No Limit Holdem 101: My Basic Theory of Poker

This is intended to be a series of articles about playing on-line no limit holdem cash games. There will be times where I venture into live poker and times where I venture into SNGs, MTTs, Satellites, and games other than no limit holdem, but for the most part this will target no limit holdem cash games.

For the 7th installment of this series, I’m going to cover the basis I use for my style of play – give the other guy the chance to make a mistake.

Poker is game where you try to make decisions based on incomplete information. If you had all the information possible visible, then there might still be more than one plausible play, but there would only be one OPTIMAL play. The preceding is called “game theory” by the way.

I’ve rewritten this particular article several times trying to decide exactly how deep I should get into game theory and exactly how much of my geekitude to reveal! In the end I decided to keep it fairly simple but hopefully delve enough into it that you can hopefully get the general concept.

Let me draw out a scenario for you. Imagine a poker game where all the cards were face up. Your hole cards, your opponent’s hole cards, the discarded cards, and the cards remaining in the deck were all visible. Well it really wouldn't be much of a game then would it? Everything is known and there really are no decisions to be made.

Now start hiding information. Take the discarded cards and the cards remaining in the deck and flip them over. You now know exactly what cards your opponents hold and what cards you hold, but you do not know what cards are left to come. In reality this is the situation you are striving to achieve in holdem. You try to put your opponents on hands so that you can reach this state of knowledge. From this state of knowledge all decisions can be optimized.

Now introduce the element of betting. Here is where we really get to start trying to optimize our play. Outs, odds, pot odds, implied odds, and predicting opponents behaviors all play into making an optimum decision.

In fact pot odds are an excellent example of the application of game theory. The optimal decision in the case of pot odds is governed my whether or not your odds of making the hand are outweighed by the amount of the bet you must make and the reward for making that bet. In the long term if you make the correct pot odds decision, then you are making the optimal play.

The key here is getting your opponent to make non-optimal decisions.

Some of the concepts I am going to discuss here as examples of getting your opponent to make non-optimal decisions will be concepts I will go into more detail in future articles, but I wanted to introduce them here as examples of optimal play and of getting your opponent to make non-optimal decisions.

Let’s go back to pot odds for a moment. We previously discussed using pot odds to make the decision on making a call. Another application of pots is use it to govern your betting to give opponent the wrong pot odds to make a call.

Without using a long drawn out example, let’s just say that you have a hand and you put your opponent on hand where he is 4 to 1 to make his hand on the turn. Making sure that he does not get 4 to 1 odds when you place your bet is giving your opponent an opportunity to make a mistake. If you bet such that your opponent is only getting 3 to 1 odds (1/2 pot), you are giving your opponent an opportunity to make a non-optimal play.

Another example of giving your opponent the opportunity to make a mistake is the huge over bet when you have made the nut hand. While making a huge over bet may induce your opponent to fold, your opponent may also put you on a bluff. After all, who would make a huge bet with a huge hand? While the play may not work the first time, against weaker opponents, you may be able to goad them into calling the over bet by making the over bet multiple times. Be careful here and make sure your have a truly big hand before using this play.

The two above examples should serve to illustrate the concept of game theory and giving your opponent the opportunity to make a mistake.

In the next installment we will talk about position in poker – what is it?