Sports & Gaming
Table Image and Metagame: Hand Reviews
Lesson time 13:29 min
Using footage from two different hands, Daniel shows how to use metagame as a weapon to steal a pot from his opponent, and incorporate his table image into his four-betting range.
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Topics include: Using Metagame to Steal a Pot vs. Alec Torelli • Incorporating Table Image Into a Four-Bet Range vs. Steven Silverman
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DANIEL So in this next hand we're going to look at, we're really going to, you know, talk a lot about sort of metagame. And you know, there's a lot to poker. There's the fundamentals of learning, you know, what to bet when and, you know, hand reading and things like that, but there's always going to be an ebb and flow, a dynamic that you create with another player where they're going to perceive that you do something. Maybe, for example, they think that you bluff a lot, or maybe the opposite. Maybe they think you don't bluff enough. And this is a situation where I was trying to be inside of Alec Torelli's head and try to be one step ahead to what does he think I'm capable of and what does he think I'd never do? And any time you can create a dynamic like that where you know what your opponent thinks you will or won't do in a spot, it opens up really good opportunities for you. ANNOUNCER 1: Daniel may be the shortest at the table, but he's still got 65 bigs. ANNOUNCER 2: Under the gun plus one, he minraises to 400. Alec Torelli from the US calls with 5s. Dario Sammartino calls as well. He's got pocket 3s. Folded around to Dany Parlafes in the small blind. The Romanian calls. And Luca Pagano, jack-7 off, he's going to get odds. He calls as well. DANIEL OK, so here we see a multi-way pot. I mean, we've got five players in the pot. That's pretty rare in a tournament. My hand's pretty, you know, normal to raise with ace-jack, and all the hands behind make sense. You know, Pagano doesn't have a very strong hand but he's in the big blind. And look at all the money out there, so he's getting good odds to play kind of a trashy hand. So no mistakes here from any of the players preflop, pretty standard. Let's take it to a flop. ANNOUNCER 1: Yeah, everyone's pretty justified in making this call. Pot odds kept getting better and better. ANNOUNCER 2: Queen-5-2 with two clubs, a set of 5s for Torelli. Negreanu was the preflop aggressor. He has ace high and a backdoor club draw, and he bets. DANIEL OK, so as a general rule, in a multi-way pot, you want your continuation-betting percentage to go way down. Against just one opponent, you want to be betting more than half the time. When you're up against five opponents, especially when you don't have anything, you should be checking because your opponents likely have something. Having said that, as I talked about before with the metagame is I want to do things that people would never expect. So in this position if people thought I had ace-jack, they would expect me to just check and fold. So I'm betting here because it also-- my hand kind of blocks a couple calling combinations. Queen-jack, ace-queen, you know, it makes it a little less likely someone has a hand like that. And if nobody does have a queen, I also know that nobody has an ace-high flush draw because I have the ace of clubs. So unless there's a queen out there, I think hands like pocket 6s or pocket 7s, they're going to be-- yo...
About the Instructor
Put yourself across the felt from Daniel Negreanu, the biggest live tournament poker winner of all time. The six-time World Series of Poker champion teaches poker strategy, advanced theory, and practice through hand-reviews of his winning games. Learn how to sharpen your mental game through demos on reading opponents and spotting tells. Join Daniel at the table to increase your win rate, grow your ROI, and get your game “in the money.”
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Daniel Negreanu
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