Poker News

Lou Krieger

Weak poker players make this mistake above all others: They call instead of folding. And it’s only natural. Like most of us, you venture out to the cardroom to play poker, not to fold hand after hand.

Folding isn’t much fun, and if winning is paramount in your eyes-forget for a moment all the social aspects that make poker such an enjoyable game-playing to win can be boring because the majority of poker hands are unplayable and should be thrown face down in the muck. Every good player does that most of the time.

On those occasions when they don’t, they are either in a short-handed game where more risk-taking is required and more hands must be played, or they’re at a table full of passive players who seldom bluff and raise infrequently. In games like these, pros will play some speculative hands because there’s little chance of being raised. It’s an opportunity to build a big hand and if he makes it, he knows that his opponents will pay him off to the bitter end.

He rarely deviates from this pattern, and does so only when confronting a very passive opponent who throws too many hands away when faced with a bet or a raise. Against this kind of opponent, cards have no meaning whatsoever. What matters is how often the strong player can bet or raise with reasonable assurances that his adversary will fold to his unmitigated aggression.

Because most opponents call too much and stay in the pot far too long with weak hands, they can be beaten by betting for value, not by bluffing. Because they’ll usually call when you bet, don’t waste your time and money bluffing in fixed-limit games. In no-limit games, the size of a big bluff can dissuade others from calling, but when the cost is only one more bet, your wagers will tend to attract callers. Instead, bet when you think you have the best hand, secure in the knowledge that your opponents are very likely to call you with lesser hands. Good players fold much of the time. They fold when they have the worst of it, and they’ll also fold to a good bluff made by a solid player who bets when the cards suggest he’s actually made a big hand. That’s not to say a good player will fold every time you bet into him. Sometimes he’ll have a good hand and call or raise. He might even read you for a bluff and raise just to seize the momentum and cause you to fold a weak hand. But good players can be bluffed precisely because they are both selective and aggressive, and the selectivity quotient in their game dictates that they fold some hands because they’re looking for better spots to risk their money.

That’s where the art of poker comes into play, and it’s an art that begins with knowing one’s opponent. Some can be bluffed while others will never fold if they have even the slightest inkling that they might win-never mind the long odds against them. What works against one opponent might not work against another. To put this in terms of dueling aphorisms, in poker it’s seldom a case of “what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander;” it’s usually “one man’s meat is another man’s poison.”

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On another topic entirely, No-Limit, the poker documentary, went on sale in late July. The film has a really interesting back story. A couple-with their four year-old in tow-go on the poker tournament trail hoping to win enough money to finance their independent film project. But the thrust of the film is interviews with a large number of poker players. Taken together, these interviews paint a fascinating picture of the poker world, and if you see the film, there’s an interview with me that somehow survived the editing process and made it to the film’s final version.

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