The Myth of Poker Talent: why anyone can be a great poker player by Alexander Fitzgerald

Author:Alexander Fitzgerald [Fitzgerald, Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781909457546
Publisher: D&B Publishing
Published: 2016-09-08T04:00:00+00:00

09

CHECK-RAISING

In my mind check-raising is a “dark art” of poker. It’s so powerful it almost feels like it shouldn’t be allowed. This is especially true when you’re in the big blind. Players give you these incredible odds by just 2x raising, so you flat. But don’t you want to do something else when you miss all those boards?

We’ve proven earlier that even if you just continue with made hands you’ll make a profit flatting most bets that just double your first investment but, unbelievably, you can sometimes increase your earnings by 100%, simply by including a check-raising game. I focus greatly on teaching my students how to check-raise for a multitude of reasons. Let’s start with the first one that didn’t occur to me for the first 10 years I played poker.

Your win rate is a great arbiter of how good of a player you are. If you are making 5BB per every 100 hands of tournament poker you play then eventually you are going to turn a profit. That is verifiable proof that you are staying ahead of the game. If your normal BB/100 rate is higher, then that can prove you’re running under expectation. A good win rate is around 5BB per 100. If you could increase that by 2.5BB you’d be injecting 50% more earnings into your bottom line.

Where do we find that 2.5BB however? It’s hard to do from early position. You expand your range, diminish it, work on your triple barrels, and on and on. It seems like the money never comes in.

We shouldn’t try to make our money there. If we fold every single hand UTG we will be making zero big blinds every 100 hands. Certainly, that’s not good, but we’re also not losing anything. However, if we fold every single hand in the big blind, as some position Nazis are prone to do, then we will lose 100BB every 100 hands we play from that position. If that sounds like a lot, that’s because it is.

Later in this book we will get more into what we just discussed, but now we’re going to focus on saving those big blinds, as opposed to cutting our limbs off with the forced bets we don’t save.

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