Poker Superstars
Phil Hellmuth
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2 Quick Ways to Put A Stopper in Your Cash Game Leak |
 So you’ve hit a bit of a down slump. You don’t seem to be making hands no matter what you do. And yet you can’t quite get the game out of your head enough to take a little break, and you don’t feel like you’re playing badly, but maybe you’re getting a little punchy and playing not quite as efficiently as you once might have when you felt more in your game. Or maybe you just can’t seem to put a winning session in. Maybe you’re leaking a little. Playing too many hands. Here are two small pointers for honing your hand selection when you really need to focus on ‘buckling down’ and building your cash game stack.
3 Quick Ways to Put A Stopper in Your Cash Game Leak
So you’ve hit a bit of a down slump. You don’t seem to be making hands no matter what you do. And yet you can’t quite get the game out of your head enough to take a little break, and you don’t feel like you’re playing badly, but maybe you’re getting a little punchy and playing not quite as efficiently as you once might have when you felt more in your game. Or maybe you just can’t seem to put a winning session in. Maybe you’re leaking a little. Playing too many hands. Here are three small pointers for honing your hand selection when you really need to focus on ‘buckling down’ and building your cash game stack.
1. Stop playing Ax suited for a raise.
Yes, I know it’s really nice looking Yes I know you’ve made the nut flush a bunch of times. There are lots of reasons that keep people playing this purely speculative hand in plenty of situations that they shouldn’t, but in the long run, it’s been proven: playing Ax suited without pot odds is losing poker.
By this, I pretty much mean that if you’re not doing the raising yourself (which even that I would look askance at) by entering the pot first, you shouldn’t be playing this hand unless the kicker is strong enough to hold up in a show down. In other words, that the kicker is strong enough that you’d play it unsuited. The odds of making a flush simply do not make it profitable to play this hand for a raise if you don’t have position or think you can win against your opponent without making the hand.
If the table is allowing a lot of limping, sure, go with it, see what happens. But for the most part if you drop this hand from your arsenal, you will pretty quickly see the money it saves you.
2. Stop continuation betting/ calling with AK when you miss the flop.
It still amazes me pretty much every time I play how much people still overvalue their AK, even when it has not improved on the flop. You see so many guys pushing this hand preflop like its AA or KK, and then keeping that misdistinction in their head even after the flop comes rags and your opponent comes at you hard.
Personally, I tend to treat AK like small pairs. Too often (about 2/3rds of the time) AK will see the flop and still resolve with no pair. So why reraise and make a huge pot when you could just as easily see what you have before you commit a ton of money.
Particularly sore for me, though, is when people continue not to bet out (as we know there is a clear distinction between betting and calling), but to call down other player’s bets trying to hit their ‘overcards’. This, again, is not profitable poker.
If you’re a gambler, or you’re at a weak table where you can often win preflop by pushing your AK hard against raises, then go for it. But with this kind of hand in a cash game I would much rather see where I am at.
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