Overbetting can often be a big mistake, as it either builds pots that are too big with weak hands (in the case that you are doing it a lot), or it makes your hands very easy to read (in the case of only doing it with your nut hands). There are however, situations where overbetting is a great play, and I want to look at a few examples of this.

Too many poker chips

Although rare, holding quads can often lead to spots where an overbet is the best move. Imagine that you hold pocket fours on a final board of 4c4sAhAdKc, are out of position, and are pretty confident that your opponent holds an ace. In this situation making a big overbet all in is nearly always the best play.

If your opponent does hold an ace they are basically forced to call – simply because so often they will think that you hold the other ace, and they will miss out on splitting the pot if they fold. This logic often seems to go against the intuitive logic, as most of the time when players hold monsters they tend to just try and value bet or check raise.

The other great time to overbet is against very weak players. Against any kind of thinking player, you should really be limiting your overbets to situations such as the above, where you feel that they will be forced to call a bet of nearly any size due to the board/previous action.

Against calling stations though, overbetting can be one of the most profitable plays with good hands. As these types of players thought patterns only really extend to ‘I have a hand that I want to call with’, the bet sizing is largely irrelevant to them, and as a result they can be taken for much more money than a good thinking player.

Always remember that although mostly in no limit games bet sizes should be kept in relation to the pot, there are situations where overbetting late in a hand, or overshoving pre flop are much better alternatives. By thinking carefully about how the action has gone, or what kind of thinker your opponent is, you may well open up situations where overbetting will generate you much more profit than a regular bet.

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1. What have you hit?

You entered the pot with a good hand in accordance with the starting hands chart, or perhaps were in the big blind, and did not have to invest any more money to see a flop. So far, so good. Now the first three community cards, also known as the flop, are dealt. The first question to ask is: what hand have I made?

There are basically three types of hands – hands which are already good, hands which could become a good hand if certain cards come in the future, and worthless hands. We call these made hands, draws (or incomplete hands) and trash.

• Made Hands

We give this name to those hands which are already very strong and most likely the currently best hand. A three of a kind, for example, is almost certainly the best and will not need to improve to win, but also pairs fall into this category. These hands do not necessarily have much of a chance to improve.

• Unfinished Hands / Draws

Hands which have yet to improve, but are still a good hand. For instance, suppose you have two spades. You do not hit a pair or something better on the flop, but two of the flop cards include two spades. If either the turn or the river is a spade, you will have a flush. We call this hand a flush draw.

• Hands with little value/ Trash

A trash hand is neither a good made hand, nor does it have much chance of improving to the best hand. You will rarely win a showdown with such hands, but you may still win with a bluff.

The following chapters will show you the various possible card combinations. These will ultimately decide how you play, so you should just memorize these.

2. What are made hands?

You already know most hands from the articles on the rules of Texas Hold’em: to the article.

In the case of two-pair, three of a kind, straights, flushes or better, we call the hand a monster, since it is very often the case that you have the best hand. If played correctly these could potentially win you lots of money.

Single pairs also fall into the category of made hands. There are only two very good types of single pair, however, which will now be extensively explained. These are Top pairs and Overpairs.

TOP-PAIR
If you have a pair which has been made using one of your two starting cards and the highest community cards, then you have top pair.

The situation may arise that you had top pair on the flop, but the turn or river brings a higher card. For instance, you have a pair of jacks on the flop and the turn is a king. You no longer have top pair – anyone with a king would now have it.

OVERPAIR
This is the situation where your two starting cards form a pair, and this pair is higher than any community card. There is no ‘top pair’ hand that is better.

NOTE: Having two pairs is different to having two pair

When we refer to having “two pair“, we mean that both of your pairs are made using one of your starting cards (hole cards). This needs to be differentiated from when you simply have two pairs, due to there already being a pair on the board (thus one of the pairs is in the community cards – meaning everyone has that pair). In this situation your opponents might already have three of a kind or a full house.

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3. What are unfinished hands/ Draws?

Draws are those hands which are not good made hands, but that can develop into made hands if a helpful community card is dealt. There are strong and weak draws, depending on the number of helpful cards which would improve your hand. If you have a flush draw, then there are 9 cards which could complete it. If you have a pair, there are only two cards which will improve it to a three of a kind.

If your two cards, combined with the community cards, contain 4 cards of consecutive rank, then you have an OESD. This is short for open ended straight draw. You do not currently have a straight – this would require 5 consecutive cards, yet an extra card at the top or bottom end would complete your straight. In the example below, there are 8 cards which complete your straight – any ace and any 9.

FLUSH DRAW
If you have four cards of the same suit, you have a flushdraw, since an extra community card of that suit will give you a flush.

MONSTER DRAW
A monster draw is a flush draw and a straight draw combined. There are cards which can give you a flush, and ones which give you a straight. With 9 outs for the flush and 6 outs for the straight you have a total of 15 outs to a strong made hand.

GUTSHOT
The gutshot is the smaller brother of the OESD. You have a chance of hitting a straight but you are missing an internal card, hence the name gutshot, or belly buster. The straight is missing a middle card – the stomach so to speak. In the example below, a jack is required to make the straight, so there are only 4 cards in the deck which can complete our draw. A gutshot draw is therefore much weaker than an OESD.

DOUBLE GUTSHOT
There is a third type of straight draw which is more difficult to recognise. We call this a double gutshot (or double belly buster) and it is the combination of two gutshot draws. In the example below, the two gutshot draws are (ace, queen, jack, ten) and (queen, jack, ten, eight). As you can see, any king and any nine give us a straight, so there are 8 cards which complete our draw. This is the same number of helpful cards as an OESD, so the two draws are of the same strength.

OVERCARDS Suppose you have no made hand and none of the above draws, but both your cards are higher than any community cards, then you have what are called overcards. This is admittedly not a strong draw, but if you hit a pair, then it will become top-pair.

OVERCARDS + GUTSHOT It may be the case that you have two weak draws, but together these form a strong draw. A classic example of such a combination is having overcards and a gutshot draw.

4. What are worthless hands/ Trash?

Hands other than those described above will rarely be able to win a showdown. They have little opportunity to improve and are not good made hands.

5. Summary

That was a lot of poker knowledge you just took in. Don’t worry if there are card combinations which arise that you cannot immediately recognise and react properly to. This is how we all started, and with time you will automatically recognise situations and be able to decide what to do.

It is important that you note the three main types of hand:

• Made hands
• Unfinished hands / draws
• Worthless hands / trash

You know the main representatives for the three types of hand. Top-pairs and overpairs are made hands. You know that two pair or better are known as monsters. You know the most important types of draw, that is, flush draws, monster draws, overcards and the three straight draws – OESD, gutshot and double gutshot.

The next step on your journey to becoming a successful player is to learn the article on playing the flop. In the article Flop play you will learn how to play your hand after seeing the first three community cards. Further articles will teach you how to play the fourth card (the turn) and the fifth card (the river).

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I can’t emphasise enough how important it is to remain unpredictable and I can also tell you that if you become more reliant on a heads up display to guide you from low to medium stakes than on observation, note taking and understanding game-flow, then you will almost certainly hit a brick wall in your progression as an online poker player. Don’t get me wrong, HUDs are a very useful tool but don’t take it to the level where your HUD is playing the game for you. If you do then you are nothing more than a badly programmed poker bot. The higher the level you play at the more important the more traditional poker attributes such as instinct and trickery become.

For example, in a $2-$4 6 max online environment depending on the kind of opponents and table conditions you are up against you could potentially play anywhere between 12% and 38% of your hands profitably over large samples, raising or re-raising with around 80 to 90 percent of those hands that you decide to play. So, with that in mind, how can anyone define your range using a heads up display? The numbers would simply be misleading, saying that you are something like a 22/19 “TAG” (tight aggressive). What will someone think of those numbers the next time you re raise him from the button with Five-Seven suited and you get to show it down? He’ll probably think they’re useless won’t be sure what to do next. Perfect!

What most players seem to be trying to do lately is solidify their online image regardless if table conditions, getting too caught up in their VPIP and PFR numbers. (i.e. the total number of hands they play, and how often they raise) . “Oh dear I have a VPIP of 15% UTG, I’ll have to start folding King- Jack and Ace-Ten”. Come on now. Start thinking outside the box please. Sometimes it will be right to raise with those hands and sometimes it will be right to raise with a lot worse or fold better.

Sometimes it will be right for you to re-raise with six-seven suited and sometimes it will be right to fold Ace-Queen to a single raise. Sometimes you should slow play your set and sometimes you should play it fast. Playing tight aggressive is not the Holy Grail and there are no absolutes when it comes to poker strategy. The right answer is usually “It depends”

Be unpredictable, Approach every table differently, and learn to make adjustments to your game quickly. Be a reactionary poker player. That is the only way forward.

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Obviously, this playing style is dangerous for the player unless they are very good at mixing up their raise sizes enough for their holdings to not become transparent. Randomising your game in bet size terms is a difficult and time consuming thing to do (due to having to think carefully about your betting history on that table), but there is another way to randomise your game that is much simpler to do – especially when multi tabling online.

Instead of changing your bet sizes, you can change the ratio of hands you raise and make your standard open always the same. Instead of shifting between raise sizes of 2x to 5x of the big blind depending on the strength of your hand, try just raising 3x but do it with a few more junk hands than you were before. If instead of changing your bet size depending on your hand and position, you can simply standardise the bet size and change the hands you are raising in different positions, you still mix up your game while making your life much simpler. A good example of this would be to start raising the odd suited connector from early positions, thus making it hard for your opponents to know whether you have a monster or junk when you raise from early position – making their life much harder.

This not only holds true pre flop, but also on your later bet sizes. If you always make a standard percentage of the pot continuation bet (say between 50% and 75% of the pot), but do it both when you hit the flop and when you miss it, you make your game much harder to read. The great advantage of this technique is that you only have to think about the hand in question, not about the amounts you should be raising. This allows you to free up a lot of your mind and focus much more on the situations and people around you.

Always remember that if you are playing lots of tables it is crucial to be able streamline your game as much as possible. Live it is easy to have enough time to think about randomising your bet sizes (the great Dan Harrington wrote that he would often let the minute hand on his watch randomise his bet sizes on occasion when playing live), but online it is much harder. By randomising the hands you play instead of the amount you bet, you make your game much easier to play and think about – always a bonus when trying to stay on top of a lot of tables.

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Pink Poker Chips

This is because the real skill of a good tournament poker is not in the early deep stacked game. The thing that separates them from the rest of the field is their skill once the antes kick in and the pressure starts to push players into making moves. This is where someone who understands the situations where maximum pressure can be applied starts to have a substantial edge over the majority of the field – it is also the point where it most matters to have an edge, as the pots are large, the money is near, and the difference between winning and losing now is what will ultimately decide whether you will make those all important top three spots.

This has clear consequences on your early game in MTTs. Hands which do not have the potential to turn into big hands, such as unsuited weak aces, weak broad way hands (such as KJo, JQo etc), and unsuited connectors should usually just be left alone. Early in a tournament you are much better off playing hands that have the possibility to turn into hands that you are happy putting one hundred big blinds in with – which is rarely a weak top pair or draw.

Always remember that although you cannot win a tournament in the early stages, you most certainly can lose one. Focusing on surviving until the point where your edge becomes larger is critical if you want to maximise your advantage over the field. Early you want to try and get in with hands that can turn into the nuts and let you win a massive pot or two with little risk – it is nearly always a big mistake to ever be busting early to anything but bad beats and coolers early in a tournament.

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