By DANIEL NEGREANU
I’m often asked poker strategy questions by amateurs who hope to get concrete answers in return. That’s rarely how poker works. There are simply too many variables to consider. The best approach in one situation might be the absolute worst in another.

In tournament poker, it’s not a bad idea to have a game plan right from the start. Unlike football, though, you shouldn’t script your first 15 plays of the game as many NFL coaches do. If anything, your game plan must be adaptable to the players that you’ll face.

Let’s say that you come into a tournament with the following game plan: Sit back early and play conservatively, and then, after a couple of levels, start attacking the blinds.

That’s not a bad game plan against certain opponents. But what if you find yourself at a table where most of the players simply call before the flop and play weak after the flop? That would require an immediate change of plan.

When up against bad players like these early in a tournament, you shouldn’t avoid playing marginal situations. In fact, you should welcome them. If your opponents don’t raise before the flop and commit big mistakes after the flop, make every attempt to play any two cards that have any value at all. The payoff at a table like this could set you up for a good run in the tournament.

Now, the second aspect of the game plan needs to be addressed: After a couple of levels, start attacking the blinds.

Realistically, that’s not going to work when you’re facing weak players. They play too many hands before the flop for this approach to be effective. So, forget about trying to steal their blinds. Rather, in this type of game, focus on…. Read rest of article at chron.com

By Sasha
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 re-steal. If you are sitting further down the line, a re-raise will put the pressure on the remaining competitors; and if you happen to have posted the blind and sit on a strong pocket, it may be worthwhile to challenge the thief and retain your stack.

There are many strategies for most effectively utilizing a re-steal, but ultimately it comes down to reading opponents. The player with a stack that is smaller than yours might as well have a target on their back if they raise early; as much as they want to add the blinds to their dwindling stack, they’ve also got to think to protect. If they were remotely confident in what they were holding pre-flop, they would more than likely…  Read rest of article at Smoke Poker

by nowapowa
It is often said of posthumously successful artists who were underappreciated in their lifetime that they were somehow ahead of their time. Their contribution to their craft could not be appreciated at the time because of its deviation from commonly accepted notions. Moby Dick is considered by many authorities and readers alike to be a brilliant work of fiction. However, looking at the reviews upon its release, one might think it was doomed to obscurity and failure.

Blind-stealing. The squeeze play. The resteal. These plays represent just some of the ways winning tournament players have stayed ahead of the field by employing strategies that vary from traditional card dependent methodologies. Today these plays are common knowledge, though they did not always exist. We have a handful of enterprising…. read rest of article at PocketFives.com

By Joe Navarro
This is a question I ask attendees at the various poker seminars and training camps I conduct every year. The answer is important, because once you know the most honest part of an individual’s body, that’s where you’ll want to look to pick up the most accurate read on what your opponent is holding. The problem is that few attendees know the right answer; in fact, unless they are familiar with Read ‘em and Reap, they almost always respond incorrectly and, thus, they ignore the part of a person’s anatomy that gives significant, uncensored information about his true card strength.The correct answer to the question: “What is the most honest part of your body?” is… your feet!

That’s right: Your feet win the honesty award hands, uh, feet down every time. The feet are truly remarkable and truthful in the information they convey. Unfortunately, when it comes to reading body language, most poker players start at the top (face) of their opponent(s) and work their way down, in spite of the fact that the face is the one feature of the body that is most often used to bluff and conceal true sentiments. My approach is the exact opposite: I begin with the feet and move up from there. This is because when it comes to the honesty of a person’s responses, the degree of truthfulness decreases as we move from the soles of our feet to the top of our head. Thus, our feet are the most honest part of our body, and our face is the most deceptive.

When you think about it, there’s good reason for the deceitful nature of our facial expressions. We lie with our face because that’s what we’ve been taught to do since early childhood. “Don’t make that face!” our parents growl when we honestly react to Aunt Wilma’s treacherous meat loaf. “At least look happy when your cousins stop by,” they add, and you learn how to force a smile. Mom and Dad are, in essence, telling us to hide, conceal, deceive, lie with our face… so we tend to get pretty good at it. So good, in fact, that when we put on a happy face at the poker table, we might look like we’ve got…. Read rest of article at Bluff Magazine

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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