Daily Archives: February 16, 2020

February 16, 2020LearnWPT

You dont have to be the worlds best player to use GTO Strategy, and thanks to the WPT GTO Trainer, now you dont have to buy expensive software or have expert level knowledge to study GTO.

The WPT GTO Trainer lets you play real solved hands against a perfect opponent in a wide variety of postflop scenarios for cash game and tournament play.

If your goal is to be a tough poker player then you should try the WPT GTO Trainer today.

Register a free account here (it only takes your e-mail address to begin) to play hands and see true GTO strategy in real-time.

The WPT GTO Trainer has over 1 billion unique solved flops, turns and rivers that are fully playable.

As you make decisions in a hand, you receive instant feedback on the specific EV loss (if any) and Played Percentage for every action you take as compared to GTO strategy.

The full selection of scenarios for the WPT GTO Trainer are only available to members of LearnWPT, however were giving PokerNews Readers free access to the Trainer on a regular basis with the WPT GTO Hands of The Week.

Use this series of articles to practice the strategies you learn on LearnWPT (or at the table) and test your progress by playing a five-hand sample each week.

This is a common spot youll find yourself navigating in a cash game.

In a Cash Game with 100 big blind stacks, the cutoff raises to three big blinds and you call on the button.

You have a capped calling hand range for this spot and your opponent has a standard opening hand range for the cutoff seat.

This model shows a common spot where you are in position against a tough opponent on the flop after you flat call in late position preflop.

To maximize your expected value, you must learn to exploit your positional advantage, both in terms of exercising pot control and knowing when to bluff due to blocker effects.

Because your preflop hand range is capped, you will rarely have an equity advantage on the flop and therefore passive flop lines will often be correct.

To see more examples and test your skills, you can play through five solved random hands from this scenario.

Visit this page now to play through the hands and see how close you are to GTO play.

Visit this page now to play through the hands and see how close you are to GTO play.

https://gto.learnwpt.com/button-call-vs-cutoff-open/?utm_source=pokernews&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=gto_hands_week4

Scroll down before you start and note the detailed view of the preflop hand ranges.

True GTO strategy can be a bit counterintuitive at first, so don't be surprised or discouraged if certain plays you make show significant EV Loss.

Regular play on the WPT GTO Trainer will help you adjust your decisions closer and closer to GTO strategy.

Read more here:

WPT GTO Trainer Hand Review: Flatting the Button in a Cash Game - PokerNews.com

February 14, 2020Will Shillibier

First, we had Pot-Limit Omaha. Then we had Big O which increased the number of hole cards to five. Now say hello to Big O's even bigger brother - Six Card Pot Omaha which is now available to play online on PokerStars!

PokerStars has started spreading the game variant on its dot-com and dot-EU clients from the micro stakes $0.05/0.10 up to $50/$100.

This is the latest new variant that PokerStars have brought to their platform, after variants such as Split Hold'em, 6+ Hold'em and Unfold

The only real difference from "normal" Omaha is the number of cards dealt to each person. The main rule that a player must use two cards from their hand, along with three from the board, remains the same. In Six Card Omaha this means you must use two of your six hole cards with exactly three of the community cards in order to make your hand.

In four-card Omaha, you have six possible two-card combinations to make your best poker hand. In Big O this increases to ten combinations. However, in Six Card Omaha, you have a potential 15 starting hand combinations across your starting six hands.

This means that you should be looking for more than just suited aces or kings in your starting hand. Make sure that you have as many flush and straight combinations as possible, but at the same time ensure that you can be drawing to the nuts as often as possible. Why, then just read one!

You won't know truly how strong your starting hand is until the flop. This is because Six Card Omaha is a flop-driven game. You are looking for hands that can easily make the absolute nuts, therefore the more co-ordinated your hand is pre-flop, the more potential you have.

The more your cards work together to make straight, flush, and full house opportunities, the better. You must be able to evaluate these opportunities once you've reached the flop.

In four-card Omaha, you will be looking for all four of your cards to work together and complement one another. Take for example. You have double-suited aces, with two flush draws to go with your aces. You also have and which could both make straights.

A "dangler" is a hand that does not do this and is unrelated to the rest of your hole cards. You must be aware of these when you choose your starting hands, because often you will have to play a Six Card Omaha hand with a dangler. If you didn't, and only waited for the "dream hand" then you would hardly enter any pots at all. Just be careful to avoid those hands that are completely uncoordinated.

Follow this link:

Everything You Need to Know about 6-Card Omaha Games on PokerStars - PokerNews.com

Image by Pixabay

La vida loca baby. The crazy life.

Here on Caye Caulker, the little island off Belize where Im living. (My intended stay of two days has stretched into three weeks. Its hard to leave paradise.)

Wake up at 6.30. Have a smoke on the balcony and check out the tequila sunrise splotching the sky. Theres always a lone great white egret standing Masai-like on one leg in the sea. It hangs around the same spot all day, and I wonder what its story is.

Waiting for its long-lost mate? Scrounging fish from the nearby boats? Nothing better to do and nowhere better to go?

Whatever the story, I guess it lives with no egrets. (Ahem)

Then I walk down to Beans and Ice and order a large dark with milk. Gaze at the Caribbean Sea, flick glances at the young women swaying in hammocks attached to palm trees, finish my cup of jolt and walk through the mangrove swamps to South Pointe at the far end of town.

Turn around at the end of the dirt track and head back to Lenas, the ramshackle clapboard turquoise structure that I call home.

By now its 9am and time to work. Subediting for Daily Maverick, which involves wrestling with issues of great import.

Is our style SONA or Sona? Should this which not be a that? Square brackets or curved? eSwatini or Eswatini? Subeditor or sub-editor?

Interestingly, the authorities are divided on the last question, with the Oxford Dictionary and Collins Dictionary favouring subeditor, and the Cambridge Dictionary sub-editor. The Guardian and Observer Style Guide has it as subeditor, and in the section under that heading notes:

WP Crozier said of CP Scott: As a subeditor he got rid of the redundant and the turgid with the conscientiousness of a machine that presses the superfluous moisture out of yarn. The man who passed seaward journey to the great metropolis, and when the copy came back to him found written in firm blue pencil voyage to London, knew what sort of English CP liked.

At 3pm (11pm South African time) works over, and its time to head to the Barrier Reef Sports Bar for lunch and a beer. Or two. Happily, its Happy Hour (3pm-6pm) and a draught Belikin beer costs only four Belizean dollars about R30.

Theres always a colourful crowd of regulars at the bar, many of them Canadian swallows who come here during the brutal northern winter. Its minus 30 degrees Celsius at home today, theyll gleefully tell you, beads of sweat rolling down their face and globules of condensation sliding down their beer glass.

Theres a couple of women knocking back tequila shots, they stagger or wend their wobbly way home on bicycles at four in the afternoon; theres Mandingo, a giant dreadlocked man who wears knee-length striped socks, shorts and an Ancient Greek-looking helmet made of palm fronds. They say Mandingo is the village shaman, and for sure, he has the otherworldly look of a man who communes with the spirits. Or smokes heaps of ganja.

Boozers, losers, assholes, angels, rogues, renegades, seekers, speakers, thinkers, doers, jokers, smokers, wannabes and has-beens everyone here has a story, theyre all interesting for at least five minutes. Some for a lot longer than that, and Ive made a couple of friends at this bar.

One of them, former Rifleman Gary Rifle of the Queens Own Rifles of Canada, introduced me to the poker game thats played here. Its Texas Hold-Em, tournament-style, with a 50 Belizean dollar buy-in. Tournament-style means that the blinds the compulsory bets posted by the two players to the left of the dealer go up every half hour, so that if you havent amassed a sizeable stack of chips midway through the game, you can no longer afford to play and have to take outrageous risks in a last-ditch bid to remain.

A lot like life, come to think of it.

Unlike life though, in poker you are expected to dissemble, to misrepresent, to beguile, bamboozle and deceive, to hoodwink, dupe, delude, mislead and entrap. In other words, you gotta get real.

However, its also expected that you win graciously and lose gracefully. Theres no place at the table for blowhards and sulkers, but you can get away with a short-lived grin of triumph or a brief moment of petulance. If you really must.

The players at the game on Caye Caulker are a mixture of Canadians, Americans, and locals: Tommy, who deals in real estate and is one of the islands renowned musicians, singing his heart and lungs out at jam sessions and Karaoke Evening. Angie, his wife, blonde and buxom. Chris with the corkscrew curls and impish sense of humour. Dirty, a loud American, who seems to bluster his way through the game and then traps you with a move straight out of David Slanskys Hold Em Poker for Advanced Players .

The locals, most of them young and lean: Baby, Daniel, Major, Norman. Then theres Harry, an old guy who plays an unorthodox but strangely effective game that seems to rely on intuition and precognition. The young men call him Mr Harold.

We play upstairs at Tappers Sports Bar theres a wall camera focused on the table, and they can watch us in the bar downstairs. When one of us wants a fresh drink he waves his glass or bottle at the camera, and pretty soon a fresh libation arrives a bottle of Belikin beer with a slice of lemon squeezed in its neck, rum punch, Cuba Libre, mojito, whatever

Someone once said, The man who invented poker was smart, but whoever invented chips was a genius. He was right. Our chips are weapons that conduct exploratory feints, instruments of war that frighten and pulverise; they are questions that demand answers; swaggering braggarts that kick sand in your face.

And the story with chips is, you gotta speculate to accumulate. You dont play, you cant win.

The game itself, as the late, great Norman Best an old warrior and former diplomat I played poker with back in Cape Town once said, is a microcosm of the macrocosm. He meant that it mirrors life, with its highs and lows, its waves of fortune and ill-fortune, the feelings of joy and despair that it engenders.

They play poker just about every day and most nights on Caye Caulker, and soon the days took on a well-defined shape. Sunrise, coffee, walk, work, lunch, beer(s), swim, nap, poker.

At some stage, I realised that I was down a few hundred dollars in the game, and that it was time to leave paradise.

Former Rifleman Gary Rifle hired a 44, and we headed for San Ignacio, a little town in the jungle. Its famed for its weekly farmers market and as the gateway to a number of natural attractions.

Next morning we drove for a couple of hours along jungle dirt roads and headed for the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve. Where the film director Francis Ford Coppola has an upmarket lodge, and we stopped there for a couple of beers.

The place was reminiscent of a movie set, and we could have been actors in a Coppola film, but, alas, not the leading men. Perhaps two renegades, battle-crazed and war-weary, styling it up in some south-east Asian jungle lodged appropriated from a heroin-addled Frenchman. Or a couple of old Mafia consiglieres hiding from the young capos who wanted to make us swim with the fishes.

Then we headed for Rio On, a place of little waterfalls and beautiful river pools. There were many young women there, basking in their bathing costumes, laughing, flicking their long hair, sirens if ever there were.

I knew they were sirens when they called me, their beautiful voices floating on the wind like wisps of smoke:

Sugar Daddy Sugar Daddy Sugar Daddy, they said.

I gave a wry grin, and advanced no further. I knew from reading the Odyssey and watching the movie Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? what would happen if I did:

Them si-reens will kill you, boy. ML

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Digital Nomad: Poker players of the Caribbean - Daily Maverick

February 14, 2020Mo Nuwwarah

Covering live poker tournaments for a living affords me the opportunity to see countless thousands of hands played out, many of which offer interesting and potentially valuable insights into how players both amateurs and professionals play the game. In this ongoing series, Ill highlight hands Ive seen at the tournaments Ive covered and see if we can glean anything useful from them.

I recently got a chance to dust off my playing chops for the first time in a few months as I traveled to Milwaukee for World Series of Poker Circuit Potawatomi. There, I participated in a handful of tournaments, including the $1,700 Main Event, which is where I saw this hand take place.

A player on my right had been playing a very tight strategy overall, and when he did play, he often just shoved all in preflop. While he had nursed a short stack for awhile, he'd recently found a triple up when he got pocket queens in three ways and nailed a queen on the turn after a player with flopped a king. So, he had around 35,000 when this hand started at 400/800/800.

From middle position, Eddie Blumenthal (pcitured) opened for 1,600. The player on my right jammed from the cutoff for about 35,000. Action folded back to Blumenthal, who agonized for a few minutes.

"Man, one higher and I'd snap-call and one lower and I'd snap-fold," he mused.

Finally, he did opt to call, turning over . The other player also held and they chopped the pot.

When we went on break a bit later, Blumenthal confided that he wasn't sure about his call and he actually felt like it was likely a losing call. I considered that it was likely close, and thought I'd take a look at the math to see whether his post-mortem was correct.

First off, the size of the pot and the size of the call. Blumenthal made it 1,600 and he didn't ask for a count, so we'll go with a rough estimate of 35,000 for his opponent's stack. That means he had to call 33,400 more into a pot of 38,600. He was getting about 1.15-to-1 on his money, and the math works out to where he needed a little over 46% equity to profitably call.

That's a big price, and indicative of how you have to play against this sort of massive overbet shove.

So, what sort of range can we expect the player in the cutoff to have in this spot? If he's shoving queens, we can expect he'd likely shove aces and kings as well. Most players are aware that ace-king is a good shoving hand too, but some very tight players may not shove with it. We'll give him ace-king suited to factor in that there's some chance he's shoving these also.

What about jacks? Clearly, Blumenthal was on the fence about whether his opponent would shove with jacks since he second-guessed himself afterward. We'll the calculation both ways.

If you run these ranges into an equity calculator against a pair of queens, here's out it works out:

Either way, if these estimates are correct, Blumenthal was right. He made a bad call if his opponent is shoving this tight. Throw in and it becomes a call as the queen edge north of 50% equity.

I certainly count myself surprised here as I'd have thought with jacks in the range, queens would at least be very close, but it's actually a clear fold. Basically, if someone is shoving a very tight range for this many blinds, you need kings or better to call.

Even if you include every combo of ace-king along with queens or better, the queens still only have just north of 40% equity, making them a fold. Jacks-plus and all ace-king combos pushes the queens just over 47%, making them barely a profitable call.

Sometimes, in low-stakes environments, you'll run into newer players who aren't confident enough to play postflop and actually do approach poker like this player in the cutoff. They'll occasionally peel a few hands with preflop calls while mostly playing a very aggressive shoving strategy when they have the goods.

Bottom line is, against someone playing this way, stick to raising their blinds as often as you can and folding to most of their shoves. Only call when you have one of the absolute best hands possible, because if their ranges are this tight, jacks aren't cutting it and queens are on the border.

Link:

Hand Review: Playing Against a Very Tight Shoving Range - PokerNews.com