A Couple of Limit Ideas

We all know that short stacks need to be punished.

Fish, also, have another thing coming, and I'm more than happy to give them a expensive poker lessons all day long at the tables.

With that in mind, I've found yet another way to make my game more aggressive. Pretty much any time there's one (and only one) limper in the pot, and I find a playable hand, I will raise!

I know this is not a new tactic, but it's fun to take it to the extreme. I like doing it with marginal yet playable hands sometimes if my read on the limper is correct. So many things can go right: you can hit the flop, you can isolate the limper, you can set yourself up to bluff later ...

Oh, you limp? I raise with 78 suited! You check the flop? I bet!

Another thing I've gotten better at is laying down hands based on my reads of players. A few months ago, I fell into the trap of almost always calling one more bet on the river. My reasoning was that I was folding too much. If I got to the river with any hand at all, I leaned toward a call.

The problem with that is that it's an automatic, thoughtless decision. Just because it's hard to put fishy players on a specific hand doesn't mean you don't have a lot of information to work with. You have all the bets from the entire hand. You know the relative strength of your opponent's hand. You know the pot size and the odds. You can figure out your opponent's likely holdings. You can calculate how often you have to win to make a call worthwhile by comparing your estimated winning chances to the pot odds.

You have plenty of facts to base a decision on, and that decision isn't always an automatic call. I should say that if you make it to the river, a showdown is often justified unless you completely miss your draw.

My favorite is when a tight, passive player check-raises the river. It's so remotely unlikely that he's bluffing in this situation that it's frequently an easy fold. I'll save that bet, thank you.