5 common sense tips to improve your live no limit cash game

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Sometimes the best thing you can do for your game is to make minor changes. Here are a few quick suggestions for quick tweaks you might consider making to your live no limit cash game. If you’ve given up on live play, check out Full Tilt Rakeback offers for a better deal when you play online – but if you’re still playing live poker, read on:

1. Stop folding out of turn (or getting ready to fold out of turn). Making it obvious to everyone when you’re not interested in a hand also helps people to key in on when you actually are interested in a hand, and it can also be a signal of when you’re getting frustrated. It should also be a signal to you that you’re not paying enough attention to the action in front of you. I’m not saying you always have to wait until it’s your action to check your cards, but you should probably wait until it’s your action before you make a final decision.

2. Try declaring your raises verbally and then placing your call and your raise out separately (this is a legal move in 99% of card rooms – just say “I raise). Making your raises in the fashion does a couple of good things. First, it helps you to get a very real sense of how large the pot is after your call, which can help you calculate your raise more precisely. Second, it forces you to take a pause in between deciding to raise and deciding how much to raise. Finally, it will often result in a few players behind you acting out of turn, (which is their own damn fault) affording you even more information about how large your raise should be.

3. Resist the urge to show cards. I know it can be tempting, and there are probably even a few select situations where it’s completely called for, but by and large you just shouldn’t do it. First off, you never know what information you’re giving out – or who you’re giving it to. Second, if you do show, it gives people a solid lead on what kinds of hands you might have when you don’t show in a similar situation. Finally, it comes down to a matter of control – if you give people no concrete information via showing your cards, you have control over how they view you. You can do a lot more to shape someone’s thoughts about your hand with bets and false tells if you haven’t given them a decoder ring to what those bets and tells mean by showing hands in the past.

4. If you’re playing at a fairly straightforward table, try to make a habit of raising any hand you were planning on limping with when you’re on the cutoff or the cutoff +1. Not only will this get you the button more often than not, but it’s a good way to force you to be relatively active preflop so that your good hands will be disguised. Also, it’s just rarely a bad idea to build a pot when you have good hands in position. On to tip 5….

5. Use the dealer change as a mental checkpoint. As the new dealer settles in, ask yourself a quick series of questions. Some quick suggestions: Is this game better or worse than it was when the last dealer sat down? How did my table image change during the last session? Who is my most likely target over the next few orbits? Who was on tilt before? Are they still on tilt? Building your own list should help you to stay more involved in the game and stop you from making decisions based on outdated information.

Developing a few small good habits can make a huge difference at the end of the year. If you’re already doing all of the above, then take a few minutes during your next session to notice what bad habits you’ve picked up and build your own list of small tweaks to make the next time you sit down to play.

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