Need Advice Badly!!

[Davontae Hardaway]

Hi everyone, i am a standard 1/2 player in poker, been playing for almost 6-7 months. now i cant seem to ever be on a consistant upswing with my plays. and i feel i get into alot of bad beats, and i started studying, but it seems when i use advanced poker moves i still loose. ( Also, im 18 so im playing at morongo casino for 18 year olds), sometimes i think its because these players here are alot more loose, and i happen to get hit alot. what do i need to do to improve? i do play small stacked alot like 40-80. for example of the bad beats, the other night i have AK off suit, someone raises, so i 3 bet him everyone folds except him, flop comes Kh 5d 4c, he raises , and i instantly put him all in. he calls and shows king, 5 for 2 pair, the board does pair 4’s but that obivously isnt enough. what did i do wrong ? did i shove too fast with no info? he was also a very loose player when i came to the table he lost 4-5 hands in a row, all the way to showdown with a mid pair or so. 2nd example i have Ace2 Suited, so i 4 bet, i get about 4-5 callers and flop comes Ah, 7h, Jc. i get one raiser then i raise him all in, they all fold accept one person, who then hits the last heart (queen of hearts) for the flush. once again was i wrong for raising? i hear raising is the smart thing to do but it seems to always get me in trouble. do i need more studying? i just need to know because i love poker but am coming out my pockets too much.

[Chuck M]

Hi,

A little thing on vocabulary. On the A2s hand, you didn’t 4bet, you raised 4x i guess, like $8, right? If you play 40-80 stack (20-40bb) i’d either fold this hand, or go all-in preflop after a loose player has raised in front of you.
But let’s say we decided to okay this hand, with a raise as you did. This short stacked, you just cannot fold when you hit an ace. You’ll likely get called by better aces, but also from mid pairs and draw. Here, your opponent got his flush, depending on the stack you had, he probably had the right pot odds to call you with only a flush draw. That being said, you were ahead, so you did good, as he did if your shove (all-in) was for a pot sized bet. (Let’s say you raised to 8, get 4way to a flop, there’s 32 in there, and you had (i dunno) maybe 30-40-50 in your stack). If villain didn’t have the right odds he wasn’t that far

On the first hand, with AK, if you play $40 and there’s a raise before you, you did good by 3betting, but with $40, id go allin right there…
Or call $8-10 and shove any flop if he checks, or if you hit a pair.

If you got 60-80 buck, i think it’s ok to just call and play postflop. You’re too deep to 3bet shove, but too short to 3bet a standard sizing. It also depends if there were calls when the first player opened raised. Let’s say you got $60-65, one player opens to 10, there’s a call or 2, now i think it would be a good spot to go all-in there.

In my opinion, when we play with smaller stacks, we are more vulnerable to the luck factor. But I understand that for financial reasons, you may have to buy in short. It’s good that you read about poker and want to study. Practice (even when we loose, it’s still practice!) Makes us better.

When you go play, try to take notes about hands you played where you weren’t sure about what move to do. You can read those notes afterwards and think about those spots, and you can also post them here and ask opinions from other players

Cheers, and have fun 🙂

[DeeKay]

Good analysis from Chuck. I would only have a couple more questions… when you are playing short stacked, whats your strategy? Usually the short stack style is to overbet shove which puts pressure on hands to call such a large bet. But given the short stack, its hard to raise or play without shoving. So is your method to get it in quick to double up, or is it to put pressure on and drag small pots to build your stack?

To Chuck’s point, the downside of playing short stacked is that you are going to get loser calls. Simply because anyone you are playing against will have limited risk. They could call your all in shove with AK with a small pocket pair, because their risk would only be say $60.

I’ll leave you with this. Poker is not a game of the short term. Anyone can win on any given day. Poker is a long haul game where implementing the right strategy and smart play should return you profits over the long term. Keep studying, play stakes with in your comfort zone and make the best decisions you can. Nothing wrong with playing very tight as you learn.

One book that Brad Owen highly recommends is The Course by Ed Miller. I read it. It is a great book. Simple, non technical look at playing 1-2 strategy. Highly recommend it. Good luck

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