Avoiding Trouble

When you read my articles, you will see that most center around a few general rules and guidelines. Can advice in such general terms be of any help? For me it sure has been. As a matter of fact I think a lot of players make poker a lot more difficult then it need be. When I'm in doubt in a hand, I often just try and stay out of harms way. I'm more prone to fold then to call when faced with a hard decision. The value of avoiding trouble probably decreases with experience. Today I find myself well acquainted with a lot of non-straightforward situations, and possess a lot of advanced playing tools I didn't when I was a rookie. In other words - I think I've become better in handling trouble. But in a sense this has merely moved the borderline to the land of trouble. Yet I still put a lot of value in avoiding trouble in the first place. In this article I'll walk through four of the most common ways of getting yourself into trouble, and I'll try to give some solid advice on how to avoid it.

Loose Start Hand Selection

When I started playing poker I soon found a great online poker buddy who had more experience then me. Every day I found new questions to ask him, and he gave me some great feedback that helped me move along quickly. I remember him saying a thing that I simply could not come to terms with at the time. I was bragging about how super tight I was in a multi tourney where I had only seen 21% of the flops, to which he replied that in his vocabulary a rock is a player who takes 15% or less flops including the blinds. Nowadays I often find myself close to the Rockies when I play against tough opposition. Having a loose start hand selection is asking for troubles for several reasons. Good start hands statistically win more pots then bad ones. Good hands usually make for easy decisions after the flop. Bad hands often make for tricky ones. Take a hand like A6o. If you flop an ace you are likely outkicked and if you flop a 6 it is very unlikely to be top pair. It's pretty damn hard to flop a monster with this hand. With AKo you will flop top pair top kicker when you hit your flop. Knowing where you stand from the flop and onwards has a lot of benefits. It will allow you to bet and raise, building a good pot for a good hand. With a hand like A6o you will probably be checking and calling most of the way, as you have doubts whether you are ahead or behind. This is bad poker, as calling will win you no pots without a showdown. And it also means that the pots you win with A6o will be smaller in average then the ones you win with AK. In short good hands will win many good pots and bad hands will win few small pots. How about those times where really poor hands like 72o flop a monster? Well 72o is very unlikely to flop a monster to begin with, and when it does, it is unlikely to get much action, as nobody else is likely to have much. With AK, all the ace rags will be contributing to the pot.

For these reasons a reasonably tight start hand selection is crucial in avoiding trouble. Often you will suffer tough beats, but when you analyze the hand, the only mistake you'll see is that you had no business in the pot to begin with. Wait for good start hands, and most of the decisions you will have to make after the flop will be fairly easy.

As a final note on this issue, I recommend simply avoiding specific hands you feel uncomfortable playing. Personally I have frequently dumped suited ace rags, as I didn't feel comfortable playing them (at the same time I loved playing small suited connectors like 87s!). But the point in this is that must marginal hands add little to your earnings, but will increase your swings considerably. Furthermore it is in playing the marginal hands that experience shows the most. So mucking marginal hands may easily be the right thing to do, especially for an inexperienced player. Avoiding trouble often comes cheap. Getting in trouble usually doesn't.

Failing To Release After Start Raising

When I get in trouble these days, it seem to follow a very distinct pattern which deserves comment, as I'm fairly sure I'm not the only one struggling with this. What happens is that I start to play tight aggressive poker. More precisely - I start to play super tight pre flop, and as I play so few hands to begin with, I start pushing my hands too hard after the flop. Playing too tight and too aggressive can therefore be a recipe for disaster. At the heart of it usually lie a failure to tighten up after the flop, caused by boredom and restlessness from playing fewer hands then I usually do. How do you pull yourself out of this trap? There are several things you could and should do. Firstly, you should stop raising all together from early position. Somehow it often gets a lot easier to walk away from a hand like AK unimproved on a missed flop, when you have not raised pre flop. If you find yourself pushing hands you have start raised harder then is merited by the board, the easiest way to stay out of trouble is to stop raising them pre flop. If this is what it takes to dump them, why not? Often you will be able to check raise on the flop when you hit anyway, catching up the bet you missed pre-flop. Also you should start to play some of the marginal hands from late position. These are easy to walk away from, and easy to play when you have a positional advantage.

Failing To Respect Raises

This is one of the most common mistakes seen in low limit games. Often you find yourself seated at a very loose and passive table. You will see players call with anything, but not much raising is going on. If you encounter a raise from one of these players you should know that your top pair top kicker is in trouble. Passive players seldom raise after the flop with less then two pair. If the pot is small when the raise occurs, you should dump unless you have a monster yourself. You know that even if you have pocket aces your odds are slim. Whether you should call it down or muck it right there depend on the size of the pot. If the pot is huge, you should probably call it down. If it's fairly small you should probably avoid trouble and wait for a better opportunity. In any case it never hurts to stop and think about what may have caused your opponent to raise. The equation you need to solve is whether your chance of ending up with the best hand when this particular player has just raised is better then the odds laid by the pot. But against weak opponents who never bluff, the easy way is simply to muck you hand when they raise. It won't happen often, and they will call you down on all your good hands. Don't fight a weakie when he looks strong. Fight him when he's weak.

Failing To Make Timely Decisions With Unpleasant Outcomes

This is the weakness of the calling station. Let's take that A6o hand again, and lets say see the Q86 rainbow flop along with 5 other players. What do you do now? How likely is it that you have the best hand? How many outs have you got? How likely is it that your outs make someone else a better hand? Instinctively you should know that despite you hit a part of the flop, you are probably way behind, and your chances of improving to the winning hand are slim. Despite knowing this, your first impulse will probably be to call and pray for a miracle, telling yourself that you hit the flop (as if...). When the river card doesn't help you, you will probably make the decision you instinctively made on the flop, but failed to act appropriately to before now - you fold. This urge to postpone unpleasant decisions lies within the sub conscience of everybody. Yet dealing with it is a super important issue in poker (and in life in general by my experience). Its called taking responsibility for your actions. A lot of the decisions that seem tricky are actually quite straight forward, when you realize that you often make a decision unconsciously very early in the hand, but fail to execute the decision before late in the hand. Folding early instead postponing decisions is good poker. Simple as that. It almost always pays to play tight, and it's on the flop more then prior to the flop that you should evaluate your degree of tightness. Fold those losers, and rest assured that much better opportunities will arise later on. They always do.

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