3 Mistakes That Cost You Money in Poker | Upswing Poker Level-Up #58

This article is a transcription of the Level-Up Podcast, hosted by Upswing VP Mike Brady with poker pro Gary Blackwood. You can watch or listen to the entire episode via the links above or read on if you prefer a written version.

Mike (00:00):

Making any of these three mistakes at the poker table is like throwing your money into an incinerator. Myself and Scottish poker pro Gary Blackwood are here to help you avoid costly errors at the table.

Gary (00:11):

That’s right. We’re talking about the biggest mistakes that you could be making at the table, how to avoid them, and how to keep that win rate high.

Mike (00:18):

If you play low stakes, pay extra close attention to mistakes number two and three. Those are super costly when you’re up against weak competition. Mistake number one is making too many passive plays.

Gary (00:32):

Playing too loose and passive is a win rate killer, especially before the flop. If you take a look at any preflop chart, you’re likely to see a lot of hands played aggressively and actually quite few played passively. Watch any good player on a stream or online and you’re likely to see them lean towards aggressive plays rather than passive plays. There are some spots to play passively like when you’re getting great pot odds in the big blind against a raise, but those are exceptions not the rule. We want to be the aggressive player doing lots of three-betting in position not doing too much calling with marginal hands, and keeping our foot on the gas and making our opponent’s lives a misery. Calling preflop with hands that you shouldn’t be calling with is like being the only player at the table straddling. It’s costing you money unnecessarily. So let’s tighten up, play solid ranges, and lean towards being more aggressive as opposed to more passive.

Mike (01:22):

Speaking of playing solid ranges, you can get instant access to battle-tested ranges for live cash games, online cash games, and tournaments, accessible anytime anywhere with the new Preflop Prodigy app over on upswingpoker.com. This browser app is completely free, you can use it on any device with an internet connection. All you have to do is go over to upswingpoker.com/preflop and sign up with your email address. Then once you log into Upswing Poker, you can access the ranges at any time from the main dashboard of the Member’s Home area. That’s the Preflop Prodigy app over on upswingpoker.com/preflop. Mistake number two is being scared of value betting without top pair or better.

Gary (02:03):

Most important part of poker is getting value. That is how you’ll make most of your money playing this game. Bluffing is great too, and at times bluffing can be very profitable, but one of the main reasons that we bluff is to support our value bets. If you’re not going wide enough for value, you are just costing yourself a lot of money. It is as simple as that. There are numerous scenarios where a hand as weak as second pair, even bottom pair, even ace high is worth a wager in the right scenarios.

Mike (02:32):

Here’s a quick hand example for you. Suppose you’re playing a one two live cash game with $200 effective stacks. The action folds around to the button who raises it up to $10 and you defend your big blind with ace six offsuit. The flop comes queen six deuce rainbow and you check call a $10 bet from your opponent. The turn is the three of clubs and the action checks through the river is the eight of diamonds making the final board queen six deuce three eight with no flushes possible.

Gary (03:00):

Our hand on the river here is a very clear value bet. We can use a small size to bet hands like our six x, our eight x, our pocket sevens, and then obviously we can use a larger size to value bet our hands like pocket eights and king queen and things like that. But if you’re the type of player that’s only value betting a queen here and only value betting a strong queen at that, you’re leaving so much money on the table. This is obviously a very specific example tailored to get the point across, but it’s really important that we’re value betting widely enough in the right scenarios and getting value with second pair, third pair, and fourth pair in the right situations. You might be asking yourself, well, I’ve got a six, what can I get called by and going off on a little bit of a tangent here, but that is a fundamental leak for players who are wanting to get better at this game.

(03:46):

This is a wide range scenario here and both players have really wide ranges and we need to appreciate the wideness of our opponent’s range. When we have ace six here, our opponent is going to c-bet hand like pocket fours on the flop, or six five or pocket threes or king deuce, so it’s not as thin as it might initially feel to throw out a bet here and try and get called by a worse hand when we have a six. Appreciate the wideness of your opponent’s range and go ahead and get that value when you’ve got a third pair in the right scenarios.

Mike (04:13):

You also will have some hands that you want to bluff with in this scenario. You can definitely have a hand like king jack from the flop that you decided to float with. You can have some ace highs that you might turn into a bluff. You can even have hands like seven five suited with a bunch of backdoor draws from the flop, where now you’re stuck with just seven high. You’re obviously going to bluff with a hand like that if you didn’t check-raise it on the flop. So with all those potential bluffs in your range, it’s definitely possible your opponent has bottom pair with a deuce or ace king high and decides to look you up. Another quick example for you, suppose you’re back in that one two live cash game, but you’ve got $300 effective stacks now, the button raises it up to $10 when the action folds to him and you three bet from the small blind to $40 with pocket tens.The button comes along, the flop is king eight three rainbow and you continuation bet for 50% pot, which your opponent calls. The turn pairs the eight, it’s the eight of diamonds, you check and your opponent checks behind the river is now the four of hearts making the final board king eight three eight four with no flushes possible.

Gary (05:18):

Our pocket tens here very clearly want to go for a value. Again, you might think, well, my opponent’s called a bet on the flop. They’re just going to have a king. That is a habit that must be broken. We need to appreciate the wideness of our opponent’s range. Ask ourselves, what can our pocket tens get called by here, ace three, pocket fives, pocket sixes, pocket sevens, pocket nines, ace queen, ace jack. We need to get into the habit of using a small bet size with our marginal hands that want to get value on the river so we can have two sizes here. We’re going to play some king queen, king jack like this. We can use the larger bet size, but these thin value bets that might feel a bit too thin. Let’s use a small blocker bet size with those for around 33% pot and use them very, very consistently to get more value with our more marginal hands and it will drastically increase our win rate if we’re suddenly value betting wider, getting more value and raking in more pots.

Mike (06:12):

Working these thin river value bets into your game can really make quite a difference even when you’re using a small block bet size. In this case, we’d probably bet around a third of the pot if we’re betting our pocket tens on the river. That’ll be about $50 into the about $160 pot. That’s 25 blinds that you are picking up on the river here. 25 blinds is nothing to scoff at. That is a reasonable amount of chips. I mean it’s bigger than you would three bet to preflop. So if you are just checking down and missing your opportunity to eke out this little bit of extra value, you’re really costing yourself a lot of money and you got to be sure to look for these opportunities.

Gary (06:50):

One of the added benefits of using a small bet size on the river here is that in theory when you bet 30% pot here with your pocket tens, your opponent is supposed to jam a hand like king queen for value. In reality, that’s just never going to happen in low stakes live poker, so we are serving two purposes with a small bet here with pocket tens. One, we’re getting value from hands like pocket nines and pocket sevens, and two, we’re stopping our opponent from using a larger bet size when we check to them when they’ve got a hand like king queen or king jack.

Mike (07:19):

It’s worth noting that the two examples we used here were very wide range spots featuring the button against the blinds and those are scenarios that are particularly ripe for these thin value bets with marginal hands, but these spots also come up when you’re up against earlier positions or when ranges are tighter in general, your threshold for making that thin value bet will just go up a little bit to quite a bit in those scenarios. The key takeaway is to keep an eye out for spots where you can eek out a little bit of extra value with a hand that might not be as strong as top pair. Mistake number three is calling with bluff catchers against players who don’t really bluff. And just to make sure everyone’s on the same page, a bluff catcher is a hand that can only beat bluffs. It doesn’t beat any potential value bets.

Gary (08:06):

This is arguably the biggest mistake in poker, especially at lower stakes. In many spots, bluff catchers are zero ev. In other words, the expected outcome of calling versus folding are the same. If your opponent bluffs just a bit too infrequently, all of these zero ev bluff catchers become just losing calls, plain and simple, there’s no other way to say it. And if you’re up against most low stakes players who rarely if ever make bold, crazy bluffs, calling with one of these hands is a surefire way to torch money. You have to ask yourself, is this a spot where people are bluffing the correct amount? Are they overbluffing or are they underbluffing? Most of the time they’ll be underbluffing, so as a result we need to exploitatively tighten up and make less calls overall versus these types of players.

Mike (08:55):

There’s a reason most poker players underbluff, don’t bluff often enough. I’ve mentioned this on a past podcast a time or two. When you value bet in poker, when you have a strong hand, it’s more of a feeling. You can feel that the hand is strong, you can feel that it’s worth money. You look down at pocket aces, it gives you that warm and fuzzy feeling. You flop a set, you get that thrilling feeling and your eyes dart to your opponent’s chip stack and you’re going to try to get it all. You can just feel when a hand is worth a value bet, but in order to bluff, you have to think, you have to think about your opponent’s range, you have to think about your own range and what you’re representing. You have to think about what size will get them to fold.

(09:43):

In general as a human being, feeling is a lot more natural than thinking. So the thinking goes, most of your opponents at the poker table are going to be able to feel out their value bets, but they’re not always going to be able to think out their bluffs. We’ve got a quick example for you on this mistake as well. Suppose you’re playing yet another one two live cash game with $200 effective stacks. The action folds to the player in the cutoff who raises it up to $10 and you call in the big blind with queen jack offsuit, with the queen of hearts. That’s going to be relevant in a moment. The flop comes queen nine five with two hearts and you check-call a $15 bet. The turn is the two of hearts, that’s the third heart on the board now and you have that queen high flush draw. You check-call a $35 bet. This time the river is the six of clubs making the final board queen nine five two six with three hearts. You check for a third time and your opponent bets $85 into a pot of approximately $120.

Gary (10:42):

This looks tempting to call. We’ve got top pair, we’ve got a flush blocker, but versus most low stakes players we’re just toast here. This is a pretty disciplined, solid fold if we’re able to get away from this one. When we factor in the player type that we’re talking about here in terms of not bluffing enough underbluffing, kind of a nitty player, I think this would be a mistake to call the river here. We want to be tightening up and making discipline folds with hands like this which are just not going to be facing enough bluffs, enough barrels, and as a result, I think a hand like this, we just want to get away from.

Mike (11:13):

Even if you had a lower two pair hand, like say nine five suited. You may have just folded that preflop against the raise, but just imagine for a moment that you did call preflop with nine five suited. You flop two pair on the queen nine five, the turn completes that obvious flush draw, the river’s the six which actually brings in some potential straights as well. Against a lot of players even that two pair with nine five is pretty tempting to fold. I wouldn’t fault you if you flicked in the call if you happen to get to this river with that two pair hand, but are they really value betting with pocket aces? Are they really value betting with ace queen three times on this runout? Maybe, but they’re definitely value betting with flushes. They’re almost certainly value betting with sets. So you’re looking at a range of hands that he can definitely have that you lose to and hands that he can maybe have that you beat.

(12:03):

On top of that, he doesn’t have the bluffs. If he’s not bluffing here, you’re just not going to be good often enough, even with a hand as strong as two pair on this queen nine five deuce six board. The key takeaway for this mistake is to look for situations to make big folds against players who aren’t bluffing. There’s a quote from Alex Foxen that I absolutely love. He’s a top top player and he once said, you should use folding as a weapon against certain players. When you’re up against a player who isn’t making bold bluffs, who isn’t making super aggressive plays without having the goods, you’ve got to be looking for spots to make big folds. It’s going to work out much better for you in the long run. Before we wrap up, we’ve got a bonus mistake for you, and this is a key one to avoid. Don’t play when you are tilted.

Gary (12:52):

Some people think that they don’t get tilted or that their mood never affects their game. They’re just in denial. Be strong enough to tap the table when not in the right frame of mind and not let your win rate get annihilated as a result. Now, if you’re in a really good game and you can feel yourself a little tilted making mistakes and you don’t want to quit because the game is so good, at least get up from the table, step outside, take a break, do some breathing exercises and come back to the game when you’re feeling a little bit better. It might save you dozens or hundreds of big blinds if you’re able to do this.

Mike (13:25):

It could be quite a lucrative walk. Money saved is money earned. If you just take a quick step away from the table, walk around, stretch your legs, that could really pay dividends for you. And to quickly illustrate how massive the impacts from these tilted mistakes can be, I’ve got a little example. Suppose you’re a solid winner in your poker game. Let’s say you win an average of 10 big blinds per hour, which is pretty damn good. Now imagine you’re tilted after playing a stupid hand and instead of going for a walk, you decide to just grind it out and stay at the table. A few hands later, you find yourself on the river facing a 50 big blind bet, which is pretty chunky, and you decide to flick in the call against a player who’s probably not bluffing quite often enough to justify that call.

(14:07):

Considering your 10 big blind hourly win rate, you’ll now have to play five hours of poker to recoup that money. One moment of clouded judgment leads to hours of your time flushed down the drain. And that’s why it’s so important to be in tune with your emotions and make sure you’re keeping a level head at the poker table. Now that you know what the biggest mistakes are, you should be able to avoid them. We hope this episode helps you out. Definitely go check out the Preflop Prodigy app over on upswingpoker.com if you want access to those battle-tested ranges on any device with an internet connection. And if you enjoyed this show, go ahead and hit that like button, subscribe, follow or leave a comment. We really appreciate it. It helps us keep this thing going when we get positive engagement like that. And if you have any requests for future topics, drop them in the comments below. We appreciate it and we’ll see you in the next one.