure or children who live in hostile and impoverished
neighborhoods endure. This feeling of slow, rolling uneasiness releases a stress hormone called cortisol
which activates your nervous system and stifles the release of learning and bonding chemicals in your
brain such as serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine. This is one of the reasons pulling out of a
downswing can be so difficult. Additionally, the chemical process described above also occurs when we
experience depression. No wonder the two go hand in hand.

So what can be done? The only method that works for me is to breathe; to start breathing if I’m
holding my breath and to keep breathing when my body wants to tense and freeze. It sounds so simple
and, frankly, stupid so let’s reframe it.

Everyone knows that the food you put in your body affects the output your body can give you.
On average you eat a few times a day.

Everyone knows that water is essential to life. Nothing in your body runs correctly without
water. You probably drink even more often than you eat.

Far fewer people think about breathing.

How many decisions have you made while holding your breath? At some point in my poker
career, I realized that I held my breath through every big pot I played. When I was stressed out I
probably held my breath through some of the smaller pots as well. Imagine hiring someone to choke you
during your most important decisions every day. Every panic attack, every fist clenching moment of
tension that escalates, and many poker mistakes (especially the ones where we immediately realize
we’ve done something dumb) are caused by a lack of breathing.
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 121

By the way, you breathe about 21,600 times a day.

It’s one thing to go through this roller coaster alone, but it’s another entirely to do it with a
long-term partner or even roommate. Here are some recommendations to keep that relationship
healthy:

● Communication is everything. Tell them why you want to do this and what you’re hoping to
accomplish.
● Help them understand how the game works. Most people tend to be much more supportive
when they see that poker is a game of skill.
● If you feel normal, but they tell you that you’re not acting like yourself, they’re right and you’re
wrong. It’s often very hard to self-evaluate your own play or mental state while going through a
downswing. This person may not know poker, but they know you, and I would bet a lot of
money that their evaluation of your mental state is better than your own in that moment.
● If you play online, try to create your own office at home with a door that you can shut, or go
somewhere else to play. This helps create a distinction between work life and home life.
● If you begin working hours that you used to spend with that person, find other ways and times
to connect. At the end of your life, you’ll remember the time you spent with that person way
more than you remember the hands of poker you played.

Quitting
Recognizing when your energy or focus is fading, when tilt has impacted your play, or when the
composition of stacks or players in the game no longer favors you is a skill that cash game players must
master. Sorry tournament players, you’re out of luck here. Having the discipline to take that information
and then eject from the game is pure poker poetry.

Even after years of playing, I still don’t quit as well as I should. While writing this section, I
combed through my poker database to see how my ​winrate​ changed from the beginning of my session
to the end. Sure enough, during the last hour of my session, I did significantly worse than during the
previous hours.

How should I handle this discovery? Here are a few suggestions:

● Set an alarm for approximately one hour before your session ends. Use this as a reminder to
evaluate your current mental state and see if you should abandon ship early.
● If you determine the game is still worth playing, use this reminder to stretch, walk, or do some
deep breathing.
● Have a non-sugary, nutritious snack, like almonds, readily available.

Here are two passages from ​Elements of Poker​ that pertain directly to quitting. Enjoy!

“In order to quit well, you must be in control of yourself at the end of the session. It can be no
other way. To achieve your highest possible score, you must be at your A-performance and your
A-mindset all the way to the end, especially to the very end, of every session, not only so that you
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 122

will make your best betting decisions, but also so that you will make your best quitting
decisions.”

“Being able to quit well when you are stuck is an essential skill for long-term winning. You can
improve by practicing it, just like any other skill or talent. The talent I’m talking about here is
standing up and walking away at the moment when you know you really should, but you really
don’t want to. There is a way to practice this skill. Take a lot of breaks. If you take a lot of breaks,
and you do it the same whether you’re ahead or behind, whether you feel steady and stable or
tilted and toppling, then you will build up quitting strength much more quickly than if you think
of quitting as something that happens only once per session.”

Rake
This is less of a mental game topic and more of a “buyer beware” topic and fits under the
auspice of treating the game like a professional, whether you intend to play professionally or not. Unless
you are playing a casual game with friends, someone is taking a slice of every pot you play, be it the
casino, the online poker site, or the individual providing the home game.

Without rake, poker is a ​zero sum game​. This means that any money taken from one player
necessarily is captured by another player. In a heads up poker game, when player A loses, player B gains.
In a multiplayer poker game, this transaction is more complex because multiple players can gain
simultaneously, with the largest gains often going to the player directly to the left of the player that is
losing. (Consider how this should affect which seat you choose at a particular table.) The net result,
however, still remains zero.

The introduction of rake alters the game to create a ​negative sum game​. This means that the
net result of 6 perfect players playing against each other is that each will lose a small amount after the
rake is paid to the casino or poker site. More importantly, we can conclude:

In order to win at poker, we need to not only be good enough to beat the other player(s), but we also
need to beat them by a margin that is large enough to also beat the rake.

This is an irritating fact of life for the poker professional or serious amateur and has a massive
impact on your bottom line. It also means that before you sign up to play online, you have the
responsibility to your winrate to investigate how each website or casino’s rake compares to their
competitors. You also should try to secure ​rakeback​ if at all possible.

How Rake Will Impact Your Game

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Small stakes games are raked at a proportionally higher rate than high stakes games, which
makes starting in poker difficult. Of course, the absolute dollar amount is smaller, but in terms of big
blinds, the relative amount is orders of magnitude larger. Fortunately, the caliber of play in small stakes
is generally so low that the rake remains beatable, although this may not be true forever. There’s not a
lot you can do about this other than to shop around for the site that offers the lowest rake​, ​softest
games​, and best rakeback.

Rake can also impact your game strategy. The higher the rake is, the less incentive you have to
call preflop. Rake is usually only deducted if the hand reaches the flop (known as “​no flop, no drop​”).
Therefore, by calling, we never give ourselves the chance to win the hand preflop and often ensure a
flop occurs. Thus the BB should call with fewer hands on average at lower stakes than at higher stakes.
Of course, if the small stakes villain is a weak player, we may try to play more hands against him, but
generally the rake will have a greater impact than the skill level of our opponent.

Variance
Let’s go back to the “invisible floating numbers” analogy. Your hand is worth $10. Does that
mean you receive $10 dollars every time you play it? Of course not. Poker would be a much easier game
to play if that were true. The question is: How many times will you have to play this hand to receive an
average $10 for it? The answer is probably between hundreds of thousands of times to millions of times.

Variance​ in poker can sometimes be astonishing and the old adage, “At some point, you will run
worse than you ever thought was possible,” is one of the great truisms of the game. Even articulating all
the ways you can get lucky or unlucky is difficult. Here are just some of the myriad types of variance:

● Running under EV
● Coolers
● Running into the top of your opponent’s distribution
● Flopping poorly
● Poor Turn or River Cards
● Missing/hitting draws at higher than normal rates
● Your opponent missing/hitting draws at higher than normal rates
● Bad internet
● Software glitches
● Showing up at a live game at the wrong time
● Being cheated

Many of these will be self-evident to you now, but also take note of the types of variance that
are external to the game itself. You can pay for the best internet available, but if you play online poker
long enough, you will eventually lose a hand (or numerous hands) as a result of a disconnection. You will
show up at a live game right when the best seat fills. You will almost certainly be cheated at some point
as well. All you can do is avoid the highest risk scenarios, like three-handed games with players that
frequently play together or small browser-based poker sites that are easy to hack.

We also must learn when and where to take responsibility for our own mistakes. Here’s a rather
dramatic and humorous example from early in my poker career:
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I was playing in a local $1000 buy in NLH tournament in the early levels and each player had a
tremendous number of chips to start, something like 300bb. I watched as player A raised and got called
by player B, who was extremely passive. Player A continuation bet on 962r and faced a large check-raise
from the passive player B. Player A instantly shoved (around 10 times the current size of the pot) and
stared down player B. Player B thought for a long time and looked legitimately pained with his decision.
He eventually called with 66 for middle set. Player A flipped over KK and instantly yelled to his friend at
another table that he had once again “gotten setted.”

I don’t know about you, but when I “get setted” in NLH and have an overpair, I don’t tend to
lose 300bb. I would have almost certainly folded the turn to the passive player B and maybe even the
flop if I was playing well. Also notice that player A created a term “setted” to rationalize his bad play. I’ve
heard of being “over-setted” which is really unlucky and will result in losing a lot of money, but “setted”
was his own invention.

If we had to evaluate how unlucky this hand was for player A, we would probably say that it’s
somewhat unlucky for his opponent to flop a set when he held a strong overpair. It is not, however,
unlucky that player A lost 300bb. Another way to break it down is that player A got unlucky for maybe
20bb. The other 280bb? He set that money on fire.

You will get unlucky in poker. In fact, you’ll get unlucky roughly half the hands you play. The key
is to lose less and win more than your opponents each time this happens. Thousands of little edges can
make a fortune.

Recognizing variance is a skill, but so is discerning what isn’t variance. Seeing the truth through a
haze of uncertainty and false signals is the greatest of all intellectual achievements. Therefore,
developing the courage to look through randomness and rectify mistakes is a gift from your poker
playing self to your full self.

Adjusting To Your Opponents In Game

I chose to put this section, written by Phil, at the end of the book for a few reasons. It perfectly
summarizes not only the poker skills you’ve developed throughout the course of this book, but it also
emphasizes a number of mental skills like not jumping to conclusions based on a small amount of
information and seeing the bigger picture. Also, what could be a better way to end a poker book than
with them man himself, Phil Galfond.

Adjusting to Opponents In-Game

While refining your strategy and building a solid game plan should happen away from the table,
it’s very important to be able to react and adjust your strategy to specific game conditions or opponent
types. In this day and age of poker, where solvers can tell us the “correct” way to play every spot, I see
many players delude themselves into thinking they’re playing perfectly when, in fact, they’re leaving a
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 125

lot of money on the table.

The process of adjusting to game conditions has two simple steps:

● Determine what the game conditions are. (AKA develop reads on your opponents)
● Choose the proper adjustments

Developing Reads: Where to Focus

When you play poker, you are presented with a lot of information. Your first job is to separate
the reliable from the unreliable. Due to the nature of poker, there is a lot of randomness hidden in the
data you collect during a session.

Let’s say you’re playing in a live 6-handed cash game, and after 3 hours of play, it seems like one
player is continuation betting the turn really often. Should you assume they’re aggressive and bluffy
with their turn bets and start calling them down very light?

No! Unless you’ve played 100+ hours or 2500+ hands with this player, you’re not going to get
very reliable turn continuation bet data from their frequencies. It’s a spot that doesn’t come up
extremely often, so you’ll be working with a small sample size. Whatever information you think you
have is likely just noise, and adjusting your solid strategy to a strategy that is weaker (calling down too
often) means that you’re usually going to be leaking money.

Furthermore, even if we think our opponent bets the turn too often, we don’t know what it
means. Maybe they have really tight preflop or flop ranges such that they simply have a lot of strong
hands once they get to the turn. Maybe they are value betting too thinly and under-bluffing by
comparison. More bets doesn’t necessarily equal a weaker range.

Besides preflop tendencies (whether they be actual statistics that you’ve tracked or a frequency
that you’ve observed), it’s unlikely that any other frequency-based reads will provide you much value
during an individual session. Preflop is a little bit better because your opponents face a preflop decision
every single hand, providing a much larger sample size than, for example, turn Cbets.

So, what should we pay attention to if not frequencies?

You guessed it - Showdowns.

Anytime your opponent shows down a hand, especially one that was played unusually, you get
much ​more information than you do from learning that they cbet turn 5 out of 7 times. Showdowns
provide insight into how your opponent thinks, how they value a hand, and what types of plays they’re
willing to make.
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Developing Reads: Focusing on the Right Information

If you were even capable of watching every showdown and memorizing the way each player
played every hand, you would end up with a mountain of information - most of it nearly useless. Given
that, and the fact that almost nobody is capable of storing that much information in memory, it’s
important to figure out which pieces of information are valuable and to discard the rest.

Let’s say an opponent cold 4-bets from the Small Blind against a UTG raise and Button 3bet. UTG
folds, Button shoves for 100bb, and the player in the Small Blind calls with AA. Should you remember
that?

No. The fact that SB is willing to stack off with Aces is inconsequential information - everyone is
willing to stack off with Aces. Now, perhaps SB used a 4bet size that gives you clues as to what type of
player they might be - that’s a different story - but otherwise, you can move on from this showdown.

In short, what you want to focus on at showdown is:

Information that a player has played a hand in a way that is different from the way most players
you encounter would play it, or information that can help you categorize a player into a certain
player-type (wild recreational player, super nit, advanced pro, etc) with some level of confidence.

Going back to our AA hand, let’s say the Button showed down K8o after 3betting and 5bet
jamming. ​That i​ s valuable information! We now know that the button is definitely not nitty, is willing to
put in a lot of money with a weak hand, is probably a maniac, and very likely is not a pro.

Note that I don’t state the last two with certainty in the name of precision (perhaps Button is a
tough aggressive pro with very strong reads on each opponent that led them to play this way), but
practically speaking, you can treat all of the above as certainties in terms of the way you adjust your play
until proven that you should reconsider.

What if, instead, Button showed down A5s?

Well, the 3bet isn’t a very defining play - many player types would make it. The 5-bet jam could
be a good play given some reasonable assumptions, could be part of this player’s well-prepared default
strategy, or it could be that this player is wild and bad, spotted a tell, or was just tilted! All we’ve
learned here is that the Button is willing to put a lot of money in light - they’re not a big nit. Worth
remembering, but don’t make the mistake of boxing them into a narrow category prematurely!

Let’s look at another example across 4 streets:

Cutoff raises, BB calls.

Flop is Kc 4h 9c
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BB checks, CO bets ½ pot, BB calls

Turn As

BB checks, CO bets ½ pot, BB calls

River 2s

BB checks, CO checks

BB shows Ks5s

CO shows Kh8h

Take a moment to think about what we should take away from this hand for each player.

What did we learn about the BB? Well, they made preflop, flop, and turn calls that most players
would make. Are there things that this showdown, in combination with many more, might tell us about
them? Perhaps, but in the interest of preserving your memory and focus for more important things, I
would completely ignore this as far as BB is concerned.

What about the CO? The CO made a standard preflop raise and very reasonable continuation
bet with top pair. We can ignore those.

On the turn, CO decided to bet a hand that might be good but needs to be called by weaker than
Kx to make it a good value bet, and that they knew they wouldn’t bet again on the river unimproved. Is
this an awful play? Are they clueless? No, but as you’ll soon see, even something small like this can
open a player up to being exploited with some intelligent adjustments.

Making Adjustments

Now that we’ve acquired a read, you need to make the right adjustments. This isn’t always as
simple as it may appear.

Let’s dive right into the last example we covered, which is a great illustration of a non-extreme
read that requires multiple adjustments. (I think you can figure out how to play against the person 5-bet
jamming K8o on your own!)

Remember, our opponent in the CO cbet flop and turn with K8hh on Kc 4h 9c As

We expect that CO likes to cbet the turn with (too) thin value hands.
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Now, the exact adjustments we should make in an ideal world would depend on further reads.
We would like to know:

● Do they bet 2nd pair but check back with top pair because it makes a more comfortable river
call? Or do they go for protection/value with all hands Kx or better?
● Would they check down in a similar spot with a lot of their air, such that their betting frequency
is reasonable but contains too many made hands and not enough semi-bluffs?
● Or do they bet every gutshot, flush draw, and the occasional pure air, such that their turn cbet
frequency is extremely high?

First, let’s pretend we have no other reads. Afterwards, I’ll detail a more effective counter
strategy that we should play if we have more information. The adjustments we’ll make with limited
information won’t be as valuable, but since we’re usually working with limited information, I don’t want
to skip over them.

The first thing we can consider is how to respond to their turn cbets. We know that their turn
betting range contains more thin protection hands than it should, but for now, that’s all we know.

So, unless I have a strong read on common player tendencies for the player pool I play in, I like
to suppose that they have an otherwise normal range with these hands added to it.

This hand category is small when compared to their overall turn cbet range, so their range
composition won’t be drastically different. For this reason, it’s important that we don’t make huge
adjustments. This is important to keep in mind! I’ve seen many players make huge adjustments in an
attempt to ‘exploit’ a small fraction of their opponent’s range. They end up exploiting themselves the
majority of the time.

Let’s start with what to do when facing the CO’s turn cbets.

The first adjustment, which most people will come up with, especially if they were the (likely
frustrated) BB in the hand above, is to attack!

We should widen our turn raising range just a little bit, dipping slightly (but not much) lower into
potential value raises and adding in more semi-bluffs. Note that we add ​both​ value hands and
semi-bluffs because we don’t know if our opponent calls down light after betting this range or folds too
often. We add both so that we’re making a +EV adjustment either way. If you have more information
(or even a strong suspicion) about how they react to raises, you can make the more risky adjustment of
adding only bluffs or only value hands.

The second adjustment we can make, which people don’t think about quite as readily, is to fold
any bluff-catchers weaker than weak Kx more often. The fact that they’re going for thinner value across
one street means that the EV of defending these hands goes down. Again, just make a slight adjustment
here.
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Next, we need to think about how to adjust to their turn ​checks​. Don’t make the mistake of only
adjusting to one situation when their tendency impacts their range in multiple spots!

If they’re betting a few too many thin value hands, this means that those hands are no longer in
their turn check back range. This is key!

Adjustments here are somewhat simple once you think of making them. The hands removed
from their checking range are strong bluff-catchers, leaving their checking range deficient in them.

If they don’t account for this by intelligently defending more hands on the river (nobody does),
our bluffs will have a higher success rate. Bluff more often!

As far as value bets, it’s a little bit tough to generalize. I think we want to go for value more
thinly, but it depends on the specific flop, turn, and river. One play that should work well in most spots
is expanding our value bet range for a small sizing - we’ll be value cutting less often.

For example, on the K94A2 board, betting small with some strong 9x type hands may work well.

Expanding our value range for a large sizing could work in theory, but in practice, since almost
nobody defends their weakened range enough, and because they have a wide gap in their range (no Kx),
the hands we’d add to a large-sizing value range will most likely get too many worse hands to fold.
Without stronger reads, I wouldn’t make this adjustment.

The ripple effects of our opponent’s one tendency do extend beyond these two situations, but
the effects get very small the further we go, as ripples tend to do.

For example, we could fold more marginal made hands on the flop given that we get forced to
fold them (or call with lower EV) on the turn a bit more often. We might want to play some potential
floats more aggressively, and some others by folding, because we’ll see the river less often after calling.
On the other hand, our river bluffs after calling the flop and facing a turn check will be more profitable.
I’d adjust by check-raising some more strong draws and check-calling more weak draws. The strong
draws ‘waste’ more equity when folding to a turn protection bet. For the weak draws, sure, they fold
equity, but what’s more impactful is that they get bailed out of making a losing bluff on the river when
our opponent bets good river bluff-catchers. Again, though, I wouldn’t make ​huge ​adjustments here
without more information.

Taking Advantage of Strong Reads

Now, let’s say that we know a bit more about our opponent. I’m going to stick to the same
board for continuity, but you can extrapolate the same reads and concepts to other boards.

Board Kc 4h 9c As

Let’s say our stronger reads are that:

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● Our opponent bets turn with all hands Kx or better

● Our opponent doesn’t bluff as often as they should on the turn, so their overall turn betting
frequency is normal

In practice, your reads will almost never be quite this strong, but I want to use this example to
show you how hard you can exploit an opponent who’s playing a strategy that doesn't seem so bad on
the surface.

Now it gets really fun! If you feel you have a good grasp on the adjustments above, take a
moment and think about how you’d adjust here. It’s an excellent exercise that I’d recommend you
practice away from the tables.

Let’s start with their turn bets:

Now we can fold everything worse than Kx very comfortably. Our opponent is adding too many
value bets and skipping too many bluffs, making their range way too value-heavy. Bye bye
bluff-catchers​!

If we do call, we can also over-fold the river because our range for getting there is stronger, and
our opponent doesn’t bet enough of their potential bluffs on the turn.

We should check-raise bluff the turn less often, because proportionally, they have just as many
very strong hands and they’re going to have some made value hands that can still decide to call us
down.

With just as many big hands in our opponent’s range, we probably can’t go ​much ​thinner for
value with check-raises, but we’ll probably want to add a few because the EV of check-calling big hands
has gone down - our opponent has removed many potential bluffing hands and replaced them with clear
rivier checking hands, so we aren’t going to face a river bet as often as we should. If we were
slowplaying any hands that are more than strong enough to raise, we should now raise them, assuming
our opponent doesn’t notice and make river adjustments to take advantage, which most opponents will
not.

As an aside - notice how the read of “my opponent raises all their strongest hands on the turn and doesn’t
slowplay enough” is very hard to make. You’re dealt a monster very infrequently, and your opponent will
fold much of the time you raise turn and bet river, so it will take a very long time for them to see you
fast-play a few strong hands. Even once they do, that isn’t proof that you don’t slowplay them on
occasion, nor is the fact that you’ve shown down no monsters after check-calling.

Phil, I thought you said we get to do some really fun stuff! That wasn’t that fun.

Don’t worry! Off we go to the river, after our opponent has checked back the turn:

Kc 4h 9c As 2s
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Let’s also set up a realistic stack size and pot size. Say we put in 3bb each preflop, 3b on flop,
6bb on turn, for a total pot size of 24.5bb, which we’ll round to 25bb, and call remaining stacks 100bb,
for some easy math. (oh yes, there’s math)

What do we know about our opponent’s range after the turn gets checked through? We know
that they didn’t have Kx or better on the turn, and we know they checked back a good portion of their
air.

I quickly plugged in a rough range for our opponent so that we could look at some precise
numbers.​(QQ-TT,QxJy,Jx9x,Jx8x,Tx9x,9x8x,88-55,QsJs,Qs9s,Qs8s,JsTs,JsTy,Ts8s,QhJh,Qh9h,Qh8h,JhTh,JhT
y,Th8h,QdJd,Qd9d,Qd8d,JdTy,JdTd,Td8d,33,22 *for reference)

Firstly, if we want to include a small sizing, it looks like we can bet any 9x for ⅓ pot.

9x is beat by our opponent’s range roughly 30% of the time. Betting ⅓ pot means that they need
to call 75% of the time (theoretically speaking), which would mean we are ahead of their calling range -
beating it 45/75 = 60% of the time. We could go a little thinner or a little larger in theory, but some
players won’t call enough, and there are other considerations to keep in mind (what does this do to our
checking range, what’s our EV after checking and facing various bet sizes, etc.).

What about when we have Ks5s, which is usually a good check-calling hand, like the Big Blind
had in our example above?

Because of our opponent’s turn strategy, K5 is good on the river a whopping 97% of the time
(we only lose to 22).

What does that mean about our river strategy?

It means that not only does K5 go from a check to a bet - it can bet BIG!

If we shove for 4 times the pot, our opponent has to defend 20% of the time. Since we’re only
beat 3% of the time, this makes for a very clear value jam with any Kx or better. In fact, we could even
jam 200bb into 25bb if stacks were twice as deep!

With this wide a value jamming range, we can add in a ton of bluffs. We get to absolutely
destroy our opponent whenever the turn gets checked through.

This extreme (correct) strategy adjustment illustrates just how hard one can pounce on a strong
read, even if the player you’re up against doesn’t seem like they’re making a huge mistake.

I should note, that if you employ this suggested river strategy, our opponent probably gets to go all-in
when checked to with something like 77 or better along with a bunch of bluffs, but that’s not something
you need to worry about in practice, and even if you did need to, you could prevent that by making sure
to check some strong hands every once in a while. Other than that concern, though, we have no incentive
to check hands that can check-raise unless our opponent is ​way o ​ ve-rbluffing, because we’ll almost never
face a value bet.
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Against this opponent, we can also call more weak bluff-catchers on the flop, because we mostly
are beat when facing a turn bet (but seeing a river often when our hand is best) and because we won’t
face tough river decisions when we’re facing a capped range. We should also call more weak floats on
the flop, since in addition to our equity, we’ll have great river bluffing opportunities, and we’ll have
more outs than just our gutshot, for example, against our opponent’s turn checking range (our 6 pair
outs will often be good).

If we do end up checking the river and facing a pot-sized bet, it’s likely that our opponent will be
over-bluffing and that we can call with anything that beats all bluffs. They only have 3% of hands that
can comfortably value bet, so as long as they bet at least 1.5% of their hands as a bluff, we’ll have a
profitable call.

Review

We only went through the way to adjust to one opponent based on one specific hand, but you
should have the tools to make reads and adjust to them in any number of situations.

You know to focus on showdowns. You know what types of showdowns are valuable and what
types aren’t. You know that the way an opponent plays a specific situation will impact their range not
only when they take that specific action, but also when they don’t. And you know that the ripple effects
of an opponent’s tendency can affect your strategy on every street, whether they take that specific
action or not.

Take some time to think about how you’d adjust your strategy after seeing some different
showdowns. Start in your games by just observing and remembering without adjusting, even if you
likely won’t face those opponents again. After the session, go through the reads you’ve gathered and
think about what your counter-strategy should look like.

What does their tendency mean about their ranges? Do you have enough information to make
big adjustments, or just small ones? Is it likely that your opponent will notice your adjustments and take
advantage, or is that not something you should worry much about?

It takes time for this process to become fast enough for you to make great adjustments at the
table, but if you start slowly and keep at it, you can get there. Good luck!
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Book List
While this book is intended to be comprehensive and to provide you all the skills you’ll need to
begin your poker journey successfully, I would be remiss to omit the books that shaped my poker
thought process over the years. I also attached a usefulness score next to the book and an explanation
of why I assigned that score. The score is a mixture of how useful I felt the book was, how relevant it is in
modern day poker, and how much of an influence it had on me. I would also highly recommend that you
read the non-poker books on this list as they will add tremendous value to your life outside of poker.

Applications of No Limit Hold’em​ – Matthew Janda – 4/5. Does a great job of teaching foundational
game theory topics with a reasonable amount of depth. If the Game Theory section of this book came
easily to you, then you are probably ready to read ANLH.

Easy Game​ – Andrew Seidman – 3.5/5. A lot of the material for this book came from ​Easy Game.​ Some
of the content is dated and I find the explanation of capturing dead money somewhat confusing, but all
in all, probably the most important poker book of my career.

Ego Is The Enemy​ – Ryan Holiday ​– 5/5. Simply a life changing book.

Elements of Poker​ ​– Tommy Angelo – 4/5. A charming and inviting book. Part mental game book, part
memoir, part Buddhist philosophical text, it will have you thinking about all the soft skills around poker.
Somewhat dated, but still well worth the price of admission.

Harrington On Hold’em​ – Dan Harrington – 2.5/5. The first poker book I ever read. Wildly out of date
now, but can provide an excellent foundational understanding of concepts like pot odds or equity.

Let There Be Range​ – Cole South and Tri Nguyen – 3/5. My first venture into understanding
combinatorics. Ahead of its time when released, but dated now.

Mindset​ – Dr. Carol Dweck – 4.5/5. Potentially life-changing book which has the power to reframe the
way you think about learning, intelligence, and skills. The only slight knock against the book is that it’s
slightly repetitive.

Painless Poker​ – Tommy Angelo – 4.5/5. I read Painless Poker while I was writing this book and boy was
it helpful. It anthropomorphizes all of the common poker woes in the form of characters that are
beamed into The Painless Poker Clinic. It shows the power of mindfulness for coping with emotional
pain.

The Mental Game of Poker​ – Jared Tendler – 2.5/5. The first book I read on poker mental game training.
Describes the different types of tilt well, but is shorter on advice to resolve them.

The Obstacle Is the Way​ – Ryan Holiday – 4.5/5. Another blockbuster of a book. Somewhat repetitive,
but offers tremendous wisdom.

Thinking Fast and Slow​ – Daniel Kahneman – 4/5. A foundational book in Psychology that really can
open your eyes to the way our brains deceive us. Somewhat dense and I knocked off a point for its poor
understanding of poker. ☺
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Poker Terms

Essential Poker Terms

A-High​ – Hand strength that is only a high card Ace.

Absolute Hand Strength – ​How strong a hand is in terms of the rules of the game where a flush beats a
straight

Absolute Position​ – Your position in relation to the dealer (Button). The closer you are to the Button
(going anti-clockwise), the better your Absolute Position. This is because your Absolute Position governs
your future turns to act (with the SB always being first, and the BTN always being last).

Air ​– The weakest possible hand strength that is below a pair.

All-In​ – When a player has wagered all their remaining chips.

Ante​ – Mandatory preflop bets posted by each player before the hand is dealt. Often used in
tournaments, but also in live cash games too. Usually denoted by parenthesis. Ex: $5/$10 ($2) means
$5/$10 blinds with a $2 ante.

Backdoor Draws ​– Draws that are not available on the flop but appear on the turn. For example, a
Backdoor Flush Draw occurs when there is one heart on the flop and the turn brings another heart.

Betting Limits ​or​ Betting Structure ​– The rules regarding the amount a player may bet in a poker game.
The three most common betting structures are limit (players can only bet a fixed amount), pot limit
(where players can bet from one big blind up to the size of the pot), or no limit (where a player can bet
from one big blind up to the size of the ​effective stack​).

Big Blind​ or ​BB​ – Both a forced bet preflop and the associated position at the table. This position is
directly to the left of the small blind and acts last.

Blinds ​or​ bb​ – The combination of forced bets preflop or the associated positions at the table. Usually
measured in terms of bb’s (or “big blinds”). In games without ​straddles​ or ​antes​ there will be 1.5bbs
invested preflop before hands are dealt (1bb posted by the ​Big Blind​ + 0.5bb posted by the ​Small Blind​).

Blockers ​– Cards that interfere with the hands another player can hold.

Blocking Bet​ – A small bet utilized to attempt a cheap showdown.

Bluff ​–​ ​To bet with the intention of making a stronger hand fold or to fold out a hand with equity.

Bluffing Candidates ​–​ ​Hands which could serve as bets designed to fold players off better hands.

Bluff Catcher – ​A hand which can only beat a bluff from our opponent.

Board Texture ​–​ ​The combined quality of community cards. A “static” or “dry” board will have little to
no connectivity between cards (ex: Ac-3d-6s-9h-Js). Conversely, a “dynamic” or “wet” board will have
much more activity on it usually distinguishable by its extra draw possibilities (ex: 9h-Th-Qs-9s-Jh).
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 136

Combo​ ​Draw​ – Having both a straight and flush draw at once.

Continuation Bet ​or ​C-bet​ –​ ​A flop bet from the last raiser preflop.

Counterfeit ​–​ ​To cause a hand to lose its strength due to a change in the board texture. This most often
happens to a two pair hand when a pairing card comes on the next street. 43 on T43 is two pair and is
beating AA, but when a T comes on the turn, the best possible 5 card hand for AA is now A-A-T-T-4,
whereas it’s only T-T-4-4-3 for 43. Kickers can also be counterfeited. Q8 beats Q2 on a board of QT3r, 9x,
until a Q, T, 9, or 3 comes. In the case of the Q, each player has a five card hand of Q-Q-Q-T-9.

Cutoff ​or ​CO ​–​ ​In a poker game with four or more players, the position that acts directly before the
button.

Database ​–​ ​An essential tool for playing online poker. This tool will track all of your hands, your
winnings, and your opponents’ statistics. Databases are one of the primary reasons online poker is more
difficult than live poker.

Degraded Outs​ – A term coined in this book, an estimate of how clean our outs are versus a villain’s
continuation range. This can help inform the best line to take with an exact hand.

Delay Continuation Bet​ –​ ​A bet from the preflop raiser on the turn after not betting the flop.

Draw Heavy ​– When the board has a large number of draws on it. Also referred to as a “wet board.”

Effective Stack ​– The amount of money in play in a given hand. When there are two players in a hand,
the shortest stack is the effective stack. When there are three players or more in a hand, there may be
multiple effective stacks.

Elasticity​ or ​Inelasticity​ – A measure of whether a player will decide to call based on both hand strength
and bet size. When a player is “elastic” he will call a bet regardless of its size. When a player is “inelastic”
his call will be dependent on the bet size.

Equity ​–​ ​The claim each hand has to the pot.

Equity Calculator ​–​ ​A simple program to determine hand vs hand, hand vs range, or range vs range
equity.

Equity Preservation ​–​ ​Checking back with a hand ​in position​ to give it a chance to improve on the next
street and to avoid having to fold it after our bet was raised.

Equity Realization ​–​ ​This concept is sometimes called ​playability​. A way of thinking about how easy the
hand is to play. Hands that have​ h​ igh equity realization tend to be draws.

Expected Value ​or​ EV ​–​ ​How much money a hand or a decision is worth. We visualized the expected
value of hands in this book as numbers that float over the top of the cards telling you how much they
are worth. As shorthand, players often add “+”, “- “, or “0” symbols in front of “EV” either used to be
quickly informative or as a playful colloquialism. Ex: “Taking this line with this hand is -EV, since it yields
roughly -10bb on average” or “I hear cutting out all junk food is +EV for your mental game.”

Flush Draw ​or​ FD​ – When we are one card away from holding a hand with 5 cards of the same suit. In
PLO this can only occur when we hold two cards of a suit in our hand and there are two more cards of
 Poker Foundations Page​ | 137

that suit on the board. In NLH, we can make a flush with one or no cards of the flushing suit in our hand,
as long as there are a total of 5 cards of that suit available.

Four Bet – ​To re-raise a three bet. This usually only occurs preflop and a fourth raise on the flop, turn, or
river usually results in players being ​all-in​.

Flush​ – Five cards of the same suit. When the cards are in sequential rank this is a straight flush. When
you have the highest possible straight (T-J-Q-K-A) this is a royal flush, the best possible hand in NLH, PLO,
and many other poker variants.

Goal of Poker​ – To make the most money possible with each and every hand.

Gutshot​ – A four-out straight draw missing an interior card for its completion. For example, holding QJo
on a 98xr flop a T on the turn or river will complete the Q-high straight.

Hand Terminology – ​As the game of poker evolved, a syntax for discussing hands was created. The
syntax varies a bit from game to game. In NLH, a preflop hand can be suited or off-suit. These are
written 76s and 76o respectively. In PLO preflop hands can be ​rainbow​, single suited or double suited
which are typically written as 8765r, KK94ss, or AT74ds. Flops can be rainbow, two tone, or monotone
such as Q62r, K97tt (or written dd,hh,cc,ss to refer to specific suits), or 952m

Heads Up​ or ​HU​ – Can either refer to the version of poker which is played between two players or a
hand of multiplayer poker game when only two players continue in the hand.

High Equity Bluff ​or​ Semi-bluff ​–​ ​ A bet with a hand that is currently weak but has numerous outs to
improve.

Hourly Rate ​–​ ​The average amount a poker player makes. Similar to a wage at a normal job except that
the amount can increase or decrease based on a myriad of factors and can even be negative.

Implied Odds ​– Expected additional value from future betting. When the ​equity​ of a hand is not enough
to justify a call based on direct ​pot odds​, we can sometimes still make a call based on future bets we
might win when we make our hand. This is especially true when our hand could improve in a surprising
way, such as a low frequency straight draw.

The Independent Chip Model ​or​ ICM​ – A methodology of thinking about the chips in a tournament
based not their numerical value but rather on their relationship to the various payouts.

In-Position or Out-Of-Position ​or ​IP/OOP – ​Whether we act last or first in a hand of poker

Isolation Raise ​–​ ​Raising a limper or limpers with the intention of making other players fold so that you
can play a larger pot against a player who often has weak hands.

Limping ​–​ ​Choosing to just match the big blind preflop rather than raise.

Multiway Pot​ – A pot which involves at least 3 players.

Natural Bluffs – ​Hands which make obvious ​bluffing candidates​. Holding the Ace of hearts when there is
a heart flush on board is a very natural bluff. When it is difficult for our opponent to have a lot of hands
that want to bluff, there is a decent chance they won’t find enough bluffs
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No Limit Hold’em ​or​ NLH​ – A poker game where you are dealt two hole cards and try to make the best
five card hand after five community cards arrive. You can use two, one, or none of your hole cards. The
betting structure is no limit so you are able to wager up to your full stack at any decision point.

Non-Nut Draw ​–​ ​A draw to a hand that will not be the best possible hand when that particular draw hits.

Nut Flush Blocker ​–​ ​Holding the highest flush card but not a flush.

Nuts ​–​ ​The best possible hand on the current street.

Open-Ended Straight Draw​ or ​OESD​ – Four cards in sequence that can make a straight with another card
on either end. For example, holding 98 on a board of T72 gives you an open-ended straight draw since a
Jack or 6 gives you a straight. Holding 97 on J85 is known as a double gutter, but gives you exactly the
same number of outs as the OESD so they are effectively the same except that the double gutter tends
to be more surprising especially in NLH

Overbet ​– To bet an amount larger than the current size of the pot. Only possible in no limit games.

Overcards​ – Cards that are ranked above the community cards.

Overlimp​ – To call preflop after one or more players have already done so.

Overpair​ – A pocket pair ranked above all community cards.

Playability​ – The idea that some hands are easier than others to play postflop even if they have less raw
equity​. Hands with high playability hit flops often and make good draws. 76s in NLH and T975ds in PLO
are examples of hands with a lot of playability.

Paired Board​ – Community cards that include two cards of the same rank. KK2 is a paired flop. QJ4r Jx
“pairs” the turn.

Poker Shorthand (JTo, AQQTds, Q42r) ​–​ ​A method of writing the hole cards or board in a short and
understandable way. In NLH, preflop hands are either written with “o” or “s” to indicate whether they
are suited or not (except for pocket pairs like QQ which can never be suited). PLO preflop hands are
written with “ds,” “ss,” or “r” to indicate double suited, single suited, or ​rainbow​. Flops can either be
written using the exact cards or in a similar shorthand. T85r has no ​flush draws​, T85hh has two hearts,
T85tt indicates that the board has two suits on it. T85m is my own shorthand for a monotone board
(such as Tc 8c 5c). A turn or river that doesn’t complete the front door flush draw or add a backdoor
flush draw can be written as “x” (T85hh 2x Kx).

Position ​–​ ​Can refer to the name of your seat during a particular poker hand (Under The Gun, Cutoff,
etc) or the relative order of the action postflop, with a player being ​in-position​ or ​out-of-position​. The
order of actions by ​preflop​ position are as follows: Under The Gun (UTG), Middle position (MP), Cutoff
(CO), Button (BTN), Small Blind (SB), then Big Blind (BB). ​Postflop​ the action starts on whoever is closest
to the Button going clockwise.

Pot Equity vs Fold Equity ​–​ ​The claims our hand has to the current pot. Pot equity is how often we
would win if the hand were checked down while fold equity is the likelihood of the villain folding when
we bet.
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Pot Limit Omaha ​or​ PLO ​–​ ​A variation of hold’em where we start with four cards instead of two and
have to use 3 from the board and two from our hand to make a five card hand. Pot limit refers to the
betting structure which prevents us from betting larger than the size of the full pot.

Pot Odds – ​How often your call needs to be correct in order to win money given the size of the pot and
our opponent’s bet

Preflop ​or​ Postflop​ – Before or after the first three community cards have been dealt.

Pure Bluff Catcher ​–​ ​A hand which cannot beat any of the hands in villain’s value range.

Rake ​–​ ​The cut the casino or poker site takes from the pot in order to make money.

Rakeback ​–​ ​A frequent player discount or rebate some poker sites will offer.

Rainbow ​–​ ​Describes flop with three different suits on it.

Range ​–​ ​A set which includes every hand a player could hold at a particular decision point.

Range Advantage – ​When the hands one player can hold in a given situation are on average stronger
than all the hands their opponent can hold. We often talk about a particular flop giving one player a
range advantage. This simply means that flop improves more hands in one player’s range.

Raise First In​ or ​RFI – ​When a player is first to volunteer raising chips into the pot preflop.

Relative Hand Strength – ​The value of your hand against a villain’s range.

Reverse Implied Odds ​–​ ​The dark side of ​implied odds​. Applies when you justify a call based on winning
more money in the future, but there are also cards that allow you to lose a ton of money. Usually draws
to non-nut hands have some reverse implied odds built into them.

Showdown Value​ – The ability of a hand to win when the river action is complete. The term primarily
refers to hands that can only beat a bluff or a hand we could consider bluffing but opt not to since we
believe it will win at the end of the hand occasionally.

Slow Play ​–​ ​To not raise or check-raise a strong hand, but rather try to trap your opponent and catch
more bets on future streets.

Small Blind ​or ​SB ​–​ ​The position directly to the left of the button which must put in half of the big blind
preflop before seeing any cards. This player acts first for the rest of the hand. Can be shortened to SB. In
a ​heads up​ game, this player is the same as the button and acts first preflop and then acts last for the
remainder of the hand.

Squeeze ​–​ ​When one player raises preflop and at least one player calls and then a third three bets over
these two players.

Stab ​–​ ​I use this term specifically when I refer to a player who was the caller preflop choosing to bet
after the preflop raiser checked ​out of position​. Many players use the term more generally, but I find
this specific definition more useful.

Stack to Pot Ratio​ or ​SPR​ – The number of times the current pot fits into your stack.
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Stakes ​– A way to reference the blinds and buy-in limit for a poker game. As a rough guide in terms of
buy-in limits: <$50 is Micro-Stakes (SS), $50 - $100 is Low Stakes (LS), $200 - $600 is Mid Stakes (MS) and
$1k+ is High Stakes (HS). An online $5/$10 game capped at 100bb will limit you to a “max” buy-in of
$1000. If the same game has a lower set limit of 40bb (not uncommon online) you can “min” buy-in for
$400.

Straddle​ – Popular in live games, a blind raise posted by the ​Under The Gun​ player. Technically players
can straddle to whatever amount they’d like, but doubling the ​big blind​ is most common.

Straight​ – Five cards of consecutive rank, with A-2-3-4-5 being the possible lowest and T-J-Q-K-A being
the possible highest.

Street ​–​ ​One round of betting in poker. NLH and PLO both have three streets total.

Thin Value Bet ​–​ ​To bet with a reasonable hand seeking a call when the decision is close and your hand
is only a small favorite.

Three Bet ​or​ 3B ​–​ ​To re-raise the initial raise preflop or to bet postflop and then re-raise over a raise

Top Pair​ – Pairing the highest rank card of all community cards.

Under the Gun or UTG ​–​ ​The first player to act at the start of the hand. The position to the left of the Big
Blind.

Value Bet ​–​ ​To bet with the intention of getting called or raised by a weaker hand.

Variance ​–​ ​Randomness in poker.

Winrate​ – A measurement of your success at poker normally expressed as the average number of big
blinds you earn per 100 hands (or as bb/100).

Wrap ​– A kind of ​straight​ draw that only exists in Omaha. These can range from having 9 outs (JT92 on
Q83r), 13 outs (KJT2 on Q93r), to 17 outs (T972 on Q86r).

“X” Streets of Value ​–​ ​The number of bets we believe our strong hand is worth. A three street value
hand wants to generally bet the flop, turn and river, whereas a two street value hand will need to check
at some point because the third bet may no longer allow it to get called by worse

Poker Culture Terms

Barrel ​–​ ​To bet. “Firing a second or third barrel” indicates betting twice or thrice. The term itself refers
to bullets in the chamber of a revolver pistol.

Big Bet Game​ – A poker game that allows you to select your own bet size rather than forcing you to bet
a fixed amount.

Blank​ – A card that completely misses the board and doesn’t change its character. Q96hh 2x is a blank
turn.
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Bluff Targeting​ – Selecting a small set of likely hands in ​villain’s​ range to help us approximate what we
can bluff against.

Bots ​–​ ​A term for programs that make all of the poker playing decisions for a player. As software
improves, these programs become increasingly more sophisticated.

Brick or Bricks – ​If we say the turn is a brick, we mean that it was a card that did not complete any draws
or change the board significantly such as Kh 9d 7d, 2s. It can also refer to a draw missing.

Broadway Cards ​–​ ​Aces, kings, queens, jacks, and tens

Bust, To Go Bust, Busto – ​To lose all your chips, usually in the context of a tournament

Busted Draw – ​When all possible draws have missed.

Capped ​or ​Uncapped​ ​– ​When a player has a perceived upper-bound in hand strength or does not.

Cooler​ – When a strong hand that should never be folded runs into an even stronger hand.

Domination ​– A​ ​situation where one hand wins most similar boards against another. Most often refers
to both players holding ​top pair​, when one hand has a higher kicker. Could also refer to the nut ​flush
draw​ crushing an inferior draw like the 2​nd​ nut flush draw, or AA crushing KK preflop.

Drawing Dead​ – When a hand has zero ​equity​.

Fit Or Fold​ – Used to describe a straightforward opponent who has a postflop strategy of calling when
improved and folding when unimproved.

Flat Call ​–​ ​Another way to say “call.”

Flipping ​–​ ​When a hand vs hand matchup is close to 50/50 when all the money goes in. Flipping is short
for “flipping coins.”

Float​ – To call (usually ​in-position​) with a somewhat weak hand that will bluff the turn when checked to.
Think of it as a kind of cheaper, delayed bluff.

Light or Thin​ – Describes hands that are just barely good enough to make a certain play. A light ​float
would be a hand just barely strong enough to call and a thin ​value bet​ is a hand that is right on the
borderline between betting to get called by worse and checking.

Line ​–​ ​A series of actions in a poker hand often denoted with “x” for check and “b” for bet. Therefore,
b/x/b would be a hand where I bet the flop, checked the turn, and bet the river.

Heads Up Specialist ​–​ ​A player who focuses on the two player form of poker.

Maniac​ – A wild player who plays too many hands and frequently runs large bluffs.

Merged – ​When a player’s betting range does not contain just strong and weak hands, but also a
number of middling hands of various strengths. This is approach tends to be correct when stacks are
extremely short

Monotone Boards​ – Community cards of all one suit. Kc 7c 5c is a monotone flop.

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Nit ​–​ ​A player who is fearful of large bets, and may fold too much or play too tight.

No Flop, No Drop ​–​ ​A term casinos use to indicate that no rake will be taken from the hand when the
players don’t see a flop. “The drop” refers to the chips the dealer will drop into a slot for the house.

Orbit ​– One lap around the poker table.

Over-flushed​ or ​Over-setted ​– When your ​flush​ runs into a higher flush, or your ​set​ runs into a higher
set. This is often considered a ​cooler​.

Ratholing​ – Leaving once you’ve doubled up and coming back with a shorter stack. Usually implies that
the player was a short stacker.

Reciprocality ​–​ ​A term invented by Tommy Angelo. This idea acknowledges that we don’t make money
in poker when we win a hand, but rather when we win more money than our opponent would have in
our shoes.

Red Deuces ​– Slang used to describe the hand 2h 2d in live poker.

Results-Orientation​ – A form of ​tilt​, this is when your rational decision-making process is compromised
by emotions around recent results.

Rundown ​–​ ​A term for preflop PLO hands that are somewhat connected. KQJT and 9754 are both
rundowns, but KQJT has no gaps and has higher cards so it’s considerably better.

Running Under EV ​–​ ​When the money you have won is less than the amount you should have won when
luck cancels out. It usually refers specifically to getting ​all-in​ and losing as a favorite.

Satellite – ​A tournament where the prizes consist of entries to a larger tournament

Set ​–​ ​A specific form of three of a kind when we have a pocket pair in our hand and a third card arrives
on the board.

Side Cards​ – The additional two cards in a PLO hand that are not being used to actively make the best
possible five card hand.

Soft Game​ – A line up in a poker game that has a large number of recreational players.

Straight Board ​– Community cards which can make a ​straight​. 8c 7s 6d is a straight board.

Suck Out​ – Occurs when a hand with little ​equity​ ends up winning the hand by improving in an unlikely
way.

Stack Off​ – To put the rest of your money in the pot. There is usually an implication with this term that
the player putting his money in has little or no ​fold equity​ and is essentially calling his money off.

Tanked ​or​ “Went into the Tank”​ – Thought a long time in poker.

The 2 And 4 Rule ​– Coined by Phil Gordon, a simple method to estimate your hand’s ​equity​ by
multiplying your number of outs on the flop and turn by 2 and 4, respectively.

Tilt​ ​–​ Playing sub-optimally due to strong emotions.

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Tournament Bubble ​–​ ​The period directly before payouts start or before a pay jump in a tournament.

Trips​ – A specific form of three of a kind when we hold a single card and two of that card arrive on the
board.

Value Own – ​To ​value bet​ too thinly and get called by a stronger hand.

Value Targeting​ ​– ​Selecting a small set of likely hands in ​villain’s​ range to help us approximate what we
can bet for value against.

Villain​ – Your opponent in a given hand of poker.

Wake Up – ​To be dealt a good hand preflop. There is also an implication that this player may have been
folding for a while as a result of poor cards.

Way Ahead / Way Behind – ​Holding a hand that either crushes your opponent’s hand or is crushed by
the opponent’s hand.

Game Theory Terms

Asymmetric Information ​–​ ​Knowledge that only one player has. The flop is an example of symmetric
information since both players know it. The cards in our hand are asymmetric because only we know
them.

Balanced – ​Another way of saying “Unexploitable”. It could refer in a general sense to the idea of
playing a ​Game Theory​ Optimal Strategy or to having the precise ratio of ​bluffs​ to ​value bets​ in a given
situation

Board Coverage – ​The idea that we want to have hands that connect with various types of flops. If we
never 3B with a hand like 76s, we’ll never flop the nuts on a board like 985r

Combinatorics ​–​ ​A method of counting up all the different variations of something, in this context, poker
hands.

Conditional Probability​ – The probability of an event occurring after another event has occurred.

Exploitation ​–​ ​A deviation from a ​Nash Equilibrium​ strategy with the intention of taking advantage of a
particular mistake or set of mistakes our opponent makes.

Game Theory ​– A body of analysis of best plays in abstract competitions.

Game Theory Solver​ – A program that computes an approximation of a ​Nash Equilibrium​ given certain
ranges, bet sizes, and a board that was input by a player.

Game Tree Complexity ​–​ ​All the possibilities that exist within a game space written as a number such as
1x10^89.

Indifference ​–​ ​Describes the hand choices between equivalent options.

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Leveling​ – Anticipating your opponent’s thought process and thinking up the perfect counter strategy. “I
threw rock when he threw scissors last time, so I’ll throw scissors to anticipate his paper.”

Maximize​ – The fundamental principle behind the ​Goal of Poker​: all players are incentivized to increase
their payouts as high as possible by making the highest ​EV​ decision each hand.

Minimum Defense Frequency ​or​ MDF –​ ​ ​A threshold for calling or raising against a bet that prevents the
bettor from making money automatically. The threshold changes based on the exact size of the bet
we’re facing.

Nash Equilibrium ​–​ ​The perfect, unbeatable defensive strategy. In poker, every strategy loses to a Nash
Equilibrium unless your opponent also plays the equilibrium, in which case, the end result will be a tie in
the long run.

Negative Sum Game ​–​ ​A game whose outcome is less than zero. If two perfect players played against
each other at a casino, they would each slowly lose to the house who is raking the game.

Overfold – ​To fold beyond what the optimal frequency, thus allowing our opponent to bluff us at will

Polarization ​–​ ​Betting both really strong hands and really weak hands in the proper ratio to create
indifference in the opponent’s range.

Rock, Paper, Scissors​ or​ RPS ​– A simple game that can serve as a proxy for poker. It has exploitive
strategies and a ​Nash Equilibrium​ solution (throwing each category randomly one third of the time).

Under ​or​ Overbluff​ – To bet (with the intention of making your opponent fold) below or above the
“optimal” frequency.

Zero Sum Game ​– A contest where the losses from one player go directly to the other.

Psychology and Mental Game Terms

Apophenia ​– Coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad (1958), this was the observed phenomenon of subjects
mistakenly perceiving connections and meanings between unrelated items.

Confirmation Bias​ – A reflex to pay attention to results that match your expectations and ignore results
that differ from expectations.

Counterfactual Thinking ​–​ ​The ability to contemplate realities or outcomes that have not occurred.

Dunning-Kruger Effect ​–​ ​An effect whereby a large percentage of any population will overestimate their
skill or standing in a field or on some dimension. For instance, 80-90% of drivers believe they have above
average driving skill. A similar percentage of men believe they are above average in sexual
attractiveness. Everyone thinks they’re good at poker too. ☺

Heuristics ​–​ ​Mental models and shortcuts in thinking that allow us to make decisions quickly. The
downside is that these models are oversimplified and can be wildly inaccurate if a few variables change.
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Hindsight Bias ​–​ ​The illusion of knowledge or inevitability that is created upon looking back at an event.
The event may seem inevitable, though the outcome was uncertain at the time.

Limiting Beliefs ​– Patterns of thought that prevent a person from challenging themselves or achieving
their potential.

Logical Fallacy​ – An inaccuracy in a deductive argument which renders the argument invalid.

Metacognitive Thinking ​– Thinking about one’s own thinking.

Self-Sabotage​ ​–​ Intentionally self-destructive choices that cause one to fail.

Unconscious Incompetence – ​The first of four stages of learning where the learner cannot understand
how little they know. This stage is often characterized by statements like “Poker? What an easy job that
must be” or “I could totally be a pro if I wanted to be”. The final three stages are Conscious
Incompetence (best characterized by the phrase “holy shit, this is complicated”), Conscious Competence
(“When I’m on my game, I play pretty well”), and Unconscious Competence (think about the all time
greats making their skill look effortless)