There’s a myth in the game of poker that small pocket pairs are strong cards. Often when games are started women in particular will call small pocket pairs with weak kickers.Problem is, these types of hands really aren’t strong and as such, if you meet lady players that will minraise them, you can end up taking a big hit in chips.
If you’re a low pocket pair player and you’re playing in a home game against fishes that will raise with anybody’s face, well, at that point you’re just throwing money away. Here’s why…
- The average pro will raise about 8-10% of the time with his big cards and will typically only call a raise about 3-4% of the time with his small pocket pairs (and therefore end up taking a lot of chips off their hands).
- His strong hands typically tip the scale in terms of chips behind them. Whether it’s a high ace high hand, AK, or a pocket pair, if the poker player holding them has a lot of chips it will be very difficult for the another player to get away with a raise unless they are holding a hand that is obviously better than yours. And when you have a lot of chips it’s going to be much easier to make money out of them.
- If you’re serious about building a poker bankroll and winning at poker, the best way to do it is to learn to choose your starting hands wisely.As I mentioned earlier, the professionals rarely ever rush into a hand with another hand. If they have a strong hand they will wait for round two or three to make the play, generally allowing other players to be in the hand to act behind you, and they only ever play in position.
That means that if you’re playing in position, the only way to get chips out of an opponent is to hit them for more chips, which doesn’t happen too often in home games or tournaments at least.
Stereotypes in Poker tend to be very strong and that’s because most of the time real life doesn’t match up to the game model that Hollywood has created for itself. That’s why they created the fictional poker player James Bond to guy, because most people can’t handle a hand of poker with thebestplayer. On the other hand most of the time real life players can be pretty predictable, if you know what to look for.
If you’re stuck in a mediocre home game, if you’re in a mega88 that isn’t so much fun, but is bringing in a lot of money, then home games are for you. In fact 90% of the money that’s lost at home goes to loseing says. That’s a good amount of chips to lose every night, and most of people play between 6-10 home games, so each night if you’re not careful you could lose all your chips in one session.
We’re not going to go into the reasons why you should never play in every home game, because that’s a subject worth a whole article on its own. Just be aware that if this is a problem for you, it’s probably not a problem for you.
In the end, the difference between a bad beat and a bad session is the time you take to respond to the poor play of your opponents. Don’t ever let yourself be dragged into a bad beat or a losing session. If you’re up fairly big then it’s probably best to just say you’re not going to tonight and take the winnings you would normally take on your next hand, rather than get dragged into a bad situation that you could have avoided with a better play decision.