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Playing On The Button
By Josh Arieh
Are you a sucker for hands on the button? Does 8-9 off-suit look like aces when everyone has folded and there is dead money dying to make its way to your stack? The button is a very tricky place to play hands, and if played correctly, you can pick up lots of money throughout a session. The bad news about this is that if you play the button incorrectly, you can easily be sent home with a story that starts with “Oh man, I had the 6-4 of clubs and...” You get the picture.
Hopefully at the end of this read (if you have gotten this far – thanks, guys), you will be able to think more clearly when you are on the button, and you will learn to milk this very profitable situation. You will also be able to avoid the treacherousness of this danger spot.
One of the first things I do when I sit at a table is check out the tendencies of the two players directly to my left. Knowing what you can get away with when you are on the button is a huge key to your success. I will usually ask myself, “Are these guys tight? Will they play back at me?”
I use A-10 as my borderline hand. It’s the one hand that sits on the fence between being a good hand or a bad hand. I ask myself whether these players are likely to reraise me with this hand? If the answer is yes, then I will take more of a conservative approach to attacking their blinds. If my answer is no, then I will usually raise their blinds with any hand that I can draw to a straight or a flush.
Before you take this balls-to-the-wall approach to stealing blinds, you have to have a feel for the game and know when to put on the brakes. I don’t care if it’s your baby sister in the big blind; if they think you are stealing with nothing, most poker players just aren’t going to let it happen. You have to think about the last ten minutes of the game and try to get into the “minds of the blinds.”
It’s not a good time to raise players that have just lost chips. I’m not saying leave them alone; I’m simply saying don’t raise them. Players that have recently lost chips are probably a little hot-blooded, and through my experience of dealing with hot-blooded people, I’ve learned that an aggressive action is usually answered by an aggressive reaction; in this case, a reraise.
You definitely want to play pots against this kind of player, but you want to keep your fluctuations down, and a perfect way of doing so is limping. If the player in the blind raises, don’t be afraid to call the raise with a lessthan- premium hand. Like most of you know, when a steamed player raises, he usually fires after the flop, as well.
Unfortunately, we aren’t blessed with tilted players in the blinds too often, so we are forced to learn to play the button against all kinds of opponents. The one thing that you have to remember when you are playing aggressively on the button is that experienced players often automatically put you on a “steal.” Use that against players: Mix your raises up and show them different sized raises as often as possible. Even the tightest of players will sometimes reraise you with nothing if they think they can pick up the pot right there. Always, always manage the pot size. When you have “ace-cracking” hands, keep the pot small and make it manageable for you to take cards off.
My last bit of advice for playing the button and playing “power positional poker,” is don’t get out of hand too early. When playing mediocre hands, you have to ask yourself one simple question: Is this really worth it? What I mean by this is simple. Don’t get too creative too early in a tournament. I mean, how important is it to pick up the blinds when the blinds are 50/100 and you have 10,000 in chips? This isn’t the time to use deep thinking, nor is it the time to get in there and raise with 7-9 offsuit and expose your stack. It’s a risk/reward thing – the deeper you get in a tournament, the more important it is to pick up blinds.
So be careful whose blinds you are stealing. Attack the weak and let the egomaniacs go. There are players out there who take their blinds seriously, and sometimes even personally. Don’t get into an ego war with these people. Lastly, and probably most importantly, everyone has a breaking point: the point at which they will no longer tolerate you pushing them around (yes, I have one too!). Know your opponents’ breaking points and you can translate that into knowing what your opponents’ actions will most likely be, before it’s their turn to act.
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