If you want to beat online poker in 2021, and improve all areas of your life, make sure you are focused on the big three: Regular exercise; Good nutrition; Optimal sleep; Because I can promise you that the. Don't Play Every Hand/Do Fold More. Probably the number one mistake beginning poker players.
If you love poker, you probably have at least a couple of buddies that share your passion. You gather once a week, have some beers with snacks, and spend hours playing your favorite game. It’s never about the money in such an environment. It’s a matter of pride, and of course, the right to brag until the next time you meet on the table.
The casual nature of home games makes them different from the play in a casino or online. Usually, all players are way looser, there’s more bluffing, and people mostly have fun. If you want to beat them, you need the right strategy. In this article, I can give you seven tips that would help most of you defeat your friends in poker games.
Before I begin, I would like to say that I exclude home games that are actually pretty serious. Like, hiring a house with security and collecting rake serious. I will be talking mostly about games between friends, where the stakes are small, and the main point is to enjoy a good night with your pals.
Don’t Be Afraid to Bet Big with Strong Hands
In standard poker games, it’s not always easy to get the best out of your strong hands. Sometimes you have to slow play or value bet to get something at all. Most players are cautious with their money, and unless they hit something too, your best hands go to waste.
Fortunately, this is not the case when you play home games. Most of your buddies will chase draws, call with bottom pairs, and all kinds of trash. Also, they will tend to overplay hands like a top pair with a weak kicker all the time.
This is why you shouldn’t be afraid to put on some pressure and bet big. After all, your main target with a strong hand is to build a large pot and win a lot of money. You have the perfect conditions to achieve that, especially pre-flop and on the flop. People are more than willing to pay too much with mediocre hands in these phases of the game.
There are some exceptions, of course. If you are facing only one or two opponents, you could try to slow down a bit, especially if they play tight.
Avoid Bluffing
This one is connected to the previous tip, and the logic behind it is very similar. The players you’re facing in home games will be loose and won’t really care if they are going to lose a couple of bucks. It’s about having fun, and the action is the best way to enjoy poker.
Obviously, you should have that in mind when you consider making a bluff. I’m not saying you should never do so, but be careful. Chances are, someone will call you with a semi-decent hand.
If you insist on bluffing, here are a couple of things that will help you recognize if the timing is right:
- Number of players: if you are facing more than two players, you should never bluff. If the number is two exactly, you should almost never bluff. Being heads-up is the best option.
- Street: as already mentioned, the flop and the pre-flop are where people are simply not folding. If they miss on the turn or on the river, you could actually get them to fold every now and then.
- Position: always bluff when playing last. This will give you the chance for a second or even third barrel more often if your initial attempt fails.
Still, bluffing is almost always wrong in home games, so make sure to avoid it most of the time.
See Many Cheap Flops with Speculative Hands
Hands like low pairs or suited connectors work best when you face a lot of opponents. The reason is simple. When they hit something, it’s usually big, and you want many people playing.
This is why home games are the perfect environment for such hands. You will often be able to see a cheap flop. Furthermore, a lot of people will be willing to pay good money to see your sets, straights, and flushes.
You should be trying to reach the flop for the price of a couple of blinds max, especially from late position. This will give you the opportunity to see many flops, and sometimes even one big hit could be enough in home games. Getting a straight or flush against a couple of players has brought me my biggest pots.
That doesn’t mean you should try to reach the flop at all costs, though. Remember, the trick is to get there cheaply.
Don’t Try to Steal the Blinds Too Much
Stealing the blinds is essential in most serious poker games where you are looking for all the small edges you can find. They help you win some cash every now and then, but also balance your ranges. Your opponents will never know if you are stealing or holding a strong hand. This helps a lot in the long run.
Well, forget about the first paragraph if you’re playing against your friends. First of all, it would be close to impossible to steal the blinds. People will be limping, calling raises…you almost never have a good opportunity to do it.
On top of that, your image doesn’t really matter. Okay, if you play like a nit or like a maniac, most people will notice. Everything in between appears the same to the regular guy who’s had a couple of beers and doesn’t care much.
Finally, it’s pointless to steal the blinds because that’s simply not the way to beat your buddies. The big pots and the major mistakes are the main factors in such situations. There will be situations where you can win a couple of buy-ins, and that will make the difference at the end of the day.
Don’t Compete for Every Pot
Since you will see all kinds of stupid plays when going against your pals, you will be tempted to contest most of the pots. It’s only natural because every single hand feels like an opportunity to win big.
While this is true to an extent, it doesn’t mean you should play trash and chase stuff like gutshots or backdoor flushes. If you start doing it, you’re no different than anyone else on the table.
The key to home games is to find the best balance between taking enough chances and not making too many mistakes. To achieve that, you should restrict yourself from trying to win each and every hand.
Don’t Overplay Strong Preflop Hands
The likes of aces and kings are the strongest pre-flop hands and might bring you a lot of money. However, they are just a pair if they don’t improve after the flop. And since you will often face multiple opponents on the flop, you should always be careful.
How To Beat Poker Machine
Don’t overcommit. The best approach would be to play big pairs very aggressively before the flop. It will give you a chance to actually narrow down the field to only one or two players. At the same time, you will be building a large pot while you’re ahead. These are your two main goals, and it’s worth the risk winning a small pot if everybody folds.
If the opposite happens and you face a couple of people on the flop, you should slow the tempo. Check what the board is, evaluate your chances, and don’t feel obliged to go all the way on only a single pair, even if it is aces.
Don’t Get (Too) Drunk
All the tips so far have been related to your poker strategy, so I decided to close the list with a more general bit of advice. Having a drink or two is obviously part of the experience when playing with friends. There’s nothing wrong with that, unless you go too far.
First of all, getting wasted is rarely a good idea. If you mix it with gambling, it gets even worse. It will drastically reduce your chances of beating your friends.
On top of that, you could end up being the annoying guy that spoils the fun of the whole group. Stuff like not waiting for your turn, spilling stuff on the table, and becoming grumpy are not cool. Don’t be that guy.
Final Words
The tips in this post should certainly help you beat your buddies. However, don’t forget that home games are meant to be fun. Don’t take them too seriously and don’t get obsessed with winning. This will ruin the whole thing for you and your pals.
You can enjoy the evening, be casual about it, and still go home ahead most of the time.
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.The online poker community currently faces a new threat due to the growing number of bots. These bots are programmed to play poker flawlessly based on computer-processed calculations and an analysis of their opponents’ moves. Naturally, many poker players are now hesitant to play on the online poker rooms that a software playing on behalf of a human can beat them easily and win away their cash. In order to safeguard the players and avoid losing their active users, the poker platforms are taking various measures to prevent the bots from hampering their business too. However, considering that these platforms are still a good way to win money through poker, a large section of the players are looking for ways to beat the bots rather than just quit playing.
How can you recognise a bot?
In an online poker room, recognizing a bot is actually easy if one knows what to look for. One of the problems in recognising bots is that most players get defeated by them before even realising that they are facing a bot. However, a bot can actually be identified from its behaviour and beaten.
- Similarly-timed decisions: As the bots are just computer software, they tend to make their decisions at a fixed timing. This is simply because bots only need a short amount of time for processing and it doesn’t vary much. By observing the timings, it is possible to recognise a bot. The same method can also be used to identify the ring bots because if a group of players at a table need exactly the same amount of time to make their decisions, it is quite likely that they are actually bots.
- Unresponsiveness in chats: Usually, human players respond in the chat when spoken to. However, the bots aren’t programmed to converse. They can neither understand what’s being said to them nor respond. Hence, an easy way to detect a bot is to type something directed at the suspected account in chat and check if it responds.
- Identical sizes of bets: The bots are typically programmed to act in a certain way. Unlike humans, bots don’t actively vary in their behaviour a lot. A bot would typically make bets of similar amounts on every turn. This can act as a valuable hint in detecting the bots too. Other than the bets, the lines used by the bots are too similar and repeated to be simply coincidence.
- Constant aggression: Quite often, the bots play in a very aggressive manner. This is because while humans may be afraid of losing money, bots do not even understand the concept of money. They are just programmed with specific rules and strategies to follow. As bots generally have a high success rate, the programmers tend to design them to place large bets. The aggressiveness and effectiveness of the bots’ playstyle are also one of the factors that enable them to win the games quickly.
Bots are weak
Despite how effective bots are and all the advantages they have over human players, most bots are weak. Very few bots have been able to build a good track record of winning the mid-limit or high-limit games. As mentioned earlier, a player can beat a bot once he knows it is a bot. This means that bots are actually beatable with the right strategy. As long as a bot isn’t detected as one, it can seem to be strong. Moreover, most of the reliable online poker rooms deploy security systems to detect and ban bots. In many cases, this gives the real players an advantage if a bot gets banned and is replaced by a weaker player.
Is beating a bot possible?
Beating a bot isn’t that hard for the experienced players. The reason why most bots are weak is that in order to develop a really powerful bot, the developer would have to be an expert at poker as well as coding. As such programmers are quite limited in number, the probability of facing an unbeatable bot is very low. Most of the bots have certain holes in their playing strategies. The human players can look out for these holes and exploit them to defeat the bots.
One of the common holes in the strategies used by the bots is that they cannot detect the changes in bet sizing soon enough. Hence, if the player facing the bot keeps on changing the size, the bot would have no clue and would end up making mistakes. However, this technique does not work on all bots as each bot is programmed differently.
Are bots inherently bad?
Bad Poker Beats
Whether bots are to be considered as something bad depends on the rules of the poker site where they are being used. While some poker sites do allow the use of bots, others do not. In many cases, the poker sites which do not allow bots deploy countermeasures which ensure that the bots wouldn’t win. They make use of the flaw common among almost every bot, i.e., they function in a predictable way. The poker sites have come up with various codes and calculations to benefit the human players. If a player reads and understands these calculations before the game, he can easily exploit the defects created by the site to prevent the bots from winning.
How To Beat Poker Bots
However, there are poker sites which allow people to use bots as long as they do not cheat by colluding. Collusion is a technique through which a set of bots share their cards with each other and work together to defeat their opponent.