Poker Full Ring Strategy
Full ring micro stakes no limit Hold’em is the single most popular variety of cash game poker on the internet. This is where some players go to start out, others go to live, and yet others go to die. As easy as these games are to beat, they can also be incredibly boring. You do not need to have an understanding of incredibly complex strategies in order to beat the full ring micro stakes games. The majority of your opponents won’t be better than very average at best. This will work to your advantage if, and only if, you know how players in these games think.
Full ring cash games allows a player to play tight by being conservative with their moves and holding out and only committing when a very strong hand comes their way. Since the blinds are paid more frequently and there are fewer players in shorthanded games, starting hand values go up significantly. The exact ranges you open-raise with, call with, and 3bet with will vary from game to game. For instance, I open all pocket pairs from UTG in a 6max game but typically only open 66+ from UTG in a full ring online game. This is the starting hand chart I suggest using for full ring and live players. And for 6max players I suggest this one. In full-ring No-Limit Hold'em, deciding which hands to play and which hands to fold is the single most important factor when you first learn to play winning poker. You may only be making flop, turn and river decisions once or twice an orbit but you will be making pre-flop decisions every single hand. No Limit Texas Hold'em is the most popular poker game in the world, and it is played in both tournament and cash game form. This page links to strategy articles for No Limit Hold'em cash game players, although many of the principles can apply to No Limit Hold'em tournament strategy as well. With a full ring table, there are as many unique situations as there are seats. We’ll tackle the most basic in this breakdown of poker hands, and the appropriate time for their use. Depending on your order in the rigid betting pattern, you’ll need to take the strength of your cards into account.
Your average competition is going to look for every opportunity to slow play, won’t ever be able to fold a draw or a big pocket pair, and so on and so forth. It can’t be emphasized enough, these are the easiest cash games out there. The only thing better than playing full ring micro stakes cash game players is playing a tournament player in a cash game. Strategy is quite basic in these games and can be applied over and over again with relative ease.
Pre-Flop Strategy
Pre-flop strategy in any full ring game is going to be more passive than its 6-max counterpart. Whereas 6-max games are full of relentless aggression and action, the full ring tables are often quite slow in comparison. You will see a lot of limps, weak raises, loose calls, and so on and so forth. There are a lot of people who simply want to see the flop, just as there is in almost any poker game. Certain plays and moves will allow you to identify a player as particularly inexperienced. Some of the things to look out for at the table include open limping, check calling (frequently), check folding (frequently), obvious check raises for value, min raises, and folds to small river bets. These plays are all indications of someone who is thinking on either level one or two. In poker, the first level of thinking is “what do I have?” This means that the players are giving consideration to, and only to, the hand that they are holding. If their cards don’t connect with the board, level one thinkers disregard the possibility that you missed as well. They give up easily when they miss, and die hard when they hit. Level one thinkers are the exact people who you want to get involved with pre-flop because they will be exceptionally easy to beat post-flop.
For straightforward pre-flop strategy in these games, position and value are everything. There aren’t too many poker games were position is not a valuable asset, so you should look to play as many pots in late position as possible. In later position, calling with suited connectors, small pocket pairs, and other similar hands is wildly profitable. Because of the caliber of your opponent, you will know exactly where you are and it will be incredibly easy to either make plays or extract value. In addition to playing hands in position, you should also be looking to maximize total value out of everything that you have. It is a major mistake to let money slip out of your hands unnecessarily, particularly in these games.
Poker Full Ring Strategy For Beginners
As mentioned previously, players in these games tend to hate folding with a passion. Because of this, it only makes sense to squeeze out every nickel and dime possible when you have a strong hand pre-flop. The best way to do this is to always make sure that you are raising with a strong hand, and making even larger raises when there are limpers and/or someone who won’t fold anything. This means that pocket aces could warrant a 6x big blind raise, whereas AJ might only call for a 4x or 5x open raise. Your opponents won’t often be in the mood to fold pre-flop, so this will allow you to capitalize on their weakness by making larger pre-flop raises. The key to effectively earning some extra pre-flop money is being able to tell which players can and which players can’t fold their hands. If you are facing an absolute rock who seems to only have a fold button, there is no use in over betting your strong hands. If you just saw someone call a 3 bet with ATos out of position, however, you will know that you can make some extra money.
Poker Full Ring Strategy Chart
Actual bet sizing in these games is very formula oriented. In small stakes and larger limit games, the other players are apt to pick up on your betting patterns, but micro stakes full ring players won’t bat an eye if you raise 5x this time and 4x the next. As such, you can stick to whatever system you would like without fear of your opponents breaking the code. For some very basic bet sizing, follow these guidelines…
A 4x open raise with any pocket pair or QK/AJ+
A 5x or 6x open raise with JJ+ or AQ+
A re-raise of 4x + 1bb per limper, changing this to 5x when possible
As you can see, these formulas are very simplistic with minimal variables. Needless to say, post-flop play won’t be quite as easy.
Post-Flop Strategy
Post-flop play is never going to be all that complicated in micro stakes full ring games. Most players are going to give their hand away at one point or another, making it easy to give up when you are beat and maximize value when you are ahead.
The flop check raise is one of the most popular moves among bad micro stakes full ring players. This play is always one of two things, either a bluff or a monster hand. More likely than not, however, the player has something that they perceive as strong. Micro stakes players tend to shy away from running even the smallest of bluffs, so you can safely assume that implied strength is actual strength. Hands tend to be played with a strong amount of transparency in these games. If you are going to continue on with a hand after being check raised, you should either have a strong hand yourself or be sure that your opponent is weak.
Players in these games love to call down with their draws and make it completely obvious when they hit. The best way to play a strong hand on a draw heavy board is to bet hard. If you flop a set and feel that the other player could easily be on a straight or flush draw, you should bet near the pot on every street. This will allow you to maximize value as it is unlikely that most opponents will be able to locate the fold button with any sort of draw. If the draw hits on the river, you will know that you can give up when they make a massive overbet or suddenly show aggression that had not previously existed. Again, the most obvious hand is also the most likely. For every time that someone successfully bluffs you in one of these spots, there will be 25 times where they actually hit their hand.
Allowing the other player to do the betting is a great way to extract maximum value with minimal effort. If you flop a decent to strong hand in position, you can safely call down lead bets from the other player without needing to do anything complicated. A lot of players will either make bluffs on multiple streets or will incorrectly assume that their hands are good, despite you calling them down. An effective strategy is to call the flop, call the turn, and make a raise on the river. In these spots, your opponent will often times feel that they have too much invested to ever fold their hand. You don’t need to get tricky with deception when your opponent won’t have a clue what you are doing. Deep thinking is only beneficial if the other player can really think, and this is not something that you will run into at most micro stakes full ring tables.
Carl “The Dean” Sampson is a well known poker player and author, and is currently a Cake Poker sponsored pro. Carl will be contributing to Poker News Daily on a regular basis, and you can also read Carl’s blog on his website PokerSharkpool.com
With the preponderance of six-max ring games now dominating the online scene, there doesn’t seem to be an awful lot of theory on full ring games with between eight and ten players. At the lower stakes, good sound solid play will still get the money; but as you move up and your opponents are more alert you will definitely need to think about adding some randomisation to your play.
I will refer to the medium stakes levels of NL400 up to and including NL1000. Whilst it is certainly correct to randomise your play further up the ladder, many players who are coming up from NL100 and NL200 are doing so with their same old predictable game and their results are suffering because of it.
Let us take a look at an example from NL600 where having some randomisation will help you. You are sitting in the hijack seat with the 10d-9d and this nine-handed table has been playing very tight so far. The player who is in the UTG+1seat and the most active player on the table opens for $18 while sitting on a $450 stack.
It is folded to you, and in most cases you have a straightforward fold here: your position isn’t good and neither is your hand. You have a speculative hand that is basically designed for deep stack poker, and although you have a $600 stack (100BB), your opponent is in fact sitting on less so your effective stack is only $450 unless another player to your left with a bigger stack decides to get involved.
Re-raising is obviously out of the question – while re-raising does in fact serve the purpose of injecting randomisation into your play, it is clearly overstepping the mark to do so here, especially in a full ring game.
You have a choice between calling and folding, but you should not be calling many raises from this position anyway, as you have several players behind you who are still to speak, and it only takes one of them to raise again and you will be forced to fold and never have the chance to see the flop. But if you can ascertain that the opening raiser is somewhat aggressive then you can possibly call this bet around 20% of the time for randomisation purposes. As you begin to move up through the levels then you should at least start to consider sometimes calling raises like these, especially if the players to your left are less inclined to enter with a raise.
Why do you need to randomise your play? I would have thought that this question was rather obvious: whenever you enter the pot in this situation, you simply cannot let your opponents narrow down your range to just a handful of possibilities! In fact it would be better to three-bet with the suited connector here every once in a while than allow yourself to be read in this way.
Now I fully realise that there are many players out there who under no circumstances whatsoever would ever contemplate calling a raise with a hand like this even if the circumstances were right. There is nothing inherently wrong with this style of play, and never getting involved from the hijack with a hand like 10d-9d to a raise from a rather active player is certainly not bad poker.
In fact there are many players who firmly believe that image plays are of far less importance in online poker. But please remember that when you make a play of this nature then you are essentially not doing so to create an image as such but to randomise your play. While it can be argued that this all ties in with your table image, the primary objective is to create a situation in which your play cannot easily be interpreted by your opponents.
Also it is the very nature of online poker that makes randomisation so critical as you enter the mid-stakes levels and beyond. Encountering more and more players who are using tracking software or who have significant amounts of data on you is going to leave you severely handicapped if you fail to randomise.
So whether you agree with the play in the example or not, this is something that you are really going to have to think about at some stage as you move up from the NL100 and NL200 levels.
Carl “The Dean” Sampson is sponsored by Cake Poker and can be seen at www.cakepoker.com/thedean and at www.pokersharkpool.com