Late Position
It is vital that whenever you sit down at any poker table that you try your hardest to assess the players on your table. There is no room in poker for mental laziness. When I am in late position and I have only just sat down at the table then I will make it my goal to see what the blinds are made of and the people to my left.
Those blinds are crucial to my success, if they play back aggressively then I will attack them less but if they are the passive types then I want to know quickly and I will raise from late position with hands like connectors whether they are gapped or not.
Once again if the pot has been raised before it gets to me then I will dump them in the overwhelming number of cases as I just do not want to be going up against premium poker hands against trigger happy players with small to medium stacks with speculative hands like connectors.
So if a player raised before me then I will simply pass the hand. But the main difference with being in late position is that I now have more opportunity to attack the blinds if it has been folded around to me or if there has been numerous limpers then I may take a flyer and limp along in the hope of flopping a big hand and getting paid off and this is a viable online poker strategy.
But these are long shot propositions and straights and flushes are poker hands that do not come along that often and your flush is not even the nuts and could cripple you anyway. If I consider raising with a hand that is weaker than the average conventional raising hand then I will not just do it with any old piece of garbage.
It is true that any two cards can win in poker but if you raised with anything then you would simply be raising too often and you would find players coming back at you a lot more. But those little connectors have the capacity to make a big hand that is fiendishly concealed and can break someone…..as long as that someone is not you of course!
The Blinds
I think that one of the most misplayed positions in poker and especially in No Limit hold’em is the play in and around the blinds. In my experience people defend their blinds too much in this version of the game. I don’t know if they have a limit Texas Hold’em poker mentality or what or maybe they instinctively know that the pre-flop raiser is coming in light and are electing to make a stand against this would be aggressor.
But the best play in the majority of cases if it has been raised is to simply fold the hand, this even applies if the raise has come from a steal position. Of course there are indeed exceptions to every rule and if you are constantly getting raised by the same player after it has been folded to them on the button then you cannot simply fold your hand in the big blind all the time otherwise this will just encourage this aggressor to simply raise with anything and take your blind money.
So as long as you have the proper table image of a solid normal type of player then you can play back at this bully every now and again on light values. Because after all, they have proven that they are clearly raising without the goods so you can re-raise on weaker hands also. As long as you are not over doing this play then your opponent is going to respect your re-raise and will likely fold.
This means that your raises are in fact taking larger chunks of money than if you had simply raised from position and taken the blind money.
This way, you can help to keep aggressive opponents who are in late position in check and your re-raises with connecting hands will have deception both when you flop a concealed monster and when high cards flop that your raise has represented.
But the fact of the matter is that if the raises are not coming from overly aggressive poker players who are making their intentions crystal clear then the best move is to fold connecting hands to a raise.
They are of course ideal for completing the bet in the small blind in un-raised pots as you will be getting excellent odds both in implied odds and pot odds to call the extra small bet with a sound speculative hand like a connector whether it is gapped or not.
Carl “The Dean” Sampson at bwin.com