When you play deep stacked cash games then your primary goal is to try and promote mistakes on behalf of your opponents. It is also important to avoid mistakes yourself and this is how you basically make money in no limit hold’em. You are essentially trying to play a form of blackjack as a card counter. Not many people look at poker in this way but if they did then they would see poker in an almost totally different way than before. There are many striking similarities between poker and blackjack if you look hard enough.
As a card counter then you are always trying to get away with betting the minimum when the dealer has the edge and bet the maximum that your bankroll can afford when you have the edge. In blackjack of course then your edge can never be certain of a win when you place your bet and the win can never be 100% like it can in poker. If you move all in on the river with the nuts and you get called then your equity is 100% even before your opponents turn their cards over.
But in poker then you are constantly trying to maximise your advantages and minimise your losses when the other player has the winning hand. I was trying to teach poker to someone a few days ago who had a habit of chasing hands horribly. We played a total of 13 hands against each other heads up and he won 8 of them while I only won 5. However I was well up on him and he then started to see the mistakes that he was making. No one had held a big hand in that time and he could see that he had won more pots than me but lost money to me.
