Learning Path Warm-Up
ICM Skill Quiz
Take quizMany players learn poker from watching free content, such as live cash game streams on YouTube or Twitch, and others take it more seriously and invest in a professional approach to studying poker through paid coaching sites like Pokercode.
Yet, all of these resources teach poker at a fairly high level and don’t tell you much about how to beat players you may encounter in your poker home games, so we decided to dive a bit deeper.
If you enjoy playing poker for low stakes with your friends, then there are quite a few tips and tricks we can share with you that will work in such an environment, almost guaranteed. Note that many of these are significantly far from GTO play and won’t actually work when you play against more competent players, so be careful about when and how you apply these strategies.
All that said, the tips we will share here are guaranteed to work in almost every poker home game in the world and make you the hero of the game, so let’s dive in.
Fedor Holz helps you avoid these big mistakes!
It is extremely important, to be honest with yourself in poker. If you notice that you are playing too many hands or contrary to your general strategy, you should find the strength to leave the game.
Quitting is not always easy, as a person can feel defeated if they leave. Yet, being able to quit the game when you are not mentally ready for it is one of the best skills you can learn as a poker player.
Over time, you should learn to keep playing your best almost every time, but everyone tilts sometimes, and it’s only important to be able to admit it.
Once you are honest enough with yourself to know you are tilting, quitting the game for at least an hour or longer should not be a problem anymore.
Whenever many players go to a flop, the equities run much closer than they do in heads-up pots. Home games tend to see four or five players to the flop almost every hand, which leads to extreme variance.
It is important to remember that there is no way around this. Playing a tighter style will save you from some of it, but you will still lose many pots against some silly hands and in weird ways.
You should be completely prepared for this, both psychologically and monetarily. Note that some home games are played for significant amounts of money, which is why you need to play only in games you can afford.
If the losses in your home game are giving you stress, you may be playing above your pay grade. Variance can go on for quite a long time in live poker, so it’s important to be completely prepared for it.
If things are not going your way, you can always take a break and step away from the game for a few days or weeks until you are mentally sharp and ready to play again.
One thing you will often see in home games is that players who are losing on the night will tend to widen their range even further in an attempt to get unstuck. This is the absolute worst approach you can have and one that is almost guaranteed to end in disaster.
Playing more hands in an attempt to win is not a sound poker strategy, and it's not one that's going to get you out of the hole you may be in.
Instead, stay patient, remember all the other tips we gave you, and keep playing your game until you finally catch some hands and win back your money.
You should also be aware that everyone sometimes loses, and expecting to win every session is an illusion. Don’t be afraid to end a poker session stuck a few buyins. That’s a lot better than losing thousands of big blinds trying to win back your losses by force.
What’s more, you should not count each session separately since that is a poor indicator of your skill or actual results. Just look at it as a long-term venture, and then you will not feel the need to chase losses to get back to even for that particular night. There is always another game waiting.
When learning poker from most teaching resources, you will hear a lot about attacking the blinds from a late position or punishing the limpers. The truth is that none of these things really work in home games, and you have to take a drastically different approach to win.
Trying to steal the blinds or get limpers to fold is a fool’s errand, as you will see players call raises with completely trashy hands like J3 or 84 on a regular basis.
Over a whole night of playing poker in a home game, you may see only one or two hands end before the flop, which means a completely different strategy must be created.
This strategy rests almost entirely on getting as many strong value hands as possible while also getting some strong bluffs in on later streets when players may be capable of folding.
Players in most poker home games underbluff significantly, especially before the flop. What's even more, raises tend to be very big, making the stack-to-pot ratio in 3-bet pots quite small in many cases.
When facing 3-bets, you should ensure that you have a hand that can play well against a strong 3-betting range, position, and plenty of chips behind in comparison to the pot.
It is easy to get carried away and call off a third of your stack with 22 hoping to catch a set and stack the villain in the game, but this strategy won’t work well for you in the long run.
You will do just fine against most players in home games if you only play a very strong range for a 4-bet and call some 3-bets in position with strong speculative hands like T9s and JTs when the stacks are very deep.
Playing too many hands against 3-bets is a recipe for disaster and is one of the key things that keeps many players at the break-even point in their home games.
The position is critical in poker, and even more so if pots are often going multi-way. For this reason, having a position over other players is something you want to do whenever possible.
It may seem to you like you can’t do anything about this since you only get to be in every position once per orbit, but that’s not really true.
For starters, you can begin folding way more hands in early positions and the blinds so that you don’t get caught out of position after the flop.
Hands like KT or QJ that are not suited are absolute junk when dealt to you UTG, as are hands like AT or A9, which are very hard to win with when the pot goes 5-ways, and you are stuck playing first.
Instead, you want to play as many hands as possible on the cutoff and the button. You can also try to win a position at times by 3-betting small against openers in middle positions with reasonable hands in an attempt to get the players in position to fold.
However, note that many players in home games are extremely sticky, and it will be incredibly difficult to shed them before the flop, regardless of how much you raise.
Speculative hands like 76s or J8s lose a lot of their value when you play multi-way pots. Making two pairs or a flush with these types of holdings will often get you in trouble when facing several opponents.
Instead, you want to be in a hand against several players as often as possible with a hand that can actually make the nuts.
Hands like AJs, A5s, or KQs have a lot more nut potential and will end up making the top two pairs, straights, or the nut flush on many boards, making them ideal candidates to play multi-way. Pocket pairs have similar playability advantages as well.
Playing hands with a strong potential to become nuts gives you additional advantages, such as allowing you to bluff more often.
When you bluff the flop with a nut flush draw, you will sometimes get all players to fold, while other times, you will get someone to call you with a weaker flush draw than yours.
This will lead to more pots won on turns and rivers with your strong bluffs and cooler spots in which you come out on top.
If you simply fold your 54s before the flop, you won’t find yourself in a spot where you are the one paying off the players with the nut flush by the river.
Slow playing big hands is definitely a big part of the poker strategy you need to beat strong, aggressive players, but it’s not a strategy you need to apply in your home game.
With players more than happy to call your bets with bottom pairs and gutshot straight draws, there is no reason to slowplay your hand almost ever.
What’s even more, slow playing in multi-way hands is extremely dangerous, as it allows your opponents to catch cards that will give them the lead in the hand.
Since there is almost no telling what people have before the flop, getting at least some hands to fold is advantageous, as is making them pay if they want to see any further cards.
You may occasionally try to slow play the flop with your monsters if some very aggressive players are in the game, but such players may try to bluff-raise you even if you do bet, so why not just go for it?
Saying that you should never bluff in a home game is an overstatement. You can't play poker without bluffing, and there are spots where a raise is better than a call, regardless of who you are playing against.
And yet, it is absolutely true that you should bluff a lot less in home games than GTO suggests or the players you watch on TV do.
There are several reasons for this. First of all, your home game players will not fold very often to your bluffs, even if they only have a bottom pair.
Furthermore, you will be up against more than one player in many hands, and it will be almost impossible to get all of them to fold to your bets.
By bluffing without equity, you will open yourself to being completely destroyed in home games, and it will be very hard to end up being a winner with this approach.
You can choose some hands to bluff with that have a lot of equity, even against the nuts, and pick some spots when you stay heads up with just one player, which may be somewhat rare.
In a typical home game, most players play about 50% of the hands they are dealt, even if the game is played in a full-ring format. Of course, this is significantly more than you should be playing, regardless of your approach to the game.
Yet, players come to home games to have fun, and they often think they can't do that if they are folding too much.
If you want to crush your home game, you should start by playing fewer hands than others and carefully choosing when you play and what hands you go into pots with.
Your starting hand and position selection will determine the course of action in all the hands you play, so make sure to put yourself into advantageous situations before the flop so you can win big on later streets.
If you want to play good poker home games style, you should play very few hands in early positions and more towards the button, but still without expanding your range too much.
In fact, since it is so difficult to steal pots in home games, you should probably be playing tighter than recommended in the more serious games.
If you have the feeling you need to sharpen up your game then Pokercode is a great place to start. Sign up for a free account and set your first steps towards becoming a better poker player.
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