Jurgen's Poker Blog

The action in shorthanded games frighten a lot of poker players. If you are the kind of player who wants to wait for premium hands to act, then you cannot win these games. In shorthanded poker games the blinds go around faster, making decisions are very difficult, and the weaknesses and strengths of players are put on spotlight.

Blinds

If you have a 10-handed poker game before you, then you can expect the blinds to be on you about 20% of the time. You will be making decisions about your card before even putting money in the middle about 8 of 10 times. Make it a 5-handed game and you will be playing on the blinds about 4 of 10 times and leaving just about 6 of the 10 chances for you to be picky with the cards you will play. Your chips are also gorged by the blinds faster. You need to play more hands or your money will just be eaten up,

Decisions

Making decisions in shorthanded games is very difficult since you are facing a very aggressive group and you cannot tap into protected pot.

The players know that they cannot wait so they will be playing aggressive and will not wait for premium hands. The players will be raising more often, play it aggressive from the blinds, and also having a mindset that everyone will be aggressive towards him. It is quite difficult to read aggressive players and you will be forced to make awkward decisions. The more decisions you make, the higher the chances that you will commit mistakes.

The flop pretty much dictates what will happen to the pot. The more players who make something out of the flop, the more they will be aggressive to join and grab the pot. On the other hand, when only a few players make the flop, there will be more plays to make in order to take advantage of the situation.

Daniel Negreanu details smallball flop play in this instructional video. I’m a big fan of smallball poker; and so is Sven of Sven’s Tight Poker Tips (check him out here).

How irritating is the fact that the black background is eating Negreanu’s neck? :s

You can’t always come out of the game with more money than you put in: that’s the rule of playing poker. The chance of losing money on this game is always higher than the chance of winning more. And while a lot of people fry their brains trying to master the “skill” of playing poker, even the best players know that luck always plays the bigger role compared to any amount of hard-earned skill.

Most of the time, however, that one winning streak borne out of luck can get into a poker player’s head and the game is over. The player experiences a downswing before s/he has a chance to pull out.

What is a downswing?

A downswing happens when you’ve been winning well in your cards, and then suddenly, you start to lose more money than you’ve planned. It happens swiftly, with a single Ace falling on that flop when you’re holding a KK. Some people blame it on “variance” or a necessary downfall in the “short term” for you to win the big win in the long run.

For this to happen, though, you have to be knowledgeable about your short term losses and know just how you’re going to get out of the rut. A downswing is, for the most part, always out of your control.

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Although they’re quite similar, EV or expected value should never be confused with equity. In a nutshell, the expected value is the money you’re either going to win or lose in a bet (in this case, when you’re playing poker). The +EV or positive expected value is computed by multiplying the money you’re going to win with the probability of winning. The –EV or negative expected value, on the other hand, is the money you’re going to lose with a poor bet. You can get your –EV by multiplying the money you’re going to lose on a bad bet with the probability of losing.

It’s probably simpler if we set this equation on an even 1:2 probability. The most common setting used by poker players to explain EV is when you’re tossing a coin. Since there are only two sides of the coin, the probability of getting both heads and tails are both 1:2, or 0.5. If you win $1.00 every time the tail turns up, and lose $1.50 every time the head appears, the computation should look like this.

+ EV = $1.00 x 0.5

-EV = -$1.5 x 0.5

Ergo, the money you can expect to win is $0.5 and the money you can expect to lose is -$0.75. If you add these two products together, you get your total EV.

EV = $0.5 + -(0.75) = -$0.25

This means that you’re at the losing end if you agree with this set up.

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Oh Phil, why are you always so personally involved… Doyle Brunson decides to go crazy and pick on Phil Hellmuth in this crazy hand — and Phil decides to make a laydown that made no sense at that point in the game (as he’s known to do every once in a while…).

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Nobody really likes to talk about these sponsorship deals in the world of poker, but today, we see just that with Kathy Liebert and Daniel Negreanu discussing the pros, cons and details of these deals in the poker world today. If you want to get sponsored: final table a big tournament, or be a superstar!