4 Texas Hold’em Practical Skills: Catch Me If You Can(Episode 3)

This is the last episode of Practical Skills in Texas Hold’em. I believe that you already have a decent understanding of hand selection, a quarter betting amount strategy, and insurance. Though to become a pro who’s capable of handling every situation, we ought to keep improving our games. This episode will be focusing on how the pros approach the game.

• Watch Episode 1 Here: 4 Texas Hold’em Practical Skills, Moves Of The Pros! 
• Watch Episode 2 Here: 4 Texas Hold’em Practical Skills: Insurance!
• Watch More Texas Hold’em Poker Strategy: Poker Strategy

Texas Hold’em Practical Skills 4 | How To Make Bluff Works

Today we will be focusing on one skill only, which is making bluffs. Those who have read our previous articles know that I’ve talked to a pro before and he told me a lot about his games and how he manage to use bluffs during them. Either making a continuation bet or check-raise and letting the others think that they ran into an ambush, the pro makes bluffs based on his tactics and strategy plus his patience. That’s why he’s successful.

Before we go deeper into the skills of bluffing, I want to share the process of how the pro shape his image on the table. The process is: honest player→ aggressive player→ small card player→lose sometimes→honest player. This may seem complicated to you but it’s a complete setup strategy. Though once you have mastered it, you may decide how your process may be.

Texas Hold’em Practical Skills Step 1: Honest Player!

First of all, we need to pretend to be a player who’s lack of experience. New players have no patience and no guts to gamble so they will only join the game when they are holding a good hand. So let us start by playing with good hands only. Fold it pre-flop as long as we don’t have the top 5 hands or pairs. This action accomplishes two things, one is that we uphold a higher winning percentage when we are in the game, and two is that others will think you are a fish and easy to gain leverage from you. That’s what we aimed for.

Texas Hold’em Practical Skills Step 2: Be As Aggressive As You Can Be!

When most of the players on the table take you as a fish, then the first step of the entire process is complete. Now we will switch the strategy into step two: aggressive player. We need to attack every street of the game including pre-flop, flop, turn, and river.

We wish to gain two influences over this change. First, others will think that you have lost your patience. Since there are not many actions in the early stage of the game so you are now raising and seeking actions. Therefore they will maintain their judgment that you are a fish. Second is that since you are raising no matter what you are holding, others may not be able to tell how strong your hands are. Under these circumstances, most of the players will not choose to go crazy with you. So you may win more pots without showing what your actual cards are. Though we need to be careful with step 2 and not do it too long since attacking mode comes with a risk. Also, we have to look out and don’t go all in too often.

Texas Hold’em Practical Skills Step 3:  Rebel And Play Small Cards!

The third step is about making our opponents more confused. We change our hand selection to only play with small card hands. So what do we do when we have a strong hand, should we fold? Yes, you should ladies and gentlemen. I know this request is crazy but we do this to set up an image for us.

Though why are we doing this? The purpose is to let others think that we are running into an obstacle, as a new players who lost their patience and directions so we are playing all sorts of hands. Since we are playing small cards only, we won’t be attending too many games so our losses will be small, also since we will lose more often, our opponents will think that we are at the dead end.

Texas Hold’em Practical Skills Step 4: Give Up When You Know You Have An Advantage Over Him!

As our sub-topic has shown, we need to give up on some pots even though we know we are at a huge advantage or we can bluff our way out. This is also one of the techniques not all can accept. Most of us think that giving up on a for-sure winning pot doesn’t make any sense, yet this will for sure mess up what other people think of us, and that’s what we are aiming for.

As for the hand selection, we may choose those that we are comfortable playing with and call the bet to see the flop. Once we are on the flop, we need to act like we really meant it. We need to make them think there’s nothing left in our bag that can defeat them. So we have to lose to them in purpose for a while. This will increase the confidence of our opponent and also they will think that we’re cracked and easy to get picked on.

Texas Hold’em Practical Skills Step 5:  Wait For Them To Fall Into Your Trap!

After we go through the previous 4 steps, every player on the table will definitely see us as a fish whos’ ready to be cooked on the table. Later on, we only have to wait for the time we get an actual hand and take all of them to value town.

Since we are 100% sure what others may think of us, we simply have to return to step one and be an honest players. No one knows what we gave up in steps 3 and 4 so they will simply think that now we are giving out free money on the table. They won’t think of us as knowing the game well so they will let their guard down.

So when we go back to being an honest players, all our moves in our opponent’s eyes will not be logical at all. They will think that we are acting out of emotion so there’s less chance we get a real hand. So they will be calling our bet easily even when we make check-raise and mini-raise, the moves that seem strong if the one who makes them are regular players. Once they fall for it, we gain our profit. That’s the pro’s way.

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Conclusion

That’s all for today. Now we’ve introduced every practical poker skill in the game. The last one is about acting mostly, from a naive player to a pro who set up traps all the way. Make sure others remember the image you’ve lost and take advantage of it. Thank you all for reading and I will see you next time.