No Limit Holdem Cash Game Strategies Online

Playing Aces

As I have told my students many times, there are major differences between online games and bricks and mortar cardroom poker. Success in one does not guarantee success in the other and experience of playing a certain form of poker in one environment is not necessarily going to help you in the other. But despite me saying this, there are in fact an awful lot of similarities between the two areas. Playing No Limit Hold’em online is very similar to playing No Limit Hold’em in a live environment because at the end of the day, you are still playing No Limit Hold’em.

It is like comparing Rugby League with Rugby Union, two different games but it is still Rugby. I am not sure about the correctness of that analogy but I am sure that you get my drift. As long as you are aware that the two environments are very similar but not identical and you can prepare yourself for those differences then you will be fine.

In this series of articles, my editor has asked me to talk about No Limit Cash game strategies in an online environment. The way that I will deal with this will be to break it down into various hands over the coming months and ways to play those hands that would apply to online poker and also to live poker for that matter. I will start the series by taking a look at the “holy grail” of pre-flop hold’em hands….. pocket aces!

If you thought that the way to play pocket rockets was easy and straight forward all because they are the pre-flop nuts then you could not be more wrong. In a way, weak players and novices play junk hands much better than what they do good hands and yet it is hands like these that many novices wait for. Junk hands are very easy to play…you simply fold them and stay out of trouble. You can be as good as a top pro when you are folding the same hands that they would be folding but suddenly you get dealt a hand that is so strong that you are forced to get involved with it.

If you thought that playing aces was easy then just take a close look at this list of criteria that can dramatically define what is the correct play with this one hand alone before the flop.

What is your position?

What are the tendencies of the other players at the table?

How deep is your stack?

How deep are your opponents stacks?

What kind of action has there been so far in this hand?
What is your table image?

What level are you playing at?

This list is by no means exhaustive but these seven criteria contribute mainly to what you need to consider when you play aces or any other hand for that matter. In this article I am only going to be looking at pre-flop play with the rockets as flop play opens up a whole plethora of possibilities and this means that there simply would not be enough space left in this article to do it justice. So I am going to be taking a look at each one of those seven criteria not just individually but also as a whole group.

What links every single one of these seven criteria is that each of them are linked to the others in very subtle ways. Your opponents tendencies for instance contribute greatly to how you play aces pre-flop and this links with all of the other criteria. It is this that confuses many people and certainly many of my students as they are searching for set answers which simply cannot be given.

What I do with aces in early, middle or late position in a cash game is dependent on all of these factors to a certain extent. For instance if I am dealt aces under the gun and the table is very aggressive then I may just limp in with the aces knowing that there will certainly be a raise after me or likewise if there is not only a lot of raising going off but also pre-flop re-raising then I may just play them straight forwardly and raise before the flop.

But if I am playing in an extremely tight game with say a very aggressive player on the button then I may just limp with them and hope to get it heads up with an aggressive player who may not slow down fast enough to know that he was behind from the get go. Of course always raising with the pocket rockets could never be considered to be wrong and this is by far the most straight forward play and the play that I would recommend to any novice.

Too many players get involved in fancy plays when straight forward play is best most of the time. If you are playing in a game where you need to produce fancy plays to get an edge or to use subtle psychological moves then you really ought to consider changing games. Many players and even professionals could do a lot better financially in their careers if they just dropped the ego factor and played in games with softer players.

This highlights one of the above factors clearly and that is to be aware of the level that you are playing at and the average calibre of player within that level and more importantly, what strategies to use to extract the most money out of those players. But even though I recommended that novices should always raise before the flop, raising can be the correct play most of the time even for the professionals.

Take the games that I play in for instance, I am playing very loose and aggressive which is my normal style. What this means is that if I raise with aces then all of the players that have been observing the game are certainly not going to be putting me on a hand as strong as that. It is a common fact in poker that betting and raising with a strong hand in a relatively straight forward manner can sometimes be the most deceptive play of all.

Too many players these days have viewed poker on television with all of the bluffs and moves that get shown but fail to take on board that this has all been compressed into a one hour program and that the best bits have been highlighted to make the most compulsive viewing. I swear that if you had to televise some of the cash games that I play in then the game would probably die off because it would be like literally watching the proverbial paint dry and especially for a newcomer to the game.

But getting back to the subject of table image for a minute, even if you do not play in a very loose aggressive style like me then you cannot get away from the fact that you will have a table image….everyone has. It is how the other players at the table are perceiving you at any given time based on how you have been playing and how you have been acting if the game is live.

You can be the tightest player on the table but yet if you have sat at that table and been dealt three consecutive premium hands and won every pot without a showdown then the chances are that your unsuspecting opponents are certainly not going to be taking you for a rock at this early stage. If you get dealt aces on the very next hand then don’t even think about trying to be cute with them because the chances are that you will get action.

This happened to me a while back, I had been betting and raising almost from the time that I had sat down. Non of the players knew me as I had not been on the site all that long. But I was on a real rush of hands for about thirty minutes and just when I thought that it could not continue, I get dealt aces!
So I raise to five times the big blind making it look like I am bullying and it is folded around to the big blind who goes all in for $900. When the cards are turned over, they had A-J. There was no way that they would have made this play had it not been for my table image or what my opponents perceived it to be.

How deep your stack is as well as your opponents is also another important factor in how you play aces. Let us say that an early position player raises to $30 in a $5-$10 No Limit Cash game and it is folded around to you on the button with two shiny jet black aces. Whether the correct play is to re-raise or to simply go all in is dependent on the size of your stack and also the size of your opponents as well.

If all you have left in your stack is $180 for example (that is a pitifully small amount to have on the table in a $5-$10 No Limit game but bear with me) then if you make a pot size re-raise to $100, you are then not going to have enough left in your stack to make a pot sized bet on the flop. So you may as well just stick it in before the flop and be done with it. When you are short stacked it is surprising how many players will call you with hands like A-10 and A-J simply because they perceive you to be pressing the panic button.

Obviously a situation like this is more akin to tournament play as any respectable cash game player will simply not remain on a table with only 18 big blinds. But the point is that you must take your stack size as well as the stack size of your opponent into consideration before deciding what to do with the aces.

The previous action in the hand is also another very important factor. If a player in middle position has open raised to six times the big blind which is too high in no limit play when compared to the blinds then I will take this type of raise to be made by a relatively inexperienced no limit player who does not understand bet sizing and that they would probably be happy taking the blinds. They could easily be the type of player that does not feel comfortable playing flops and especially if they have missed and another player to their left has position on them. So with a pre-flop raise as high as that then it is unlikely that anyone else on the table will call so I may just flat call and try to trap him for more money from the flop onwards, it all depended on how I felt about the situation at that time. But if it was raised by a player in early position and called in several spots then there is just no way that I will call this against this many opponents. I would put in a very big re-raise to knock out the callers and take the pot or get it heads up with the initial raiser but depending on the situation and my stack, I may also move all in.

So you can see just how complex the play of this one poker hand really is and we have not even discussed the various types of flops yet and the tendencies of the players and how they fit in with those flops. I once read an article by some “expert” that went something like this, “anyone can play strong hands because all you do is bet and raise”.

If only life were that simple and if it was indeed that simple then why do so many players bust out of tournaments and have to repeatedly buy back into cash games by over playing premium hands. I hope that this article has given you a little bit more to think about the next time that you see two big shiny aces staring back at you on that tiny screen. Because unless you play them correctly then the one hand that you have been waiting for just could be your undoing and especially in a game like No Limit Hold‘em.