This article first appeared in the May/Jun 2011 issue of World Gaming magazine.
Read and learn fellow poker players! There are many ways to play cash poker against average opposition that reduce the chance of you losing major pots. This is not the best way to maximise your win in the long run, but you can bide your time, learn the game and win some big pots along the way.
One of the great ways to play poker if you want to be conservative is by ‘set peddling’. A set is when you have a pair in your hand and the board brings another one of your cards to give you three of a kind. This is a very strong hand in Texas Hold’em Poker and even though you are not guaranteed to win you will usually be an enormous favourite.
If you are dealt small pairs then you are really only playing for sets anyway. 22, 33, 44, 55, 66 and 77 are all unlikely to yield a win in cash poker unless you bet hard to reduce the field pre-flop, or your hand improves. If you are looking to play these hands for set value only, then try to get into the pot as cheaply as possible.
Middle pairs such as 88, 99, TT, and JJ are considered some of the hardest hands to play as you can win without improving. The secret with these hands is that if you are faced with a ‘big card’ flop then you really need to find the set, particularly if there has been some pre-flop raising. If the flop is all babies then you can have a dig at picking up the pot even if you don’t improve. Be careful with these middle pairs – inexperienced players often lose a lot with them. If the action is big and you only have the middle pair to show, you’re almost certainly beat.
The big pairs AA, KK and QQ play themselves most of the time. These are already ‘made’ hands and should win many pots without improvement. The best advice here is that you don’t want a lot of players seeing the flop. If you have five or six players looking at the flop you can easily run into a small set which will usually see your big pair lose a big pot!
The idea behind ‘set peddling’ is that you wait until you have a huge hand (like a set) and then you profit from aggressive players. This is a good tactic but you have to pick your game when you play like this. The smaller the stakes the less chance players will pick up on what you are doing. If you are playing a larger game you will find that the better players will know when you have hit your hand. You also want to be playing against opposition that doesn’t know your style of game. Try to remain under the radar and make sure you play the odd hand that isn’t a set and be sure to show your hand to the other players to create the image that you are not a conservative player.
If you have the luxury of many card rooms and tables to choose from, you can play this style of poker for a long time before the regulars work out what you are doing. Try to mix up your betting patterns as well. Sometimes bet your sets very hard and other times try to trap your opponents.
As your game improves you will want to branch out and play a wider variety of hands but many new players find ‘set peddling’ a great tactic which works well to their advantage
