There are dozens of profitable poker styles. These range from mathematically based strategies, where the player must adhere to strict betting and playing card limits to styles that focus on playing against specific opponents; to the “drunk plumber” strategy, where you can make a profit by playing a large number of starting hands and taking a number of seemingly inappropriate actions. But…
It’s a truth: The fewer starting hands you play, the easier it is to learn how to play.
How will we play? All of the above clever styles are the preserve of high-limit professionals. We will play much more simply. You see, most of our opponents are very bad players who don’t know even the simplest poker strategies. We will beat them not with tricks, but with good cards and situations where our card strength is much higher than theirs.
Style of play – TAG
We will expect good cards, strong hands and good situations to get as much of our opponent’s money as possible, and we will not play if our hand is not strong enough and we are unsure of winning. This style is called TAG (“tight aggressive”). Accurate – because we will only play with strong cards that come in relatively rarely. Aggressive – because when we do have these cards, we will try to squeeze the most out of them by “pushing” our opponent with our bets.
We will learn to play only in particularly advantageous situations, and to play only with strong starting cards. And we will play about 8-9% of the starting hands (169 in total).
This means that we will be bored very often. We will regularly throw cards away to play with strong hands one out of ten times. Not every player is up to the challenge of this routine, so we’ve come to the rescue with the internet poker feature of multitabling.
Multitabling
In online poker on the internet, we can play at multiple tables at the same time. It is up to you to decide how many tables to play on, taking into account the speed of your decision-making as well as the size of your monitor (of course, the economic rationale for this is profit maximisation, not boredom avoidance). We will start with a game at two tables, later you can increase this number as you see fit.
The average person who is computer friendly and has no visual impairment or attention span problems is able to follow a game on 8 to 10 tables using our proposed strategy.
However, not all at once! Start with two tables, gradually increasing the number of tables depending on the level of mastery and understanding of the strategy.
Dynamic preflop strategies in poker
It’s not your first day playing poker. Ideally, you have started from micro tables and within two to three months you have reached your first attempt at understanding NL50. If you are playing at the lower levels, then disregard the tips in this section, as the game is very relaxed at the lower levels, and the money involved is so small that any bluff is a waste of money.
In this series of articles, we will mainly talk about the different forms of bluffing. Let’s start with preflop, or more precisely, with blinds.