Are you a fan of poker? Yeah? You’ve watched Gus Hansen and Scotty Nguyen and if you truly loved poker enough you would make frequent poker runs to the felt. With a running aces concept in mind you would constantly be encouraging other to chase and steal high suited cards. You would be constantly scaring of high pocket pairs and would continually get everyone to fold their hands when you made a possible hand.
You may think this is a great way to play poker, but this is played in a very aggressive manner and isn’t actually all that profitable. Most of the time you will simply lose money scaring people off with your massive bets, and most of the time you will lose even with the best of hands. How then can you make money playing afapoker this aggressive? How can you win using a winning poker strategy and actually have a positive EV over your opponents?
The answer is simply this: you never want people to call you, but you want people to take a lot of poker cards from you. You will either have great pockets or strong hands, and by scaring people off your strong hands, you might be able to get them to take a lot of flops whilst you are holding a great hand. If you are called you will still usually win the hand because your opponents won’t be taking any cards.
This is the essence of the aul session. To churn a pot out without the certainty of a great hand is a much smarter strategy for the tight player, and in my experience it works well against both tight and loose adventures. However, I have been on the other side of the aul session. I have been the one to erupt in a massive poker pot, only to see my aul session get rivered by a mediocre hand when it could have easily folded.
This is the downside of playing auls sessions, the poker fish come out and play all your sessions. You’re not getting the full experience as a tight player, you’re not experiencing the anxiety of losing a large pot, or the disappointment of folding a good hand. These are all emotions you don’t want to be tied up in at a tough poker table.
Get away from the poker fish…
If you are going to make a succeedful aul strategy, you are going to need to master your emotions. You are going to need to be able to handle your own frugal feelings, and control your own emotions apart from the frugal feelings of your opponents. If you are great at handling your emotions in poker, you are going to be much better than most players in most situations. Most players simply do not know how to deal with the frugal feelings that get the better of them in stressful situations. They resort to the offer of free money in many situations where they would be better off just folding – a desperation move if you are a poker player.
Don’t be a desperation poker player! Make sure that at every phase of the game you are behaving as a confident poker player. Do not be afraid to be aggressive, be aggressive when you have a great hand, and be aggressive when you want a pot. Try to be the first person in the pot when you want a pot, and be the last person to call someone else’s all-in bet when you have a hand good enough to win. Think about the long run of the game. Be the fish that lives in the bowl you were trying to bubble.
Example:
Late in a tournament Hachem comes in to a mediocre middle position. He has $amd in the big blind. Players drop in and out. crampons is about to drop, but he doesn’t want to let anyone know that he is limping in.
Finally, the blinds are getting up there and the action is about to pick up. There is one player in the middle position who has about $7k. Everyone folds to him. Hachem moves all-in. The player folds instantly. Hachem how?
That’s where a lot of players go wrong. They are willing to fold to someone who is acting like a fish. They aren’t going to fold to a solid player. Hachem is playing low pocket pairs, and he has identified that the player is playing pretty loose. He knows that the player probably has something good.
Hachem knows that the chances of this happening are really, really low. But, he is playing so aggressively that he is forced to take this gamble.
The good news is that the other players at the table are probably going to fold. Even though he did take a gamble, it is probably still not a good bet. If you are a multimillion dollar kind of guy, you can afford to call someone who is just out here for a cheap seat.