If you want to play poker really well then you are going to have to get along with the notion that your moves are essentially going to have to be planned out. When you play low stakes games then just plain solid moves will get the money and your goal is to avoid big mistakes of your own because at that low level then your opponents will surely make them in enough quantity. But as you begin to move up through the levels or in tournament play against better players then you often need to plan your moves in advance. Let us say that you are playing tournament poker and the blinds are 100-200 and you are sitting in the big blind with 3200 in chips.
A player open raises from the button to 500 and is a move that you have seen them do several times. You hold Jc-9c which isn’t that much of a hand and so you decide to make your opponents opening raise a mistake by shoving all in. You do so and your opponent folds and you pick up an extra 800 in chips and take your stack to 4000 which is more than a 20% increase. This as only a tiny mistake on behalf of your opponent because the pot was only small! But in deep stacked cash games then the mistakes that players can potentially make can be very big for one important reason…..this is because the stacks are deep.
To make a big mistake means a big pot……otherwise it cannot be a big mistake. This is why you need to set moves up and plan moves ahead in deep stacked play and this for me is the most interesting part of the game.
