No one finds themselves on the river by accident. To get there, you have to make a concerted effort to keep playing, and usually that means betting, calling, or raising on prior rounds. When you’re heads-up, it’s mano-a-mano, just you and the other guy, and there aren’t too many weapons left at your disposal.
There always seemed to be a time, usually late in the evening in a traditional, land-based casino, when players left the table and the game had to be played shorthanded if it was to be played at all. Players stayed if they thought new players would drift into the game, but when games get down to five or six players more often than not the effect was usually a daisy chain of folks racking their chips and heading toward the cashier’s cage.
Once you’ve reached a certain skill level of play, improving your poker comes as a series of small steps instead of the gains by leaps and bounds that you experienced you were first learning the game. Nevertheless, each improvement you make will raise your game one notch further.
By the time you’ve reached this level of sophistication in your poker play, you’ve probably come to the realization that you can’t bluff too much of the time and you can’t hang back and never bluff either.
Since one of the key concepts to winning at any form of poker is game selection, why would you voluntarily take yourself out of a good game, simply because you have won or lost some arbitrarily predetermined amount of money?
You’re way ahead or way behind but you don’t know which; what do you do now?
Some hands are close; others aren’t. While Joe might be in the lead there are others calling in hopes of outdrawing him. Sometimes the lead changes on every betting round, but on other occasions one player is way ahead. And when he is, everyone else is way behind. You can’t have one without the other.
There’s an old adage you’ll hear if you hang around tennis coaches or boxing trainers long enough, and it’s a saying that works as well in poker as it does in boxing and tennis. Never change a winning game; always change a losing one.
It seems almost axiomatic that strategy and structure are closely related regardless of the field of endeavor. Every poker player should take an idea about how he intends to play to the table with him. And while much has been written about the fact that you’re wasting your time if you try to bluff a compulsive caller and will need to adopt a different strategy against that kind of player, not much has been written about how the structure of the game itself points to strategic adjustments that savvy players realize they will have to make.
The Official Dictionary of Poker, Michael Wiesenberg’s wonderfully useful book, defines a calling station as, “A weak player who rarely raises but calls every bet, even with substandard hands (and hence should not be bluffed.)”
While loose, aggressive games generate the most action, they can be frustrating too. A gaggle of players in each pot mean more money when you win, but so often someone who shouldn’t be in the pot seems to catch a miraculous card and beat you. Sometimes there’s a maniac in the game too. He’s the kind of player who raises almost all the time, regardless of whether he has a hand or not. But more money is in play on every hand, and it’s going somewhere.
