Going after the dead money

It really doesn't matter which form of poker you play or how you play it. Be it limit hold'em, PLO, NLHE or whatever…..whether you play short stacked or deep stacked……the fact of the matter is that it is dead money and the attaining of it that is key these days.

Let us say that you risk $1000 to win $150……is the risk worth it? Well that all depends on how many times you can win the $150 uncontested. Let us say that you have an 80% strike rate of winning this pot without a contest. This wins you $150 eight times out of ten for a profit of $1200.

Now the key to making money from this situation is to make sure that we have equity when we get called. So if we have equity of say 35% against our opponents range then we have 35% of not just our own $1000 stack when the money goes in but our opponents $1000 stack as well.

So we place $1000 into the pot and have $700 worth of equity in a $2000 pot. So in effect we lose $300 every time we get called which is twice out of every ten hands. So we lose back $600 of the $1200 profit meaning that we show an overall profit of $600. The equity of our hand when called allowed us to get away with a long term profit here.

This is why Doyle Brunson in SuperSystem said that he always had the worst hand when the big money went in. But it was those times that his opponent folded that paid for his living in the game.

Carl Sampson plays poker at www.pokerstars.co.uk

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