Posts By: theginger45

  Poker is, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, a game of words. We spend our time using words to describe mathematical concepts, and it’s not easy. There are a lot of words that get thrown around in poker without the correct application; there are a lot of words that get used way too much, to the point… Read more »

  For the last five to seven years, it’s been fairly common to hear people in the poker strategy community use the terms ‘TAG’ and ‘LAG’ to refer to different player types – ‘tight-aggressive’ and ‘loose-aggressive’ respectively. These are usually used when talking about the types of players we aspire to be, rather than our… Read more »

  When beginning the dive into the intricacies of postflop tournament poker, many players start in the wrong place. In fact, they almost do things backwards – they look at individual hands, representing very specific sets of circumstances, and try to use them to extrapolate their approach. A more productive way to do things is… Read more »

  Every now and again, tournament poker undergoes a reasonably dramatic evolution in the approaches most commonly taken by players at the upper end of the spectrum. These evolutions filter down fairly quickly, until they’re eventually considered to be ‘standard’ by those still making their way through the learning process. Sometimes they seem bizarre or… Read more »

  One of the most commonly talked-about subjects among poker learners nowadays is the concept of over-betting. I think it’s fair to say that for many players, the concept might fall into what Jared Tendler’s Adult Learning Model would classify as the region of ‘Conscious Incompetence’ – players know what it is, and they know… Read more »

  One of the most difficult judgments to make in No Limit Hold’em comes when we’re trying to evaluate the profitability of calling preflop. We might be getting decent pot odds, but how do we decide whether they’re decent enough? After all, most hands in our range will have decent equity versus our opponent’s range… Read more »

  It goes without saying that the pots which have the greatest significance in NLHE are the bigger pots. A pot above 50bb in size can change the momentum of your tournament, and take you from a medium stack trying to scrape into the money, to a powerful chip leader. In many instances, these bigger… Read more »

  Many players begin their tournament poker career by playing the majority of their games in Sit-N-Gos or turbo tournaments, where stacks are short and postflop play is rare after the first few levels. As each of us progresses up the poker ladder, however, it’s very common that we’ll find ourselves playing tournaments with better… Read more »

  When each of us first starts out in poker, we all have aspects of the game that are more interesting to us, based on what it was that attracted us to the game in the first place. For many of us, our perceptions about poker come largely from media representations of the game, and… Read more »

  There’s so much talk about variance in MTTs that eventually it becomes difficult to separate the useful information from the noise. Players will talk about minimizing variance in a variety of different contexts, and they’ll often justify a wide variety of different choices – from what games to play, to a myriad of different… Read more »