Betting Patterns Leading to Easy Steals

Poker Helper, Jul 2007

Beating fullhanded games populated by loose players requires nothing more than sitting and waiting for good hands. When you hit your good hands, the primary hand reading skill involved is determining whether you’re beaten. If you’re beaten, you don’t put any more chips in the pot (unless, of course, you’re getting proper odds to draw to a better hand). If you’re ahead, you value bet your foes to death.

Determining whether you’re beaten is the only hand reading skilled required, but don’t think that it’s easy. Determining whether you’re beaten is a skill that will take you some time some master, and even those who supposedly master it are constantly looking for ways to improve. However, these types of loose fullhanded games are probably the easiest to beat, and it’s quite possible to beat these games without being able to beat any other type of game. And hell, even though I can beat pretty much any type of game out there, I always look for these types of tables first because those are the tables where it’s possible to make the most money per hour.

But suppose such a game isn’t available. Or what if you want to try to squeeze more profits out of your sessions? The key to thriving in tougher games and extracting even more profits from easy games is focusing on how your opponents play and finding betting patterns that will induce your opponents to fold to you when you don’t have a good hand. Remember: if you’re capable of making your opponents fold, it doesn’t matter what you hold. When playing to make your opponents fold, it’s solely the betting patterns that matter, and a big part of evolving as a card player is knowing when your own cards matter and when they don’t ...

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