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What You Must Realize
To be successful at short-handed holdem you must realize that if you are not careful an individual could have the best of it by simply always betting.
So you must be sure that you do not use a strategy that would be beatable by an opponent betting at every opportunity.
Now it might sound impossible that you can lose against such an opponent. We all know people who play that way get “killed” in a full game.
But you need to understand that it is not because of you alone.
What foils these wild players is the combination of all the players who keep such a poker strategy from succeeding.
You do contribute to their failing, but only a little bit. To prove this point let’s look at a heads-up game.
Suppose just you and another player were playing and you don’t adjust after noticing how he is playing.
You play your fairly tight game and he has a strategy of always betting. He must beat you.
Let’s be a little more specific. Let’s say he’s on the button with the small blind, you have the big blind, and it is a $100- $200 game.
That is, there is $50 on the button and you have $100 on the bigs blinds.
So to raise he has to put in another $150, and if you don’t call he’s putting in $150 to win $150.
That means that if you call less than half the time he will show an automatic profit.
In fact even if you call a bit more than 50 percent of the time he still will almost certainly profit in these holdem situations since he will not only often steal your blind, but will also sometimes win when you call as well.
On the other hand, he is entitled to a profit because he has position on you and because you have a larger blind than he does.
The idea is to keep his profit to a minimum. This means that when the player on the button raises a lot you must call (or reraise) a lot.
Suppose you only call with the best 33 percent of the hands that you are dealt.
Then he can raise every time and if called, be done with it – that is, not bet the flop unless he flops a good hand.
When this is the case, he’s going to win $150 two out of three times, plus he’s going to win more sometimes.
He’s going to lose the $150 less than one out of three times.
To stop this simple strategy from working you must develop an appropriate counter strategy, and there are two things that you should do:
- Call quite a bit more than one out of three times.
- Reraise frequently.
(Remember we are talking about online poker the case where the game is head-up and you have the big blind while he has the small blind on the button.)
The second requirement of reraising frequently is very important.
You can’t allow your opponent to think “When I win, I win $150, and when I lose, I lose $150, and I’m going to win $150 two out of three times.”
He’s got to think that when he losses it will cost him $250, plus future bets.
Notice that we have developed the beginnings of a strategy that should slow him down.
Now when you finally get to poker play that live one heads-up, he won’t have the best of you any more.