Folding in cash games

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Cory | Poker Articles, Poker Cash Games

Submitted by Cory, this article belongs to the Poker Cash Games series.

The thoughts behind folding in cash games are very different to folding in tournaments because of the missing element of the ever increasing blinds. In this article, Cory takes us through the basics thoughts behind folding in deep stack cash games.

Deep stacked cash games are all about post flop playing. You rarely need to play a huge pot pre-flop because your real money is made on the later betting rounds. Here’s an example of a hand that I played yesterday that illustrates what I mean.

I’m in middle position on a ten handed table on line. I open for a 3.5X raise with Jacks, the first hand I had picked up in over an hour, and the player immediately on my left who hadn’t 3 bet one time in the two-and-a-half hours that I was on the table with him reraises pot. Two players call before it gets back to me.

My thinking is, the absolute worst I can expect the player who three bets on my left to have is AK, but then two other players, who each had to know that this player wasn’t three betting decided to cold call. This makes hands like Tens or Jacks look like pretty weak holdings.

With my logic, my Jacks could be beat in two spots and flipping with another. Even though the pot was large, I still wasn’t getting a good price to call with my Jacks and I folded them without hesitation. Our stacks were not quite deep enough for me to call hoping to flop a set and stack somebody. My read was proven correct when the board came with three rags and AA and QQ got it all in. So I in fact was beat in two spots.

If you’re transitioning from tournaments, especially lower buy-in live tournaments, or the shorter stacked on line variety, folding a hand as strong as JJ pre-flop can seem a little crazy and when you’re 20 BBs deep, it is pretty crazy, but a hundred or more big blinds deep, it’s still not fun, but it’s relatively easy to let a hand like Jacks or Tens hit the muck before the flop. Not having to worry about escalating blinds really opens you up to patiently waiting for very big hands that can get paid off. Only gamble on your terms in cash games.

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Tags: Poker Articles, Poker Cash Games

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