E-WSOP

Stop playing weak hands against raises

The bad thing about playing poker is that when you are playing to win you often have a ugly habit of remembering all the times you have won with a not so good hand. Looking down at 4, jack in diamonds makes most player just muck it but if you have once flopped a four of a kind with that hand, your memory remembers that occasion a maybe thinks that its a better hand than it is. You call and misses the flop completely in 99 percent of the times. Well at least it wasn’t so expensive you think to yourself but if you do it a hundred times that little call suddenly becomes a big cost.

Another type of hand that is often overvalued in poker is small pocket pairs in bad position. Like pocket twos under the gun. The only way you are going to get paid with a hand like 2,2 is if your opponent has something like a big pocket pair and you flop a set. If you don´t flop a set you might as well throw away the hand since it´s only stupid to chase after two outers. So most of the time you will call a blind, maybe even a raise looking only to flop a set which you most of the time won´t hit and then have to fold against a c-bet. So make yourself a favor and simply muck it postflop, it can save you a lot of money over time.

A good rule to follow is if you want to play a hand you might as well do it aggressively. For most players it´s much easier to raise than to call a raise. Simply because then you are the one taking command and it is the other players that have to make hard decisions if the should call or fold when the flop comes. But if you do it all the time, raising and pushing around the other, don´t be surprised if someone starts pushing back just to see how you react.