By Fredrik Paulsson
“He Probably Has a Set”

If you’ve ever said or thought “my opponent probably has a set” you’re likely to have some holes in the way you read hands. I hope I can plug at least one of them today.

Reading hands isn’t about putting your opponent on a single hand. It’s about putting your opponent on a range of hands and narrowing that range as you get more information. Exclusion. Most people get this right; they start excluding things from their opponent’s likely holdings based on his actions. The sentence “it seems unlikely that he has AA since he didn’t re-raise preflop” is an example of this. We can surely discard a whole lot of unlikely holdings much the same way, especially after we see how they act on the flop.

This is the good way to figure out hands. Assign a range of possible hands, and discard holdings as the hand plays out. A good thing to keep in hand when trying to figure this out on the fly is that it’s the number of combinations that matter. For this reason, if you “know” that your opponent has either AA or AK, then he’s more likely to have AK because there are 16 ways he can have that hand, but only 12 ways he can have AA.

Now we take this step a bit further:…. read rest of article at CardsChat.com

By Sasha @ SmokePoker
I suppose there is a library of advice that can be offered in regards to every poker play; however, the stealing blinds is a necessity in tournament play if you hope to build your stack towards the leader, and maintain a workable stack as the blinds increase and players decrease. The pre-flop re-steal is simply a re-raise based on an initial raise that someone has bet in an effort to steal the blinds. So if you were thinking it had something to do with robbing a bank with gymnastic ability the day after someone else robbed it, you’ve come to the wrong place.Often times in a game of No-Limit Texas Holdem, players will lose patience when they feel the looming blanket of desperation begin to wrap around their tournament run, or perhaps their cash game budget. They realize that they will need to make an effort at stealing blinds or they won’t have any blinds to offer. At this point, it’s not uncommon to see a player move all-in pre-flop, but in the case that they make an effort to simply raise and steal the blind, they are a prime target for a…. read rest of article at SmokePoker