Mar 07, 2019 Learning How to Lay Down a Strong Hand One of the hardest things to learn for new poker players is the concept of laying down a strong hand. By jacksadmin March 7, 2019, 1:32 pm 188 Views. Mar 18, 2017 Lake Tahoe’s best poker room can be found at Harvey’s. This 16 table poker room boasts of tables with automatic shufflers and chairs with fixed legs for the stability of the player during the game. The room opens at 10 am Monday thru Friday and 9 am on the weekends. Harvey’s has a smoke free atmosphere in the semi-enclosed room. The judges were given a list of 129 of the most popular poker books of all time and were asked to rate a maximum of 10 books: classics that cover everything from the maths to the mental side, the strategy to the psychology. 888 presents: the top 86 poker books of all time!
“What you don’t spend, you don’t have to earn,” is an adage as true at the poker table as it is outside of it. Or, to quote the oft-quoted Amarillo Slim Preston, “If you can’t fold the best hand you can’t play.”
Both adages speak to the art of making a big laydown, an act that can keep you alive in a poker tournament, keep money in your pocket in a cash game by deftly slipping out of a noose your opponent has fashioned for you, or make you feel like a fool or a complete wus when you fold the best hand because you were sitting on the saddle point of a decision and just couldn’t pull the trigger and call.
Thinking About Risk
When looking into the teeth of a big bet or raise and the pot is offering what appears to be the correct odds to call, it’s always important to assess what’s really at risk. It’s often your entire tournament life that’s up for grabs, and when that’s the case, your decision is bigger than just the results of this hand. You probably won’t win the tournament simply by making the right decision here regardless of the price you’re getting right now, because if you are eliminated, you have no chance at all.
In moments like these, many players seem oblivious to the fact that chip preservation is critical for tournament success. That’s not to suggest you should play scared. Far from it. You should never play scared poker. But you have to think through critical situations very carefully, and do so with an eye fixed on the element of risk versus the size of the reward. And if you decide the prize is worth the game, or decide that it isn’t, don’t be afraid to make your decision and act on it.
Are Smart Laydowns a Dying Art?
Some poker experts have opined that making a smart laydown is a dying art. For online poker players, there might be some truth to it. After all, if you’re in a smallish tournament online and you call and lose, it’s a simple matter to be back in action in seconds just by finding another tourney that’s getting ready to begin and buying in.
It’s different in a brick-and-mortar casino. Make a bad call, find yourself eliminated, and you’re faced with that humbling walk of shame from the table to the rail and out of the tournament area.
Poker expert Mike Caro is famous for asking this question at his seminars:
“Would you rather have $100,000 taken off your losses column or added to your wins at the end of the year?”
Mike’s point, of course, is that it makes no difference at all. Wins and losses have the same value, but many players spend much more time looking for ways to increase their wins than reduce their losses.
Calling Stations Bleed to Death
If you are the kind of poker player who never makes a big laydown, you are a calling station who usually calls even when the odds offered by the pot do not outweigh the cost to call. If that describes your play, opponents will value bet with hands that figure to be better than yours, lay down their marginal hands when you bets, and bleed you dry in the process.
In fact, if you find yourself slowly bleeding to death in too many poker tournaments, you can probably assume that you called too many hands that you really should have folded. You probably should have played the majority of your other hands more aggressively too, by raising rather than calling, but that’s a different topic altogether.
One path to improvement is to develop the discipline needed to make good laydowns while learning how to read your opponent for clues to help you discern whether your hand is good enough to win. Just feeling – or worse yet, hoping – you have a chance to win and then calling, is losing poker.
Great Laydowns Are Hard to Make
Assessing whether to call or fold is a better course of action is seldom easy and great laydowns are hard to make, but pot-limit and no-limit poker players often confront a tough laydown decision as part of their survival. But it’s important to realize that regardless of how savvy a player you are, you won’t be right all the time in a poker game, and that’s particularly true when deciding whether to fold or call based on incomplete information and your ability to decipher signs and signals from your opponent.
You’ll make errors here, and it helps to have a short memory. After all, it accomplishes nothing to beat yourself up over a misread and a bad decision. If you make an incorrect decision, just go on to the next hand. Vowing never to allow that to happen again is tantamount to taking the first step on that road to becoming a calling station.
Only players who never fold can avoid the indignity of laying down the best hand. But their fate is worse. They’ll call far more often with losing hands than they should, and call so often that they preclude themselves from ever becoming winning poker players regardless of how good the rest of their game might be.
Danger Signs
Danger signs are poker’s red flags that should raise the hair on the back of your neck. Whenever an opponent makes a very small raise, it’s often a sign he’s looking for a call. Check-raises usually foretell either a big hand or a semi-bluff designed to win the pot right there, albeit with a hand that often includes a draw to the nuts. While he may be bluffing, the frequency of his bluffs depends on his playing style, the relative difference in your chip stacks, the stage of the tournament, and whether you’re nearing the pay ladder of a tournament or already on it.
Betting Patterns
When an opponent does something unexpected, it always helps to review his betting pattern before deciding what you should do. If he called before the flop, or before and on the flop, and then check raises on a small, ragged board, he might have flopped or turned a set, and when that’s the case, whatever you’re holding is probably no good. If you persist in calling just to keep him honest, it will cost you a bundle over time, and even if you fold a hand that’s ahead, you figure to save money in the long run compared to the cost of continuing to call when you know you are beaten.
Respecting Pot Odds
When your opponent knows the game and understands pot odds, it can be helpful as you can use this information to understand where he’s coming from in a variety of situations. A player who knows pot odds will not overpay to draw for a flush or a straight unless he or she has reason to believe you can be driven off your hand with a big bluff on a subsequent betting round. But knowing that your opponent will pay to draw if the price is right but release a hand that isn’t receiving the correct odds to support a draw isn’t the entire answer.
Suppose you’ve made big bets on the flop and the turn with two suited cards on the board. You know your opponent respects pot odds and you made those big bets specifically to price him or her out of a draw. But when a third suited card comes on the river and your opponent bets, you have to ask yourself a couple of questions. The first, and easiest one, is whether your adversary has a flush.
Even when the answer is “no,” you have to ask yourself whether your opponent’s hand is a bluff or one that can beat your pair or two pair. You also have to decide how your opponent reads your game. If you’re seen as a loose, bluffy player, your opponent doesn’t need a real hand to make a big bet, because if he is correct in assuming that you don’t have much of a hand the pot can be stolen by representing a flush. But if you’re seen as a relatively tight, solid player, you’re probably beaten and might want to lay down your hand now, despite the investment you’ve already made in this pot.
Feeling Out Your Opponent
If your opponent is a snug player who is not prone to big raises without a real hand, you might just want to release your hand when he makes a big bet. Because your opponent has a tight image, he has earned a license to steal a pot or two every now and then. And when he makes a big bet into an otherwise non-threatening board, he is either stealing or he flopped a set.
When tight players make this move they will have a set much more often than not, and even though you can’t deduce precisely what they have and therefore can’t figure whether your opponent actually has a big hand or whether this is one of those rare big bluffs, you might want to step out of his or her way and protect your chips by waiting for a better opportunity to gamble.
Taking a Small Loss Early
You can also prevent getting yourself into thorny situations by taking a small loss early on in the hand. Suppose you raised with J-J or A-Q and are re-raised by a tough opponent. While it’s tempting to see the flop and find out where you stand, it’s also a door that can lead you right into a trap.
If you called with J-J but figure your opponent is reraising with hands that are better than your pair, you can find yourself in real difficulty. To begin with, any Ace or King on the flop spells trouble for you, and things might even be worse if the flop is small. While you have an overpair of Jacks, if your opponent re-raised before the flop with Queens, Kings, or Aces, you might be looking at a situation where you’re going to have to play for your entire stack against a hand that’s been ahead of yours from the get-go. Depending on how you read your opponent, the best course of action might have been to fold your hand before the flop, take a small hit, but go on to the next hand with your stack pretty much in place.
While your opponent might have been bluffing, he also might have you beaten, and the better part of valor is often to wait for a better opportunity to push all your chips to the center of the pot.
The ultimate “What should I do?” resolution depends on your opponent’s playing style, and if you’ve been at the table with him for any length of time, you should have some fix on the range of hands he will raise and re-raise with, and use that to determine your best course of action.
Conclusion
No one likes tossing away the best hand. But if you don’t make that mistake, you’ll make far more at the other end of the spectrum by burning through your chips with calls you know you really shouldn’t have made. There’s no way to make the correct play/laydown decision every time. And the closer the call is, the more errors you can expect to made.
But it’s still better than never making a good laydown. After all, part of poker, especially tournament poker, is chip preservation. Without chips you can’t play. And without chips saved by making good laydowns, you won’t have a sufficiently sized stack to get maximum value from hands where you know you have the best of it and are just itching to push your entire stack toward the center of the table.
By making good laydowns along the way, you stand a better chance of having to use both hands to push all your chips into the pot instead of just two fingers.
Related Lessons
By Lou Krieger
The author of many best-selling poker books, including “Hold’em Excellence” and “Poker for Dummies”. A true ambassador of the game and one of poker’s greatest ever teachers.
Video Poker is hands down one of the most popular casino games. Like slot machines, it’s an easy game to learn and play, however there’s more skill required that can significantly have a result in your game play. Whether you decide to keep all five cards you’ve been dealt or choose to discard them all, the choice is yours.
Since there are skills involved in playing, it’s important to not only understand the rules, but to learn some basic strategies that can help you become a better player. You also get to play alone, therefore there’s no need to communicate with a dealer or other people. When comparing the house edge to other electronic casino games, Video Poker is one, if not the lowest you’ll be able to find.
If you’re reading this article, you probably already know that Video Poker is a popular casino game, however what you may not know is that it wasn’t so popular when it was first introduced. With big changes made over the years from its release date, the game quickly gained in popularity. In this article you’ll learn about the best video poker games to play, the odds as well as the payouts.
Best Video Poker Games
In case you don’t know, there’s a lot of variations to Video Poker. For example, here at Caesars Casino online we offer two different versions, Jacks or Better and Deuces Wild. Keep in mind, these are just two different ones as there’s a whole lot more of them out there. With that in mind, we’ll be going over the 2 Best Video Poker Games.
- Jacks or Better
Also known as Draw Poker, this is the oldest variation of Video Poker. This game allows you to play up to 100 hands at a time. The more hands you bet with, the greater your potential winnings can be. In addition, you are able to get an extra point for each pair of Jacks or higher you receive.
- Deuces Wild
Best Poker Lay Down Everything
Is another very popular version to Video Poker. Just like the classic five card game of table poker, the goal is to get the best possible poker hand by using a standard 52 deck of cards. Not only that, but you also have the privilege of using some wild cards, which are deuces for this version. Since the deuces are wild, that means they are the strongest cards you can be dealt. They have the power to behave like any type of card it wants, therefore if you ever receive a deuce, you should never discard them. For example, if you have three 4s and a deuce, this will increase the value of your hand by transforming it from having only three 4s to four 4s, which becomes a Four of a Kind.
Best Poker Lay Down Every
Video Poker Odds
One of the great things about Video Poker is its low house edge. The house edge for slot machines for example, is somewhere around 6% to 20%. Video Poker on the other hand can range anywhere from around 25% to 5%. Keep in mind, your chances of winning are greater when you follow some sort of strategy structure.
Without a strategy, the casino’s edge is higher. With that in mind, the casinos are predicting that most of the people who play their games are doing so without any kind of strategy. To improve your Video Poker odds, we highly encourage you to read the article we wrote about on Video Poker strategies. Once you’ve gone over them, go ahead and practice them on our Video Poker machines here at Caesars Casino for free, 24/7.
Video Poker Payouts
Video Poker Payouts are some of the best ones you’ll be able to find both online and at the land based casinos. For some of the Video Poker machines, you have a chance to get some long-term payouts that can be over 100%, which is not something you can expect when playing some of the other casino games. With that said, Video Poker offers some potentially big payouts, while some versions have better ones that others. A couple games in mind are Jacks or Better and Deuces Wild, however you can also do your own research in order to find which games offer the best payouts by looking at their pay tables.
Again, if you’re goal is to end up with profits in the long run, we can’t stress enough how important it is to follow a good strategy. By using a good strategy, you can have a chance of seeing a return at 99.54%, or higher. On the other hand, if you decided not to use any kind of strategy, you can expect to see a return at around 99.52% and the house edge can be somewhere around 0.48%.
Now that you’re aware of a couple popular variations of Video Poker, and have a better understanding for the odds/payouts, we suggest you to check out some of the strategies we’ve written articles on as well the rules on how to play. Not only will with this help you to become a better player, but you will also increase the enjoyment as your confidence level will go up and you’ll be making skillful decisions.