10:03pm: With me finally getting completely settled into my brand new home, with my brand new office, I have finally been able to dedicate the time necessary into putting in some serious volume heads up. Join me, why don’t you? — in becoming a complete heads up machine (that is, if your desire is to do this for a living). We’ve been preaching volume, volume, and more volume for quite some time, but it feels like the weight of the world on your shoulders everyday when you feel like you have to play 20+ games. Being as such, it would be beneficial if we invented some sort of routine/program to follow in order to break it down and seem like less of a burden.

So let’s do this: committ to playing 24 heads up sit n gos a day, 5 days a week. Break each day into eight segments consisting of three games a piece. Play each segment however you’d like. Take as many breaks in between each segment as you need, and play them whenever you’d like. The only catch is that you must play the required eight segments each day. This includes times when you go 6-0 in your first two segments and you don’t want to “ruin” your unblemished record by continuing, so you decide to stop for the day. No, you are not allowed to do that. No matter how you cut it, you are going to play eight segments of three games per day.

Here is a link to a sample spreadsheet I am using to keep track of these segments.

So why this method? What does it change? How does it help you?

Well, it does a few things:

• Keeps your thoughts/mindset encapsulated, meaning you only worry about the present, and not the past or the future
• It prevents the player from taking a results-oriented approach
• It keeps things in perspective because it gives variance a fighting chance of evening out
• It’s a completely organized, streamlined approach and is much more business-like than just randomly playing games whenever one feels like it.
• It will allow you to follow a regulated schedule, which makes the process seem much more like a job and less like gambling.
• Each segment is a fresh start. When you go 0-3 in one segment, the next is a new chapter in which you are entitled to forget that the chapter before it even existed.

The three game segment approach also yields a forced result. There are no ties. There are four different outcomes:

• 3-0
• 2-1
• 1-2
• 0-3

If you’re anything like me, you’d consider 75% of those results “managable”. The only one of the four you REALLY don’t want to see is 0-3. Anything else should be considered acceptable results. Even if you finish 0-3 in any of your segments, that’s ok — that’s why you play eight of them.

Another thing you should note is that I have chosen Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday as the days dedicated to playing my sessions. These days were specifically chosen and hand-picked, based on the days of the week which were most profitable, as determined by Sharkscope. If you’d like to find out which days of the week are most profitable for you, simply click your name and then “More Options” and then “Graph Results By..” and then “Day of the Week”. Choose your days wisely, as I have. You can even choose to play the hours of the day which are also most profitable for you. Relying on this data also assumes that you have a relatively large sample size, or else the data is meaningless. 1000 heads up matches should be a large enough sample size to yield the information you need in regards to this.

Remember, heads up sngs are nothing more than mindset tweaks and making self-psychological manipulations in order to keep yourself grounded, and to keep the results steady, upward, and consistent. Implementing this organized approach is a big step into getting serious about heads up sngs for some serious extra cash, if not for a living.

Start a Clean Slate at a New Room, a New Sharkscope, and Keep HFL Free in the Process

10:30pm: You hear it all the time: be aggressive. Aggression, aggression, aggression is supposed to be the key to winning poker, right? No doubt there’s some truth to that. So what makes you or anyone an aggressive player? Are you classified as an aggressive player if you bluff a lot? To answer this question, let’s backtrack and define the different types of aggression. There are two forms: (a) wreckless and (b) well timed.

Wreckless aggression is pretty much an illogical, alpha-male sort of aggression for those with bigger egos than IQs. People who are wrecklessly aggressive bluff in spots where:

• There is no value in doing so.
• Fold equity doesn’t justify the push
• Their table image has been established such that the whole purpose of bluffing has been negated
• They have no regard for the range of cards they will get called with in spots they choose to push

On the other hand, well timed aggression is aggression that is completely deliberate and well thought out. If bluffing is “madness” then well timed aggression is definitely the method behind the madness. Well timed aggression may consist of times where:

• The estimated odds of your opponent folding offset the smaller chance you will get called
• You have established a level of trust with your opponent such that the move is well disguised
• The board is such that your opponent has more cards that could beat them than cards that cannot
• Your opponent cannot logically call without one or two exact cards in their hand

Either way, obviously the result we are trying to acheive is to get our opponent to fold, which is why we call this technique bluffing. We don’t have a hand, and we would like to win the pot without having to show our cards.

Now that we’ve established the two kinds of aggression (that consequently lead to bluffing), let’s decide which kind is a more suitable choice for the winning heads up sit n go player. While I award brownie points for courage for those who practice wreckless aggression, the path to true heads up sng success is paved with well timed aggression. There are simply times when it makes absolutely no sense to bluff. Let’s examine these times:

• In the 10/20 blinds, and you only have 20 invested in the pot. Your opponent has bet the pot, and you have absolutely nothing. Let it go, there is no value in protecting what little you have in the pot at this point. Wait until the blinds mean something to start stealing.
• When you suspect that your opponent has caught on to the fact that you’ve been stealing quite a few pots. The more pots you drag, even if they are small, the more likely you are going to be forced at some point to prove you’ve got the goods. People catch on. This is why I suggest waiting until later to start firing with air, because establishing a tight image early on is worth more later on when the blinds actually hurt to lose.
• When you’ve just shown a bluff. I can’t tell you how many times I see people show a bluff, and then try the same move again no more than 10 seconds later. I’m well aware that some people would think that I would think that there’s no way someone would do it twice in a row without having the goods, therefore I might give them the benefit of the doubt and fold the second time. Problem with that thinking is that most people aren’t on that 2nd-3rd level of thinking, and will simply call you the next time you bet big — as they should, because you have betrayed their trust.
• When pride is starting to get in the way. We’ve seen this situation before: you’re trying to bluff someone, and they keep calling you with bottom pair — and frankly, it’s pissing you off. First off, STOP. This is not about pride, or bragging rights, or who’s got the biggest kahunas. This is about money, and it’s clear that your opponent doesn’t trust you. To counter balance this, you should probably take him to a place I like to call “value city”. It’s nice up there.
• When the risk/reward ratio is too low. Way too often, I see people fire 400 on the river into a pot with 80 chips in it, I fold, and then they show me 9 3 offsuit. Ok, so what? You risked 400 chips to get 40 of your own back? Even if I fold 9 times out of 10, that’s only a net profit of [40 x 9] = 360 chips. The one time you get called you lose 440 chips. Does that sound like a winning proposition to you? I would sure hope not.

After everything I’ve just presented you with, the main thing you need to know is that wreckless aggression is -EV, while well timed aggression is +EV. There has to be some kind of deliberacy within your system of bluffing for it to be effective. Just because something is deliberate and premeditated doesn’t mean it is dechipherable. The trick to effective bluffing is coming up with your own undechiperable method of aggression.

The key to successful bluffing is to be a good storyteller, because when you bluff, you are attempting to tell a story — even if false. The story has to be believable, or else the whole purpose of such a move is null and void. When your opponent is faced with a tough call in the later stages of the hand, they will probably try to piece together the fragments of the story to see if everything “fits”, and then come to a conclusion on whether or not your story is believable to them. Wreckless aggression and well timed aggression aside, there is a such thing as a good bluff and a bad bluff. Let’s try to pick them apart.

• The bad: You’ve played pretty tight the whole match. Whenever you’ve raised, you usually held two cards 10 or higher (KQ, AK, QJ, etc), and your opponent knows this. This time you’ve raised to 90 (from 30) preflop with AsKd - and the flop comes: 5d 6c 9h. You make a pot-sized continuation bet, and your opponent calls. The pot is now 540.The turn is 7h. Your opponent checks to you, and you decide to check behind, hoping to hit one of your overcards. The river is a total brick: 2s, and your opponent once again checks to you.

  Being perfectly honest with yourself, you’re probably a little upset that you have so much money invested in this pot with such a premium hand, and you’ve totally missed the board. You’re almost 100% sure you’re beat but you feel your opponent can’t call unless they hold an 8, so you decide that you want to throw a temper tantrum (because you missed) and steal this pot by betting 500 on the river. You do so, and your opponent goes into the tank.It is at this moment that your opponent is piecing together the story you have just told them to see if it makes any sense. Every time you’ve raised preflop, you’ve held two high cards. Therefore, there’s really no scenario with you raising preflop that involves you holding an 8 in your hand, unless you raised with 88, but that’s not entirely likely. You checked the turn when the straight hit the board, which means that you were either scared of the card, or you totally loved it. If you had an overpair, you would have probably bet the turn to see where you were at with the intention of folding to a raise.

  In addition to this, if you had an overpair, the river bet is entirely too large for this holding to make sense. With an overpair, you would want a call. 500 screams, “please don’t call me”. Therefore, a logical mindset would deduce that you’d either have the straight or nothing at all in this spot.Given your normal preflop raising range, and your betting patterns on this board, it now starts to make sense that the story you are trying to tell is false. Your opponent calls with A9, and you were caught in a fairly non well-thought-out bluff.

• The good: Good bluffs involve manipulating “sure fire” information. That is, the rare times when you are able to put your opponent on a VERY specific range of hands. This will enable you to represent cards that you know are scary for your opponents hand. For example, as stated before in one of my articles (on Tells, I believe) most opponents who raise 4x preflop are holding mid pocket pairs almost all day. Your opponent believes you to be a relatively loose player, but knows that your calling range is a lot more narrow than your raising range. Therefore, when they make a 4x raise preflop and you call, it is reasonable to assume that they are thinking that you are holding overcards to their middle pair preflop.Let’s say that your opponent makes it 80 to go in the 10/20 blinds preflop on the button, and you call not even looking at your cards. In fact, it would be a good exercise in this hand to stick a post it note on where your cards are just to emphasize that cards aren’t as important as the storytelling is.

  The pot is now 160, and the flop comes 2c 3c 9s. You believe your opponent to be holding 44-88. They make a bet of half the pot (80 - which, by the way screams “I’m leaving myself room to fold this weak hand”), and you decide to call with the intention of bluffing the turn if (a) the flush completes or (b) an overcard hits. The pot is now 320, which means you have 160 chips invested into the hand.

  The turn is an excellent card to pull this move off (Kc). Your opponent bets half the pot once again (160), but this time, you decide to raise and represent either/or the club or the king. You decide to raise to 460, making it another 300 to call for your opponent. Once again, as we discussed before, this is the moment where your opponent goes into the tank and pieces together the story. Here are some of the facts that add up to your raising seeming truthful:

  1. You are sure your opponent perceives you as tight, and you called a 4x raise preflop

  2. You just called the flop, which is often what someone with overcards and more frequently, a flush draw would do.

  3. Your opponent doesn’t know that you know that their 4x raise means “middle pocket pair”, and as a tight player, you’ve shown a tendency to at least have the highest card on the board in raising situations

  4. A flush draw just completed, which is yet another way their hand could be beat.When you add up all the facts, the benefits of folding outweigh the risks of calling, and since your story seems believable, your opponent decides to lay his hand down, and you drag the pot.

So to summarize, equally as imporant as how you bluff is the times you choose to do so. Think about these things, and whether or not the bluffs you tend to make do, in fact, make any sense at all. Before you think about pulling the trigger, make sure all the facts line up. Then and only then will you begin to see the true value in storytelling.

Start a Clean Slate at a New Room, a New Sharkscope, and Keep HFL Free in the Process

6:04am: This is a very informative article written by Corey (aka “DntCaltACmBk”) regarding note taking in heads up sit n gos. While I personally don’t take advantage of the luxury of being able to take notes as much as I probably should, this article explains why it’s important.

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Throughout the grind of heads up sit & go’s I have picked up a lot of useful skills that aided me in my Sharkscope graph exploding. Note taking was one of them. I do get the opportunity to play the same people multiple times so of course the notes help in that respect – but for me, note taking is mostly about helping me to focus and observe my opponent’s tendencies.

The number one piece of advice that I could share – the one thing that I absolutely know to be true and useful, that I’ve known even before I was a winning player – is that you should be looking to put your opponent into a category as soon as possible. Even if it’s in the first two hands, identify him or her – TAG, LAG, weak-tight, weak-loose, whatever… just categorize him/her! You might not be correct, but much like the testing follows the hypothesis in the scientific method, as does you trying out your opponent. Adjust your play to match the type of player you THINK you are dealing with. If you’re running over the guy, you know you’re right. If it’s not working, reconsider your note. By five minutes in you will probably know what type of opponent you have, then you can lock in your note and you’ll have a head start next time you meet as a bonus.

So what should your notes say? I don’t have a formula, in fact most of my notes are kind of goofy. “Calling McCallington from Callville”. “Loose goose”. But mostly I just write “weak-tight”, “LAG, “TAG”. I do get more specific, which I will get to in a second, but I’ve got to tell you the number one note I make…

The number one, most common, probably happens every day note is…. “weak for weak”. What I’m telling myself is that my opponent bets weak with his weak hands. Think about how beneficial that information is. It almost always holds true too. Most opponents marked with “weak for weak” are accompanied by a note right next to it that says “strong for strong”.

Beyond the one word, one line notes I do sometimes get more specific. This often happens if I am having difficulty categorizing my opponent but I need to keep observing and keep giving myself information. It can also be if I just feel like giving myself as much information as possible. Sometimes a “LAG” note is not enough, if this guy is just a maniac the more ways I can express that in my notes the more I will be prepared next time and know how to close the deal this time. So if a note worthy hand takes place I’ll take it down. Just before I wrote this article, for example, I had to write “Overbet pot huge with bottom pair when I raised pre”. That tells me what kind of player he is, doesn’t it?

Finally, a common note for me is writing down how my opponent likely views me. If I keep getting caught making bad plays or bluffs, maybe my opponent thinks I’m a LAG donk – hey, maybe that’s the note he has on me! So I make a note of it. Another match I had just before this article: I put myself in my opponent’s shoes and it appeared that I was a fairly ABC obvious poker player. This allowed me to steal some nice pots and probably forced him to make some big folds.

Note taking really isn’t about the next time – the next time is good, but you want to win now. Taking good notes means that you are observing, that you are thinking – and especially if you can take notes on how your opponent views you, that kind of critical thinking is bound to improve your game. So take your notes and remember, for when those rematches do come up, it is nice to leave little notes for yourself. I like to write “Dear Corey of the Future, This is the easiest donk in the world. If you lose you should quit at life. Your pal, Corey of the Past.”

1:09pm: Flopping two pair — namely, bottom two — can be a great thing, or disaster for some. If you’re among the many who love to play hands with “possibilities” (that is, connected and/or suited cards), you will sometimes hit the flop by flopping two pair. The problem with this is that sometimes this becomes a really hard hand to play. This is because since your hand is usually well disguised, you will often have to play a hand like this in large pots with people who have caught top pair with a decent kicker. How well you handle situations like this goes a long way in determining your profitability long term.

Perhaps the hardest part of this situation is the speed and force with which you should play the hand. Some people preach pushing hard with bottom two to protect the hand. Some people view the hand as an absolute monster and prefer to slowplay until the river. In contrast, some people view bottom two pair as a very weak holding and prefer to keep the pot small until they are sure it’s the best hand. So which is the right way?

That all depends on how well you can handle the swings and variance in no limit holdem. Anytime you are in a hand, you should always be thinking equally as hard about the cards that could kill your hand as you are about the cards that could improve it.

Let’s face the facts: bottom two pair is a strong hand at the moment, but is extremely vulnerable to being counterfeited by the board. How many times have you played 78 suited, flopped two pair on a board such as 7 8 J - and lost to someone who put it all in with J10, only to get killed by running Kings? It happens more often than you might think. Let’s take a look at all the ways you could lose this hand:

• Running Queens
• Running Kings
• Running Aces
• Running Deuces, Threes, Fours, Fives, and Sixes
• Opponent hitting trips
• Opponent pairing his 10
• Opponent hitting a gutshot 9
• Opponent completing a flush (depending on what suits they hold, and how the board fell)

Suddenly, when you put it in that perpsective, it almost seems like there are more ways to lose the hand than there are for it to hold. That’s because while you are usually favored to win the hand at this point, it isn’t by so much that you should ever feel like the hand is a lock to hold, nor should you really be upset if it doesn’t. Add this to the fact that you could already be beat, and there’s very little to feel comfortable about in this type of situation.

My advice to you is that it’s simply a matter of taste. Bottom two pair on the flop is usually good in a heads up sit n go, however as we discussed above it often doesn’t stay that way. If you can stomach all the sick ways that you could possibly lose the hand, then I would recommend protecting your hand and pushing hard. However, if you’re like me and prefer to keep your variance to a minimum, then I would keep the pot at a medium size, until I’m relatively sure that the turn and river didn’t kill my hand, and then value bet the river with the intention of folding to to a shove.

3:02am: The biggest battle you face at the tables, espcially heads up, may not even be against your next opponent. Instead, your toughest competitor might be you. Everyone’s got an achilles heel. That is, something that “sets them off” into self-distruct mode sending them downspirling in slow motion with seemingly no way to stop it.

For example, you’re about to put someone away in a $20 husng; they have 280 chips to your 2720. You pick up A10off on the button, so you just put them all in hoping to get a call. You get the call you want, and they turn over the hand you want - J10off - but the RNG lets them off the hook when the flop brings the unfortunate Jack. That’s actually OK, because you’re still at the point where you can maintain your composure and put them away.

But what happens when the situation happens not once, but twice? - and in an even MORE unlikely way. The blinds are now 50/100, and you have 2100 to your opponents 900 and pick up 10 10 in the big blind. Your opponent open shoves, which makes this an easy call and then flip over A2. Beautiful, right? Not so fast. The flop is: K K 3. Still looking good? How about the turn (Q)? Is that a good card? Almost never. Especially in this case because it allowed a Q to hit on the river, counterfeiting your two pair and giving the underdog with A2 the winning hand.

The question is: how do you handle things like that when they happen to you? How is one supposed to take it when it happens over, and over and over again. Here are a few steps to stomaching the sometimes seemingly never ending barage of SICKNESS that happens in heads up sngs (while still in the match):

1. Take 10 seconds, breathe, and look away from the screen. Remember that at the end of the day, it is still just a game and it is for this particular reason that we have bankrolls: so that we don’t have to get sick when things like this happen. It is also the same reason we preach “volume, volume, and more volume”.

2. Remember that if the best hand always held up, no one would ever play. I once heard a proposal for a game variation of Texas Hold Em where the hand would be over on the flop. This was literally one of the dumbest things I had ever heard, and clearly conceived by someone who is so emotionally scarred from getting drawn out on, that he had to invent his own little world where the best hand always wins.

3. Believe in the RNG in the long run. Yeah, yeah - you hear it all the time: long term. You hear it so much, that you’re sick of hearing it, but it’s completely true. Take it from someone who has played nearly a million hands in poker in his life. “Long term” can seem EXTREMELY long sometimes, but the numbers always even out in the end.

4. Do not melt down. There’s a tendency to compound the problem by taking out your frustration on yourself. For some reason, we love to play the victim in life whenever we can - and once a night has gotten terrible past the point of no return, people have a tendency to just “blow a fuse” and not care anymore. Whenever you feel yourself START to get at this point, it’s time to stop. Seriously. Do not register for any more heads up sngs until you’ve completely regained your composure. Also, do not lie to yourself: only you know deep down if you’re just fooling yourself into believing that you’re in the right mindset. Trust and honesty with yourself in these moments is key.

On the other hand, if you happen to be in the middle of the match, you need to do the best you can to emulate the mindset you were in when the match first started. A fresh mindset has been the base of many of my comeback victories, and there’s no reason you can’t do the same.

5. Regain your composure, and finish the guy off. He’s gotten his money in bad at least twice now, which means he’s a good candidate to give these chips back to you. Be patient, don’t rush it, and find another good spot to get your chips in. Not to get all “hollywood” and “cliche” on you, but I believe Mickey told Rocky in one of the movies that every good fighter has one good round left in him. He says, “get up, you son of a bitch! fight this guy hard! cause Mickey loves you!”

In short, don’t let yourself be your worst enemy. In playing heads up sngs for a living, you will find over time that the only person who can beat you is you. Know your weaknesses, be honest about it, and whenever you feel yourself sliding into the dark place, jump out before the water gets too deep.

3:19am: Just read this article and decided to share it with you guys. I recommend reading this if you’re facinated or sickened by the idea of variance in Poker. Enjoy.

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Am I running bad?  Playing bad?  Am I the unluckiest person in the history of statistics?

One of poker’s great mysteries is how success can spiral so quickly into failure.  We can get our money in good or make the right play, and have everything backfire with the next card.  Critical decisions can be second- and third-guessed, over and over.  There is an infinite range of strategies, loose or tight, aggressive or subtle.  Very few aspects of the game are black or white; we swim in a sea of grayscale.

So how do we address the questions above, pounding through our psyche during a losing streak?  How do we know what needs to be changed in our play, if there is anything to change at all?  If we overreact by doing the wrong things, or are feeling persecuted and downtrodden, poker becomes that much harder to beat.  The game is difficult enough as it is.

I’m a firm believer in reviewing hand histories, looking for situations where I could have gotten away from hands, bet more, called less, etc.  But I also look for classic symptoms of negative variance, to assure myself I am making the right plays, and I’m not staggeringly, heart-stoppingly unlucky.  I’m just running through a bad stretch.

SYMPTOM #1: When I get a monster, nobody else does.

We’ve sat tight at a very loose table, folding our rags to every raise and re-raise, waiting for an opportunity to strike.  Finally, here it is…American Airlines in the big blind.  Here we go!  C’mon, suckers…get those chips flying…wait a second.  Where’s everyone going?  Why are you all folding?  Oh, dang….

SYMPTOM #2: Lose the big flips, win the small ones.

We’re in the money of a tournament with an average-sized stack, about 20 big blinds, looking for opportunities to pick up chips, move up the leaderboard, and seize the chance for a serious payday.  We’re dealt AK in the big blind.  The cutoff has about 16 big blinds, and makes a pre-flop raise in a classic steal position.  We shove, wanting to look like a pure re-steal, so our opponent will call with his A9 or KQ.  But he doesn’t have A9 or KQ…he’s got JJ, and we lose our flip.  The very next hand, we’re dealt 98 suited, and in a fit of frustration, shove our puny stack against a button raiser, who has 66.  This time we flop an 8 and win the hand, but we still only have 9 big blinds.

SYMPTOM #3: Our range assignments are good, but reality is at the wrong end.

After winning our race with 98 v. 66, we’re dealt AJ in the next hand, on the button.  The action folds around to the cutoff, who shoves his 12 BB stack.  It looks like a steal, obviously.  Even the tightest of players should be doing this with no less than QT+, KT+, any ace or any pocket pair.  Loose-aggressive MTT players will do this with any two cards.  We are way ahead of both ranges, so we call.  As it turns out, our opponent has KK, and we’re eliminated from the tournament.

What each symptom has in common is simply bad timing.  Not bad luck – we’ve been dealt some good cards, and won an equitable share of the coin flips.  Not bad play – at no time did we make any regrettable decisions or bad reads.  Just bad timing.

So what can you do about it?  Not a lot, at least not directly.  You can’t control everyone else’s hole cards, their decisions to bet or fold, or the river card turning a win into a loss.  But you can try to keep your head up.  Take solace and comfort from the knowledge you’re not necessarily doing anything wrong.  The next time you play, the breaks may turn in your favor.  The button will have KK when you get AA in the big blind.  You’ll flop an ace in that key race which puts you in the chip lead.  When you make the hero call with A8, the shove monkey will meekly turn over 86 and you’ll stack his chips next to your own.

If you comb through your hand histories for the “running bad” symptoms, and come up empty, what then?  It’s time to get self-critical.  If you’re a losing poker player, but you’re not terminally unlucky (nobody is), and not suffering from bad timing…it’s probably your play.  Find the leaks and plug them.  It’s easy to blame bad beats on bad luck…but if you’re always getting your money in ahead, you’re playing too tight and not giving yourself a chance to get lucky in return.  It’s easy to complain you never catch a flop…but you are calling too much and seeing too many flops, leaking chips in early levels, chips crucial for later tournament survival.  You may always be getting dominated by the hero who makes a very loose call…but you’re bluffing too much, giving your opponent a reason to assign a range much wider than you’d like.

When you leave the table, you decide what kind of poker player you’ll be when next you play.  Our greatest chance for improvement is to use our downtime wisely and objectively.  The next time you’re getting crushed over and over, with no…end…in…sight, give yourself a checkup.  Take the time to look for symptoms of variancitis.  Find your own path to good poker health.

“All of us have bad luck and good luck.  The man who persists through the bad luck – who keeps right on going – is the man who is there when the good luck comes – and is ready to receive it.”  -  Robert Collier

4:16pm: Perhaps one of the most overlooked aspects of heads up poker online is the presence of tells on both sides. Think about it, how many times have you possibly tipped off your hand in the last 6 months or so by betting/raising too fast, too slow, or perhaps by not raising at all? Let’s take a look at which tells are obvious, how you can spot them and also how to conceal these tendencies. Keep in mind these tells are what I call “level 1″ tells, which operate under the assumption that your opponent doesn’t know that you know these are tells. An example of a “level 2″ tell would be something from the perspective that your opponent knows that you know quick betting indicates weakness, so they will quick bet a hand in strength to intentionally give off weakness.

1. Weakness Tells

• Quick bets. Like I mentioned above, those who bet their hand rather quickly are usually holding nothing more than one pair. Betting so firm, so fast is an attempt to communicate to you, “my hand is so strong that I don’t even have to think about betting”. Good players can see through this, and will usually make a play or, at the very least, optimize their play for what they assume their opponent is holding.
• The min bet. Don’t worry if you think that someone is only doing it to trap you with an attempt to force you into a raise. In all likelihood, the person you’re playing is not thinking that much, so if you need to raise for value, don’t be afraid to do so. Also don’t be afraid to try an take the pot from someone who keeps doing it repeatedly.
• Overbetting the pot on the FLOP. When I call this a “weak tell”, I might be using the term loosely, but I consider one pair to be a weak holding postflop, so by definition this tell is spot on. Notice that I emphasized the word flop, which we will get into later. In this case, usually when people overbet the flop, they are usually holding a pair, but are not necessarily looking for a call and are usually dreading a shove. If you can beat one pair in this spot, you are nearly going to be good 100% of the time in this spot.
• Quick checking. Usually when someone checks very quickly, they just want to move on to the next hand. When someone takes less than a second to check, I will usually take a stab at the pot - with probably a 66% success rate, which gives me good faith in this as a tell of weakness.

2. Strength Tells

• 4x raise preflop. Some things in life are given: death, taxes, and the fact that when someone raises 4x the pot preflop, they are probably holding a small to mid pocket pair. People usually raise more with hands that are harder to play, so they really don’t feel like seeing a flop with hands like this most of the time. A lot of people have trouble playing 77-JJ, and they’d much rather take it down uncontested because they won’t know what to do when overcards come out. Only problem with this method is that they will either win a small pot, or lose a big one. Pay attention to this next time because if you have QQ+, you can shove and will almost always get snap called by someone who is behind 4:1 who assumes you have AK or AQ.
• Long delays followed by betting. When people do this, it’s usually an attempt to communicate to you that their hand is weak enough that they need time to think about betting. When someone does this, I try to stay away unless I’m confident my hand is stronger.
• Preflop limp re raises. You’ve got KJoff in the big blind. Your opponent limps, and you want to make him pay for it, because after all you’ve got a pretty good hand heads up. That is, until he comes back over the top after having initially limped into the pot. If this happens, odds are your opponent perceives you as aggressive and knew you were going to raise pre flop. He also doesn’t believe you will have the disclipline to lay down a marginal hand in this spot - which you should - because he is more than likely not bluffing.
• The huge river overbet. Ever find yourself in a situation where the pot is like 150-250, and all of a sudden, randomly on the river your opponent fires out like 540 into a relatively small pot leaving you wondering what in the world is going on? After all, you just rivered two pair - this seems like an easy call, right? Wrong. More often than not, your opponent is holding a minimum of top two in this situation.
• “Just calling” on every street, followed by a huge bet/raise on the river. Good players will do this when they are weak because they will assume that you will assume that you have just been slowplayed, and are attempting to get you to lay your hand down. Most of the time people aren’t this advanced, and being as such you really have just been slowplayed. It’s probably a good idea to lay your hand down in this spot.

If you find yourself doing ANY of the above, drastically cutting these tactics out of your play can work wonders for improving you ROI. Good players can spot these things, and even sometimes average players. What I used to do is to keep a bunch of small post it notes next to my monitor, and anytime I caught myself giving off a tell, I would make a note on my monitor to make a conscious effort not to do it the next time. Tells are nothing more than bad habits, and most of them come natural. This is why you have to literally go out of your way not to do some of these things, until eventually — not giving off tells has now become a good habit for you.

Spotting these basic tells can also improve you ROI much the same way. Since we can’t see things such as facial expressions and body language online, we have to use the only tools we have at our disposal, such as timing tells and betting patterns. The tells listed above are very basic and are only a small part of equation, hence the name “level 1″ tells. Stay tuned later on for some tells on a more advanced level.

11:16pm: Pick up any poker book — and I do mean ANY — and I guarantee you that you will find written at least five times written in different ways that you should always be raising the button when only the blinds remain, and nearly 100% of the time heads up. Time and time again, you heed their warning, and never stop pounding the big blind with your button raises but it never seems to translate into anything more than you playing a big pot with a hand you have no idea how to play postflop, am I right?

Anyone who has seen my tutorials quickly remarks about the odd number of times I limp (for the most part in the early blinds), and are equally as baffled at how this strategy can translate into such a positively-sloped profit graph.

Raising is traditionally to be taken as a sign of strength, and limping as a sign of weakness. However, recently in poker there has been more of a shift towards each one indicating the opposite. Fortunately for you, most people are still unaware of this fact, which will allow you do this:

Setup Hand #1:

PokerStars Game #18343957608: Tournament #93189771, $100+$5 Hold’em No Limit - Match Round I, Level II (15/30) - 2008/06/24 - 00:03:12 (ET)
Table ‘93189771 1′ 2-max Seat #1 is the button
Seat 1: trujm (2230 in chips)
Seat 2: DGDeuce11 (770 in chips)
trujm: posts small blind 15
DGDeuce11: posts big blind 30
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to trujm [9c 7c]
trujm: calls 15
DGDeuce11: raises 740 to 770 and is all-in
trujm: folds
Uncalled bet (740) returned to DGDeuce11
DGDeuce11 collected 60 from pot
DGDeuce11: doesn’t show hand
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot 60 | Rake 0
Seat 1: trujm (button) (small blind) folded before Flop
Seat 2: DGDeuce11 (big blind) collected (60)

Setup Hand #2:

PokerStars Game #18343939281: Tournament #93189771, $100+$5 Hold’em No Limit - Match Round I, Level II (15/30) - 2008/06/24 - 00:02:06 (ET)
Table ‘93189771 1′ 2-max Seat #1 is the button
Seat 1: trujm (2585 in chips)
Seat 2: DGDeuce11 (415 in chips)
trujm: posts small blind 15
DGDeuce11: posts big blind 30
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to trujm [7c 9h]
trujm: calls 15
DGDeuce11: raises 385 to 415 and is all-in
trujm: folds
Uncalled bet (385) returned to DGDeuce11
DGDeuce11 collected 60 from pot
DGDeuce11: doesn’t show hand
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot 60 | Rake 0
Seat 1: trujm (button) (small blind) folded before Flop
Seat 2: DGDeuce11 (big blind) collected (60)

The Kill:

PokerStars Game #18343981563: Tournament #93189771, $100+$5 Hold’em No Limit - Match Round I, Level II (15/30) - 2008/06/24 - 00:04:38 (ET)
Table ‘93189771 1′ 2-max Seat #1 is the button
Seat 1: trujm (2320 in chips)
Seat 2: DGDeuce11 (680 in chips)
trujm: posts small blind 15
DGDeuce11: posts big blind 30
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to trujm [Kh As]
trujm: calls 15
DGDeuce11: raises 650 to 680 and is all-in
trujm: calls 650
*** FLOP *** [4s Tc 7d]
*** TURN *** [4s Tc 7d] [7c]
*** RIVER *** [4s Tc 7d 7c] [9s]
*** SHOW DOWN ***
DGDeuce11: shows [6c Ah] (a pair of Sevens)
trujm: shows [Kh As] (a pair of Sevens - Ace+King kicker)
trujm collected 1360 from pot
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot 1360 | Rake 0
Board [4s Tc 7d 7c 9s]
Seat 1: trujm (button) (small blind) showed [Kh As] and won (1360) with a pair of Sevens
Seat 2: DGDeuce11 (big blind) showed [6c Ah] and lost with a pair of Sevens

There’s a certain point in a heads up sng where grind your opponent down to the point where they will start open shoving — either on the button or when you limp into the pot. When I limped the first two hands, I was relatively sure he was at this point, and would indeed soon start shoving. I needed to implant the idea that limping equals weakness into his head, so I made some loose calls preflop knowing that I was probably going to have to fold them. This was done, of course, with the hopes that I would eventually wake up with a hand (which I did) and would play the hand the exact same way that I did when I was truly weak — to induce a shove. Our opponent bit, and he put his money in as a big time dog. The hand held, and I won the match.

The moral of the story is that the problem a lot of people have with limping sometimes simply has more to do with ego trips, and commitment to play “power poker” than it does with actually using it effectively. There’s a time and a place to pound the big blind, but you’d be surprised at the whole new set of tools available to you when you limp into the pot a lot. A good portion of the time you will get even more action this way.

Try it sometime.

There’s more than one way to skin a cat.

4:01am: There’s a trend going on in heads up sit n gos. By lately, I mean within the last 8 months or so. I believe it is a function of people attempting to lower their variance and clean up their game. For the most part, the number of people who push all their chips in on a draw has gone down significantly.

I am basing this observation over the last 750-1,000 heads up sngs I’ve played. As recently as a year ago, and more noticably the year before that — you could fill your tank up with gas within a week if you had a dollar for every time that one of your opponents put it all in on a draw.

Why the recent change? Have people finally realized that flush draws only hit 1/3rd of the time? Did they finally crunch the numbers on open ended straight draws? Is it no longer thrilling to them? And more imporantly… is this a good or a bad thing for you and me? I don’t know the answers to the first four questions, but to the last one I say that it’s not necessarily a good thing. In general, I find that people realized that there’s no need to gamble to this extent in heads up sit n gos in order to turn a steady profit. In MTTs? Sure. In heads up sit n gos? Not so much.

This is not to say that no one is gambling, or that no one puts it in the middle on a draw. It’s just simply an observation that it doesn’t happen as much as it used to. Regardless of whether or not your opponent is doing so, always remember this: it’s always better to draw against better players, meanwhile taking the inferior players to a place I like to call “value city”.

2:08pm: Everyone who has had some relative success in poker has no doubt at least thought about doing it for a living at some point in time. It’s easy to say “I make $30/hr playing poker, and $15/hr at my job, therefore it would make no sense to continue working hard when I could be hardly working at all”. There’s no question that in life you have to dream big, but you also have to be realistic about it.

First thing to do when making an important decision is to objectively weigh the costs vs. the benefits of making said decision. Let’s take a look at the good and the bad of becoming a professional poker player.

Here are the benefits to going pro:

• Make your own hours
• Be your own boss
• Take breaks whenever you feel like it
• Vacation time whenever you need it
• Poker requires little to no manual labor
• Pay yourself as often as you’d like
• No having to dress up; Wear whatever you’d like to the office

Here are the costs of going pro:

• Lack of human interaction (if you’re playing online)
• Lack of QUALITY human interaction (if you’re playing online AND/OR live)
• On negative swings, bills don’t stop coming just because you’re on a bad run
• Tax issues: keeping up with it; documenting your results/expenses; filing correctly
• Society, in general, “frowns upon it”.
• The pressure to win every day because your livelyhood depends on it
• Guilt associated with all of the above

While the money might be GREAT sometimes, you must be extremely strong-minded in order to consider doing this for a living. You must treat each day as a seperate entity as the day before it, and never ever think about the past.

Someone once told me, “When you play to get even, you get even worse”. I can’t tell you how many people I see playing to get even, both live and online. If you want to find people online who are trying to get even, sharkscope your next heads up opponent. He probably started playing $5 heads up sngs, and the every time he lost he increased the buy in of his next one. One time, in a $50 heads up sng I sharkscoped my opponent and viewed his last 8 matches. It read like this:

1. $33 + 1.50
2. $20 + 1
3. $10 + .50
4. $5 + .25
5. $2 + .25

He started all the way down the totem pole at $2, and had lost each match he played, effectively trying to recover his money back each time he played. Long story short, he lost to me and then went on to play a $100 heads up match. He also lost that one, and decided to play a $200 match where he finally won.

Point being, going pro takes discipline and a lot of structure. Skipping around in game types/limits is fine for the casual player. However, if you plan to become a pro it’s sometimes best to find a “niche” that you excel in - while considering everything I have laid before you above.