Effective Advertising and Info Management

I was recently watching a free poker video from a pretty well known poker online player. He was 4-tabling different buy-in 180 man sit and go events. While the stuff he was talking about was very basic and great for a beginner, I found most of it to be rather useless. But, while he was discussing a hand on one of his online poker tables, I saw him play a hand differently than I might have played it, yet it went unmentioned. In the cutoff, he folded A-7 off with about 10BB’s in an unopened pot. This isn’t a huge deal, and in fact, it’s probably right on the border of a fold or a shove. My first instinct would be to shove and hope to take the blinds, or even get called by one of the blinds or the button who is putting you on an “any two cards” cutoff shove. The big thing that I took from this is that I, and perhaps many good players, might be treating the cutoff too much like the button when it is not. It’s relatively the same, but if you’re not shutting the hand down, you could get in a lot of trouble just flat-calling to be in position on an opening raiser. While the shove might be a marginal situation (trying to get through 3 players instead of 2) a flat call in front of a solid button player can be throwing chips away. This leaves the button to take the play away from you preflop or anywhere later in the course of the hand. Know the difference between the cutoff and the button and you might just patch a small hole in your game.

Comments are closed.