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November 07, 2005
He might come with an off speed pitch, or a fastball just far enough off the plate so that you're defensive swing will either miss it entirely or ground out weakly to second base. He's got a foot is on your throat and he's not relenting. I don't know what pokerparty opponents bat against Simmons when he's got them that deep in the hole, but it probably isn't much over .125, if that high.
The coolest of our Pokerparty table tactics the moves we'll boast about for weeks afterward when we pull one off and it works to perfection are all based on ploys that induce an opponent to either walk into our trap when we have a big hand, or surrender their own holding when we have nothing at all. Mike Caro calls this "fancy play syndrome," or "FPS." We're not going to discuss FPS today, but we'll approach it peripherally by examining why your at-the-table analyses and tactical decisions should be predicated on the playing skill, ability, and awareness of your opponents.
Sticky Chips
Conventional wisdom is to attack the small stacks and avoid the big ones. Of course, if you flopped an unbeatable hand, you'd welcome an opportunity to reduce the chip leader's stacks to rubble, but in this case you were the fox, not the hound. In retrospect, you would have been better off waiting for opportunities to punish the small stacks.
Sure it's nice to learn how to compute these sorts of things, but if working out probabilities is not your idea of fun, you needn't worry about it. It's already been done, thank you very much, by others. Besides, in the heat of the Pokerparty game, you scarcely have time, and certainly not the availability of a pencil, paper, and pocket calculator, to do these equations while trying to keep up with the game.
Predictable Players
Since you stand to win substantially more than the cost of a couple of bets, this is not the time to save a buck by folding. While I've never played a hand of Pokerparty where the relationship between the pot odds and odds against making my hand were this good, the fact remains that the amount of money currently in the pot is the third force to be reckoned with when considering pot odds and implied odds.
While the world is full of poker players willing to stick around with weak hands in hopes of catching a miraculous card if the cost is only a single, solitary bet, that coterie narrows significantly when they have to cold-call two bets with a dial-a-prayer hand. There's a lot more to feeling comfortable at the hold'em table than we've covered here. This is simply a primer - written with new players firmly in mind - as well as an easy way to keep your mind on the information you're likely to need in the heat of battle.
Hot Chicks at the Table
Rather than simply sitting down and paying for lessons at the table, many new Pokerparty players - in an attempt to fast-track their own learning process - are reading books and using computer software to learn essential poker principles before attempting to put them in action in live games. Some new players have read so extensively about poker that their questions are quite sophisticated.
Amazed absolutely. And in my absolute amazement some of those old lessons about lower limit Pokerparty games were quickly relearned; that's for sure. Here's how the hand unfolded. I was in sixth position, and the guy to my immediate right was eager to play and hot for the gamble. He straddled at almost every opportunity, and would also raise on almost anything - good cards, bad cards - it made no difference whatsoever - he wanted some action for his time at the table.
