Poker Tips from the Pro's - Playing Small Ball

Years ago the great Doyle Brunson made famous the art of playing small pot poker. In his legendary book that was Supersystem, he constantly referred to the process of playing poker in a very aggressive way. Although in that book, Doyle does in fact play a deep stack style of play. In his later book Daniel Negreanu advocated a very similar style of play.

The art of playing small ball poker is in how you attempt to win lots of small pots without incurring much risk to your own stack. The key to playing this type of poker is to know when to back off and when to keep on applying the pressure. One thing that will become apparent with this type of poker is in the hands that you will play compared to the hands that you don’t.

The essence of small ball poker is not with conventional starting hand selection, but more to do with disguising the overall strength of your hand from your opponents and trying to score home runs by flopping concealed monsters. If you can put yourself into a situation in which your opponents do not know where they stand and you know where you are in most situations then you are going to have a tremendous advantage over other players.

As Doyle Brunson often remarks in his landmark book, many of the Broadway hands can often be big trouble to many players. This is for the simple reason being that they often make hands like top pair decent kicker where many players end up giving far too much action relative to the strength of their hand.

Small ball poker eliminates much of the need to play hands like these except in special circumstances like with attacking the blinds for instance. Some of the most successful tournament players of all time have employed a small ball game but this style is often of less effect in online cash game poker when the average stack is substantially less.

In fact, in full-ring games and even six max games, you need to reduce your aggression to what are acceptable levels and a failure to do so will lead to you slowly leaking money. Playing classic small ball hands like 8-7s, 7-5 for example have many advantages in many situations. They allow you to represent hands that you don’t have from the flop onwards and they also allow you to hit huge flops while your unsuspecting opponents are putting you on high cards.

But do keep in mind that applying pressure to players who have short stacks and minimum stacks will have less value as good short stack players will be coming back over the top often enough to make over aggression not profitable.