Know your Competition

As mentioned in the last element, opponent knowledge is paramount to all aspects of winning poker play but it does take on a different dynamic when set mining. Experienced and, therefore, observant foes are well aware of this tactic and will realize that you did not raise pre-flop so if you get too frisky after the flop they are able to get away from many hands. There is nothing more frustrating than hitting a set on the flop, betting too big and having all opponents muck their hands. If you hit the “Mother Lode” then come out of the mine with some gold! On the flip side of losing your customers is to know, or at least feel fairly certain, that you have an opponent or two that simply cannot lay a decent hand down regardless of the action. Weak, calling stations are a set miner’s delight. They are passive pre-flop (good, you can get in cheap) and when they hit a little piece of the flop, such as making middle pair, will not release that hand if you make the bets reasonable.

Set mining can be fun and rewarding if approached with caution and discipline. You must possess the discipline to release your unimproved small pairs when it appears that you are running uphill. When faced with this dilemma simply ask yourself why you played them to begin with … the answer should be in order to hit a set not to check, call all the way to the river against a superior hand. That is the exact behavior you want in your foes. Do not allow yourself to become one of them!!! marked cards

Knowing that statistically you will only be successful in making your set once out of every eight attempts tells you that it should only be attempted when the situation is right, not as your “every time you hold a small pair” default play.

Remember, if it becomes your default play then you just might become the canary in the mine.

You certainly do not want to utilize a poker strategy which, if abused, could have a

negative impact on your ability to chirp or hold onto your chips!

Since he just sat down at the table, I have no idea what he would have done. I don’t know whether he was familiar with his opponent’s playing style, so I’ve no idea what percentage of time he would have figured his opponent for a bluff. But if he read his opponent for a flush and assigned only a small percentage to the chance that his opponent was trying to steal the pot, folding still would have been the smart play.

The outcome of the hand is not important here. What matters is that the guy who misread – or more likely, really never even took a good look – at his opponent’s stack size, committed a very basic error. He didn’t look before he leaped. So eager was he to play his own hand for its intrinsic merit, he never considered what his opponent might be holding, nor did he account for the number of chips in his stack.

I’m just guessing, but I suspect that if this same opponent had been at the table for 15 minutes or longer when this confrontation happened, the results would have been quite different. The new player probably would have acclimated himself to the table, not jumped in with both barrels blazing, and taken the time so size up his opposition and have some rough idea of each opponent’s chip count.

Poker is unique among sports in that it has no warm-up period. Every other athletic endeavor has its own pre-game rituals of getting ready to play. But poker players don’t get dealt a few practice hands when they first sit down; they have to pony up real money and play it for all it’s worth.infrared contact lenses

Poker pro Barry Tanenbaum has said on more than one occasion that he likes to win the very first hand he plays. There are lots of reasons for this, but one of the more subtle ones is that it forces you to take a look around, scope out your opponents, and have a pretty clear idea of how your hand stacks up to your opponent before you commit an entire buy-in to it, even if that commitment is less than enthusiastic and made almost inadvertently.