Poker 101 Questions

[AENeuman]

I'm trying to wrap my head around poker in a traditional (not saber-metric) way. Would love some general advice.

1. I'm going to have 4-6 people for a game. How many chips would you give each person? Doing the $5 buys $5 in chips seems too few.

2. When there are 4-6 people at the table, generally what would the pre-flop fold rate be? >66%?

3. Quick fire! Do you generally pre-flop call/raise the following: Q < Jo, A < Js, Paris <10?

4. Betting. What does it say when someone bets half the pot vs. all the pot?

[digamma]

For #1, it depends on what you are looking to play. If a tournament, where you get eliminated when you lose your chips, then there's usually a buy in that gets you call it 1,000 or 5,000 or whatever in chips. Then you have a blind schedule that goes up accordingly. So you might have 5,000 chips to start and the blinds start at 25-50 and go up every 15 minutes.

If you are playing a cash game where you just cash out for whatever you have left or whatever you win, then you might have a buy in in increments of 5 or 10 or 20 bucks and have denominations of chips being 25 or 50 cents, 1 dollar and 5 dollars. It just depends on your game and how you want to play.

2-4 are all pretty dependent on who you're playing with and the type of game, size of raise, who it is coming from etc.

For 2, that seems high, particularly since in that game your blinds are 33-50% of your hands.

For 3, it really depends, but I'd see the flop on pairs much lower than TT and TT might be my limit for reraising. Depending on the raiser calling with QJ or AJ is reasonable and there are some other suited connectors I may do that with as well.

Half pot is a pretty standard post flop bet because it's not generally a large enough bet to scare people off or make them suspicious but it does usually give a heads up opponent "bad" odds to make a call on a draw. Full pot bets can mean different things--a steal attempt or a really strong hand. I usually read a large sized bet as weakness, but again it depends on the situation.

[britrock88]

You can play with $5's worth of chips; you're just going to have nickel/dime/quarter/dollar denominations.

I would say a 4-6 player game probably has a 50% pre-flop rate, on average.

I'd take Q#o on a hand-by-hand basis, call with A#s, raise with # paired.

Half the pot is a standard-level continuation bet, showing some interest in/commitment to the hand without tipping off that you've hit anything big... unless you're playing off your opponent. A full-pot bet would typically be either a bluff or an announcement of a strong hand/attempt to take leadership of the betting for the rest of the hand.

[TroyF]

Not a poker genius here, but what I have learned about the game and when I do play a lot. . . #3 is entirely dependent on the table and your skill level.

Hands like that can get you into trouble because they are 2nd or 3rd best quite often. A really good player who can read the table and get out of the second best hand can play those hands and be successful.

Example: You play Q/Jo and the flop comes A/J/4 What do you do now? anyone with an A has you beat.

An idiot like me will find a way to royally screw up this up..

[sabotai]

In a 4-6 handed table, I'm probably raising an unraised pot pre-flop with any pocket pair.

Like TroyF said, face cards like QJ (suited or not) can be very tricky. Those types of hands are easily dominated. Even if the flop comes 9-J-4, AJ and KJ have you dominated, those without a J will fold to you, even people with a weak J will probably fold. These kinds of hands often lead to disaster unless you end up with a straight or full house. With QJ, QT and JT, it's very hard to trust that a Q, J or T on the flop is giving you the best pair. In situations like these, positioning is very important.

Even 6 handed, I might just fold something like QJ in early position.

[Shkspr]

So what were your other 97 questions?

[TroyF]

Originally Posted by sabotai

In a 4-6 handed table, I'm probably raising an unraised pot pre-flop with any pocket pair.

Like TroyF said, face cards like QJ (suited or not) can be very tricky. Those types of hands are easily dominated. Even if the flop comes 9-J-4, AJ and KJ have you dominated, those without a J will fold to you, even people with a weak J will probably fold. These kinds of hands often lead to disaster unless you end up with a straight or full house. With QJ, QT and JT, it's very hard to trust that a Q, J or T on the flop is giving you the best pair. In situations like these, positioning is very important.

Even 6 handed, I might just fold something like QJ in early position.

Position is the one thing I didn't talk about and to really good poker players, it's critical. When I first started playing, I'd tell someone about a bad beat and they'd stop me like twenty times throughout the story. (these were good friends who were teaching me to play, never tell a bad beat story to a stranger)

It would go something like this:

Me: I had A/Q and I raised.
Friend: What position were you in?
Me: I don't remember
Friend: I don't want to hear the rest of the story

There were plenty of other stops and starts, but the position you are in makes all the difference in the world. Raising in first position with A/J is a lot different than raising on the button when everyone else has folded which is different than being on the button and reraising the pot.

[Radii]

Originally Posted by sabotai

In a 4-6 handed table, I'm probably raising an unraised pot pre-flop with any pocket pair.

I forget what my default standards were online in 6-handed games, but UTG I'm pretty sure it was somewhere around 99+ in most games. Being out of position with a middle/low pair that doesn't hit is awful.



Other random stuff since the conversation is headed that way:

In the 6-handed games I'm used to playing I don't think I would ever, ever open-limp either, so its raise or fold, with possible small blind exceptions. A home game could be much different and maybe open limping is ok in a very loose passive game (where 4 players are going to see every flop and not many are raising).


But really, any question about standards for how strong a hand you need to open-raise preflop, even if you're a near-complete beginner needs to take position into account. If I'm on the button and its folded to me and I have no info on my opponents I'm probably raising about 50% of the time (and folding the other). UTG in a 6 handed game where I know nothing about the opposition I probably only raise the top 7-10% of hands? AQs+ AJo+ KQs 99+ maybe? Maybe that's very slightly tight, but its very close.

[sabotai]

Originally Posted by Radii

I forget what my default standards were online in 6-handed games, but UTG I'm pretty sure it was somewhere around 99+ in most games. Being out of position with a middle/low pair that doesn't hit is awful.

Other random stuff since the conversation is headed that way:

In the 6-handed games I'm used to playing I don't think I would ever, ever open-limp either, so its raise or fold, with possible small blind exceptions.

Thought about mentioning that too, and this is my mindset for short-handed games. I'm not going to limp, and I'm not folding a pocket pair, so if the pot's unraised, I'm raising. If it's a live game, anyway. Standards for calling an early raiser are much lower when playing online, so yeah, in that case I'd tighten up and ditch the lower pocket pairs.

Then again, when I do play, which is rare, I'm playing MTs, and most of what I've read is about MTs. So that's another reason (the first being I'm not very good) to ignore what I say if this is about playing cash games. I haven't played a live cash game in quite awhile.

[panerd]

So I play in a weekly poker tournament that pays you $2000 in chips if you get your aces cracked. This happens every time it happens throughout the night not just the first time.

Last night:
Player 1 goes all in for about $5000
I call with $4000
Player 3 calls with less, about $3000. (Making the numbers easier but about these amounts)
We flip AA, AA, 55.
Player 3 gets a 5 on the river to win the pot. Me and P1 chop the rest.

So the debate was were our aces cracked? They paid us both $2000 but now the new rules going forward is they were not. I thought the whole definition of cracked aces was you lose to an inferior hand? We both lost to an inferior hand. They said we won money but we really didn't. Had one of us hit a flush or something in the side pot and lost to a full house or something I get it but in this case we tied. What do you guys think?