Posts Tagged ‘calling stations’

Dealing with Calling Stations on your Left

Monday, January 2nd, 2012

For the most part, playing against calling stations in online poker is a blessing because they’re willing to call lots of raises and bets with marginal holdings. However, things can get a little trickier when this calling station is immediately to your left.

By having this kind of player to the left, your chances of successfully bluffing are diminished because there’s a good chance they will call any raise. Going further, you can’t really hope to check-raise them too often either because calling stations will also check to see free cards. Long story short, having a calling station sitting to your left can be annoying and bothersome.

Fortunately, it’s not too difficult to outplay these fish if you alter your game a little. The first thing you need to be aware of is that bluffs should be taken out of your arsenal. Now this sucks when you have late position because the ability to steal is essentially gone, but you can make up for this in other areas, which we’ll get to next.

The big bonus to having a calling station to your left is that you can open up your range of playable hands. Of course, doing so requires that you’ve played with this opponent long enough to see what their range is. But once you’ve accomplished this, you’ll be able to play a wider range of hands from late position, and value bet more effectively.

The whole key to beating a calling station is knowing just how far they’ll go to call a raise, and punishing them for this. Assuming you ever get stuck on a table full of calling stations, you can sit back and wait for premium hands because A) you know they won’t be re-raising you a lot, and B) once you do get a premium hand, you can get a lot more value because there’s a good chance at least one player will call your big raises.

Micro Stakes Bankroll Management

Friday, June 10th, 2011

Some people claim that the micro stakes are unbeatable, which is a complete lie. The micro stakes offer the lowest form of competition available, as long as you’re willing to be patient and avoid being overly-aggressive against calling stations. Okay, it involves a little more than this, but the point of this article is to talk about micro stakes bankroll management.

The biggest problem people have when it comes to low limit bankroll management is playing at stakes where they can’t cover a sufficient amount of buy-ins. For example, a player will deposit $25 into a poker site, then jump into $0.05/$0.10 No-Limit Hold’em. This might seem okay since you’re playing against weaker players, but you also have to consider that $25 is only enough to cover 2-and-a-half buy-ins at these stakes. If you suffer a few bad beats at these limits, you are going to lose your bankroll rather quickly.

So instead of jumping into $0.05/$0.10 NLHE with a $25 bankroll, it’s a much better idea to drop down to $0.01/$0.02. Seeing as how the competition is so easy at these limits, and people are willing to go all-in with 8-6 (off-suit) on a regular basis, you’ll be able to experience success rather quickly. Sure there will be times when you’ll get beat by these crazy hands, but the large majority of the time, you will win lots of money (comparative to stakes).

More importantly, taking a $25 bankroll into $0.01/$0.02 NLHE gives you twelve-and-a-half buy-ins at these stakes. This means that you have plenty of buy-ins to survive bad variance and ultimately make some money. Now playing limits these low isn’t exactly ideal in terms of your overall money goals, but look at it this way: if you make $0.80 in an hour, you’ve made 40 big blinds. And if you consistently do this, you’ll be moving up the limits in no time!