In texas hold em winning hands with massive holdings is easy.  It doesn’t take long to learn what beats what, and when we hit a monster like a full house or flush it’s less a question of whether we will win but how much we can extract from a hand.  However, in hold em, particularly tournament play, we won’t always hit the big hands we need to stay alive.  When this happens, winning hands without the holdings can be key to our enduring success.  Many players simply lack the experience or balls to make strong plays when our opponents show weakness, so we’ll examine a few of the situations where we can look to take down pots, even when our hole cards are against us.

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The decision to start playing small ball poker and integrating it into an overall adaptive poker strategy is a change players on all levels are making.  The style of play now known as ‘small ball’ has probably been in circulation as long as poker has.  However, its recognition and emergence as a profitable form of play has been assisted through it’s adoption by poker pro Daniel Negreanu, the man also responsible for the styles current moniker.  For those of us who have suffered one too many bad beats at the business end of a massive pot, it seems there might be some pretty tempting reasons to implement small ball poker into our playing repertoire.  Read the rest of this entry

A poker continuation bet is basically what it sounds like, a subsequent bet made by a player who bet or raised in the previous round of betting.  Continuation betting, or c-bet as it is also known, is used to represent and reinforce a strong pre-flop hand.  There is some argument that continuation betting has seen its hey-day.  Gone are the times when following up a pre-flop bet with a second barrell were enough to convince our opponents that our hole cards were actually worth something.  But can continuation betting still form an integral part of a poker players betting strategy?

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So we all understand that a bet in holdem is supposed to be indicative of strength, that your hand is a good one, and that your oponent is in trouble.  But since any poker player worth his or her salt understands that manipulating your bets to disguise your hand is an integral part of poker, just how far does this maxim on holdem betting strategy take us?

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