If you are going to play for the first time in a live casino or poker room, there are a few rules and peculiarities that you must know. I’m going to give you these particularities related to life, before that, remember to subscribe to the channel if you haven’t done so. This will allow you to receive my next videos for free and make sure you activate the little “bell” button next to the “subscribe” button because if you don’t activate this “bell” you won’t receive the new video. First of all, remember that an online table and a live table are the same things. And don’t go thinking that you have to do it differently because of your life. Don’t think “Oh yeah, it’s life, it’s a different game”. No! Use your usual online range of hands. Here are four unique live poker mistakes that online players tend to make the first few times they go to a casino or poker room:
The Stringbet
Yes, you heard me right, you little rascal: the Stringbet! String as in a thong. And bet as in a bet. A string bet is an act of placing chips one after the other. The rule of thumb is that the first chip you put in will be counted as your bet. For example, if you wanted to bet 300, but you started betting 100 and then 100 and then 100. The dealer will rightly count the first chip you put in as your bet at 100.
How do you avoid Stringbet? How do you avoid doing it and I can tell you that you will do it, I have done it. We’ve all done it and you will do it again! You must avoid it. It can mess up your whole move. You plan to bet so much. In the end, it forces you to bet so little and it’s going to make you angry, it’s also going to change the game of the shorthand. And so, it’s not at all to your advantage that this happens. You have to avoid it. My technique, my main method here is simply to announce your bet. It sounds obvious and yet few people do it.
Wait for your turn
Why do we often play before our turn in life? Because online, when you are used to playing online, you are helped: the Call/Check/Raise buttons will be displayed when it’s your turn to play, they won’t be displayed any other way, so you can’t make a mistake, you can’t, for example, make a mistake and it will finally raise before your turn. No, it will wait until it is our turn to raise.
How to avoid paying before your turn? You have to raise your head a bit like in soccer. When we want to make decisive passes in soccer, we are taught and I remember it because when I was a kid, I was in a soccer club for 6 months (I lasted 6 months!), and I was a centre forward in the junior category. I was in front of the goal. And I was waiting for the pass, that’s what I was doing. We used to go to games on Saturdays in the villages around, we took 11.0 I was completely disgusted. If I had looked up, I would have only taken 11.1’s and things like that.
If you look up, you’ll see that not everybody has played before you and you have to wait until the person before you has played before you start playing. I advise you and this is very, very important to look at your cards only when it’s your turn to play when the person who is just to your right has finished playing and not before because it will condition you in a mood that will be according to the cards that you have received. Imagine you haven’t had a card in an hour and now you have a nice little R10, you’ll want to play it. And if there’s a raise in front of you, you’ll probably have to fold it. The problem is that having looked at it before the raise, you’re going to be so conditioned to play it that you’re going to have a hard time reversing your decision to play it. What you need to do is look at the spot that’s coming up, that is, the situation that’s going to come up, and think about what you would play with now and how you would play them, if you raise this card or that card. So, you take the time to think while they are playing. It’s up to you to play now. You raise your cards, and you decide what you’re going to do.
Straddle-Option
This is only for cash games; it doesn’t exist in tournaments. It’s something you’ll only find in live, real cash games. It’s like a third blind. You can put it in when you’re the person on the left of the BB when you haven’t received the cards yet when they haven’t been dealt yet, you put in an option, it’s necessarily twice the blind so if you’re in a 2/4-euro blind, the option is 8 euros. So, you have put 8 Euros in the dark in a way since you don’t know your cards yet. On the other hand, it will allow you to play the last preflop: it will not be up to you to play right away, it will be up to the person on your left, so you shift the UTG (under the gun) position which is a bit tricky, you transform it into the last call position but it has a cost: 8 euros which are alive, they will allow you if everyone limps (pays the blind) minimum (8 euros) to get in the hand, or make a multiple of 8 euros to raise. Your 8 Euros will still come in handy later on, it’s not an ante, an imposition, it’s a live blind.
There are other little rules and peculiarities of live poker. Here, I’ve given you the 4 main ones today. Let’s recap:
- Be careful with the Stringbet: announce or bet all at once.
- Don’t play before your turn: raise your head and look at what’s happening on your right.
- Sit up: when you are playing and you feel like getting up from the table, it’s OK even when you are tilted to do so but try to always wait until you are at the beginning of the call or in the middle of the call so that you can keep and play your end positions and not miss your blinds too.
- Especially for live cash game players, stop Options because it’s a losing proposition in the long run.
