1. Defensive Poker Strategy Against
2. Defensive Poker Strategy Tactics
3. Defensive Poker Strategy Game
4. Defensive Poker Strategy Games

Table Of Contents

Advanced poker strategy and tips from professional players Whoever said less is more had obviously never heard of poker tactics. A vast, varied and well-stocked arsenal of weapons is a must-have when it comes to battling opponents across the table. In poker, certain aggression plays like steals can be very effective; players must occasionally reply to them with defensive plays with hands they might not otherwise play. If, for example, an opponent to a player's right frequently steals when the player has posted a blind, the player can be reasonably sure that the opponent is often doing so with inferior hands (otherwise he wouldn't be.

Gareth James is a tournament poker player, author, coach, content creator and streamer.

He currently grinds the off-peak Sunday schedule over on Twitch and you can find his regular strategy content, for free, over on Youtube.

I'll start this article off by saying I love Holdem Resources Calculator (HRC). I've used it for many years and regularly recommend it to my students.

However, recently I've seen some content from well-known, respected poker players, authors and streamers who seem to be suggesting that it can give you good opening ranges and responses to those ranges including good, solid BB defence strategies and I'm a bit concerned.

Mainly because I know that HRC cannot do these things as it doesn't factor in equity realisation.

HRC is great and I use it regularly, but definitely not for working out opening ranges or response ranges.

In this article I'm going to just focus on BB defence at 20bb and compare the results of both Holdem Resources Calculator and Simple Preflop Holdem.

READ MORE:7 Tips to Take Your Poker Game From 'Meh' to Amazing

What is Equity Realisation?

First let's talk about equity realisation, what it is and how we know HRC doesn't use it.

Equity realisation is how much of the pot a hand can expect to make (as a percentage) based on raw equity AND many other postflop variables including, but not limited to:

• Whether you're in or out of position
• The type of hand you have (a suited hand like 76s will realise equity better than K2o for example)
• The skill level of your opponent (e.g. will they find enough aggressive moves that will prevent you from seeing turn and river cards?)

The key thing here is the fact that it relies on postflop variables.

Now even if we take out the skill level of your opponent, it will hopefully be clear already that in order for a solver to solve properly, it will need to factor in these postflop variables.

Sadly, HRC does not. It essentially believes that after the final preflop action where neither player is all in (so there is an opportunity for postflop betting to take place) the hand just gets checked to showdown, something which rarely happens or at least is rarely strategically optimal.

Putting Theory into Practice

Let me give you an example. Nine players at the table, everyone has 20bb, the blinds are 0.5bb/1bb with an ante of 0.13bb and it folds around to the BTN who opens for a minraise.

For this example, I've run an advanced hand where I've edited the range for the BTN to see what Holdem Resources Calculator suggests the BB can call and 3-bet jam versus this open.

This is the result:

As you can see it's suggesting playing 100% of hands: calling 81.8% and 3-bet jamming 18.2%. Now you could be the best player in the world postflop, but I still don't think you're going to be able to play 72o well enough where it's actually going to make money as a call.

So what's going on here?

When the BTN opens for a minraise there are 4.67BBs in the middle and it costs the BB just 1BB to call. Thus, they're getting 4.67:1 odds which is about 17.6%.

As you can see, every single hand has enough equity to make the call here, which is why HRC is suggesting playing 100% of hands.

72o, though, does a really poor job at realising equity. In order to profitably call, you would have to realise more than 60% of your equity with 72o, something that just isn't going to happen.

READ MORE:What Is Real-Time Assistance (RTA)? Is it Legal?

Button vs Big Blind

To better illustrate this point, here's a table of selected hands for this spot 20bb BTN vs BB to look at how different hands do at realising equity, sorted by those that realise the best. For a hand to be a profitable call the equity x equity realization has to be higher than 17.6%.

Now all of the hands in this table will make the grade, simply because I only included profitable hands in the BB defence range when running the reports in Piosolver in the first place.

The key thing to focus on here is how some hands do better than others at realising equity. Suited hands will always do better than their offsuit counterparts.

Connected hands will always do better than unconnected hands. K4o, while having a lot more raw equity than 32s, does a lot worse in terms of equity realisation.

Simple Preflop Holdem

So if HRC doesn't give us a usable solution, how do we solve this problem?

Enter... Simple Preflop Holdem.

Simple Preflop Holdem is a preflop solver that factors in equity realisation by considering some of the postflop variables we discussed earlier - namely postflop betting and position.

I've used exactly the same opening range for the BTN and once again given the BB the options to 3-bet jam, call or fold. Here's the result from Simple Preflop Holdem this time:

Let's take a look at the calling and 3-bet jamming strategies side by side for comparison.

Defensive Poker Strategy Against

As you can see there are some big differences, mainly with suited hands. Simple Preflop Holdem does a lot more calling with suited broadways and suited Aces, hands that HRC likes to jam, but then just folds hands like 94o, 93o and 73o, which HRC likes as a call.

Again there are some differences here. Simple Preflop Holdem likes to jam the weaker offsuit Ax hands more frequently, but then flats hands like AA, QTs and T7s that HRC likes to jam.

What Simple Preflop Holdem is essentially doing here is telling us that it believes it's a higher EV play to just call Aces than it is to jam and the same goes for other hands like KQs, A5s and T7s.

You can clearly see equity realisation being utilised here to give a better strategy where the EV of both lines are compared and the better one is recommended.

In Conclusion

HRC is good for many things, especially push/fold in cEV and $EV situations at 8bb and under, but it can't give you solid BB defence strategies that you can use in your own game so please don't use it for that.

When we think about which hands to flat and which hands to 3-bet jam, we should always be thinking about which line will generate the higher EV.

We also need to make sure we're making +EV decisions in the first place and not blindly following the HRC readout and calling with 72o and 94o.

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Bullies are a fairly common subspecies of poker player. You can’t spend too long at the tables without running into one. They bet and raise with reckless abandon. Playing against them can be scary, like riding a bucking bronco.

Let’s talk about three general strategies for playing against the poker bully, two of them wrong, one of them right.

One temptation is to try to out-bully the bully, to punch back even harder than he is hitting. The problem is that you are pretty much reduced to flailing away wildly, kind of like Ralphie in A Christmas Story when he finally loses it and goes nuts on the bully Scut Farcus. It might work, but it’s risky and costly. In the poker setting, it also leaves you wide open to being exploited by other players who are smart enough to wait to trap both of you with a monster when you’re trying to out-bully each other with mediocre holdings.

A second temptation is to go into highly defensive mode — that is, to tighten up even further, waiting for the rare premium hand before playing back at the bully. There are two problems with this. First is that you’re missing out on lots of money that the bully is putting into pots with weak hands which you could win if you were braver. The second is that even minimally intelligent bullies will figure out that the guy who punches back once an hour is doing so only when he has a big hand. He’ll just fold, giving you one pathetic little pot for all your patience and consternation.

The third option — and the correct one — I learned from Mike Caro’s writings. In fact, I think it’s the single most profitable piece of poker strategy advice I’ve ever encountered:

A poker bully is by definition too aggressive. In order to be a bully, he must make a fundamental mistake — he must bet and raise too often. When an opponent makes a mistake, there’s always a way to take advantage. Here’s how to take advantage of a poker bully:

Call more often. Because a bully is betting more hands, it’s obvious that he must be betting more than just the ones you would normally bet. This means you can relax your calling standards and still make a profit.

Bet less often. A key to defeating a poker bully is to let him hang himself. Since his major mistake is betting too liberally, you should give him every opportunity to defeat himself by repeating that mistake. You should check and call frequently. You should also bet less often when a poker bully checks into you, because a bully likes to check-raise a lot. Therefore when he foregoes the opportunity to be a betting bully, you should be wary of a check-raising bully. Just check along.

When you do these two simple things, the bully has a losing expectation against you. And, in the long run, he cannot win. Sometimes it’s tempting to “out bull” the bully by being even more aggressive than he is. That’s the wrong answer. You can’t win at poker by exaggerating the same mistake an opponent is making.

Read the whole article on Caro’s web site here.

Can such a simple formula actually work? Yes. Absolutely it can.

I fondly remember one poker session in which a bully figured prominently. I joined the game and watched him raise the first five hands in a row. He was running over the table, cowing everybody into conceding him pot after pot while almost never having to show a hand.

When a seat opened up two to his left, I made a beeline for it. Caro’s formula is much easier to apply when you have position on the bully.

Then I just started calling him down with medium-strength hands. This took some courage, because he tended to bet big when he was bluffing, since he wanted to induce folds, and I usually try to avoid playing big pots with just one-pair kind of hands. But those are often enough to beat a guy who’s betting with nothing.

Defensive Poker Strategy Tactics

Eventually he gave up and said, “I’m done trying to bluff you.” But it was too late. In a $1/$2 no-limit hold’em game I had made $399 in under two hours — almost all of it from the bully’s stack. He had lost the stack he’d had when I sat down, plus two more buy-ins.

I was not the only one to profit. The other players caught on to what I was doing, and copied it. Somebody was calling down the bully every time he tried to win a pot by hammering at it with big bets. Once a bully has been shown to be just a weakling in a scary disguise, all of his former victims are eager to get their licks in.

I love the simplicity of the strategy of just calling the bully. Of course, sometimes he gets lucky and hits something big, and you look pretty foolish calling three times with not much of a hand. But in the long run, those instances are far outweighed by both the monetary effect of his too-frequent bluffing and by the psychological effect that you have on him by not backing down to his attempts at intimidation.

In a Card Player magazine column a few years ago, Bob Ciaffone penned a wonderful apothegm that neatly sums up the same concept in a different way:

Defensive Poker Strategy Game

“We know you can fight fire with fire, but what is wrong with fighting it with water sometimes?”

Robert Woolley lives in Asheville, NC. He spent several years in Las Vegas and chronicled his life in poker on the “Poker Grump” blog.

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Defensive Poker Strategy Games

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