If You Get 8/10 On This 3-Bet Pot Quiz, You’re a Shark

3-bet pot strategy quiz

How competent are you at playing 3-bet pots as the defender? Take your time and think carefully, because these 10 questions are tough. For each question, assume that you have no information about your opponent. And be sure to share your results at the end. […]

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Final Table Poker Strategy: The #1 Biggest Mistake to Avoid

final table poker strategy

With steep pay jumps and top-heavy payout structures, the final table of any poker tournament is where big money is earned or burned. In this article, we’ll look closely at the biggest mistake made at final tables: overly tight/passive play. Along the way, we’ll have real-world examples to discuss from live tournaments, along with key…

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3 Best Poker Tips from a Cash Game Session with Doug Polk

best poker tips from a cash game

There’s something to learn from every video in the Upswing Lab. The same is true for the following Doug Polk Play & Explain session, in which he battled across 4 tables at mid-stakes on America’s Card Room. In this article, I’d like to share 3 of the best poker tips that I learned from watching…

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Floating Strategy | The Complete Guide

what is floating poker strategy

What is floating? Floating is a must-have weapon for every aspiring poker crusher. It’s an advanced play, however, which entails calling with a weak hand on the flop in order to win the pot on a later street by either showing down or bluffing an opponent. The main reason floating is such an effective weapon…

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Stop Fearing Triple Barrels with this Professional Approach

triple barrel poker strategy

Let’s be honest: we all sigh when an opponent fires that dreadful triple barrel, putting us to the test both technically and mentally. A triple barrel is when a player bets on the river after betting on the flop and turn. There is a deeply embedded fear in most players that their opponents are not…

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How to Check-Raise on the River Like a Pro

It’s difficult to play out-of-position as the preflop caller. In this scenario our opponent, the preflop raiser, has both a range advantage and a positional advantage. However, we can still implement a well-thought-out check raising strategy, which will hinder our opponent’s ability to bet thinly for value and bluff. How important is check-raising? To demonstrate…

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4 Insights from 11 Years, 70,567 MTTs, and 6,304,190 Hands of Poker

miikka anttonen poker insights

I’ve written poker strategy at Upswing for the past year and a half. During this time I’ve mostly covered specific topics – like bounty MTTs, blind defense, and staking. I strongly believe that working on just one area of your game at a time is the best way to improve, but as someone who’s mentored and…

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How to Destroy Your Opponent After Seeing One Showdown

Sometimes it takes just one showdown for a great poker player to change their game plan and start crushing opponents. In this article I will teach you how to start thinking like a truly great player when it comes to making these immediate adjustments. You will first be presented with four hand examples that reach…

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5 Biggest Online Poker Pots Explained

biggest online poker pots nl

Today, we’re going to mix things up a bit by discussing the 5 biggest online poker pots in No Limit Hold’em (according to highstakesdb). All 5 pots are well over a half million dollars, and were played at “Rail Heaven,” which is a colloquial term for $500/$1,000 (the biggest game that used to run on…

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4 Cash Game Mistakes to Avoid at All Costs

cash game poker mistakes

Today we’re going to discuss some of the most common mistakes cash game players make, both novice and experienced alike, and what you can do to avoid them.  The 4 mistakes in this article are mostly general in focus, which means they’ll improve your playstyle overall rather than just in specific situations. This article is…

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How to Play Small Pocket Pairs in Tournaments

small pocket pairs strategy tournaments

The disguised nature of a flopped set makes small pocket pairs very profitable. However, although they are profitable for most players, some tend to play them wrong in certain situations. A common mistake, for instance […]

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4 Ways to Improve Your Results in Multi-Way Pots

multi-way pots strategy

Multi-way pots can cause headaches, and it’s easy to understand why. More players means more variables, and potential for the pot to swell quickly. But if you want to crush live games or low stakes games online–where loose and passive preflop play is common–you’ll need a sound approach for multi-way pots. Today we’ll discuss 4…

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4 Do-or-Die Tournament Situations Explained

tournament poker games chips

The situations heavily impacted by Independent Chip Model (ICM) are truly where money is won and lost in tournament poker. You can crush an entire tournament and then make an ICM-punt at the final table that costs you all the expected value you grinded to build. Today we’ll discuss 4 of the most important situations…

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3 Tips to Help You Maximize Your Winnings with Overpairs

overpairs poker

How do you play overpairs after the flop? “Play ‘em fast,” someone told me years ago. “If you don’t, you’ll miss out on value.” Despite its simplicity, this is generally good advice. The idea, of course, is to get maximum value from what’s presumably the best hand. But nothing is simple in poker. In this…

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