Mistakes From A Small Buy-In WSOP Event The
WSOP is complete, and while that is a sad time for poker players everywhere, it is also a time to reflect to ensure you did your best and played well. Every year, there is a small buy-in
WSOP event, usually around $500, that brings together more poker players than any other tournament, so you are bound to see some interesting plays. Let’s look three leaks that I have witnessed in that event that most of the players could easily fix, giving them a much better chance of making a deep run.
Limping With Junk I have never seen so many players limp with junk in my entire life! Multiple times per orbit, four or five players would limp only to fold to a huge preflop raise or, if they get to see a cheap flop, play passively and straightforwardly when they failed to flop well. Either way, they are giving away a huge amount of equity. While it is nice to be able to see lots of flops, if you are not fighting for pots that no one wants to claim, you will either break even or lose with this passive, straightforward limping strategy.
While I am more prone than many professionals to limp behind with speculative hands, mostly because I do not want to play huge pots without strong holdings or a great read that my opponents are weak, you should get a bit more out of line than normal in order to attack habitual weak limpers. If your goal is to make them fold, feel free to raise quite large, perhaps to around 1.5 times the size of the pot. Your opponents will eventually adjust, either by limping with premium hands or tightening up, but by then, you will have likely stolen lots of chips.
Overplaying Decent, But Non-Premium, Hands It was quite common to see a few limpers and then someone raise to around 7 big blinds with 50 big blind effective stacks with A-J, only to have the limpers call. The flop would come A-7-4. The player with A-J would bet the flop and either get called or raised. If someone called, the A-J would almost always confidently go all-in on the turn. If the A-J got raised on the flop, it would also go all-in. This is not a good situation to happily put your stack in when multiple players see the flop. You will find that your opponent almost always has two pair or a set. I watched numerous stacks be punted away in this manner in what they viewed as a “cooler” situation.
Instead, consider not raising before the flop, and if you do, bet fairly small on the flop, around 25% of the size of the pot. This will make it much more difficult for you to go broke on any individual hand. Most professional tournament players succeed because they avoid “set ups” where other players go broke unnecessarily. While you are certainly going to lose some chips when your decent top pair is not the best hand, you do not have to automatically lose your entire stack every time.
Raising And Betting Large Amounts When most of my opponents had a premium hand, they would bet a large amount, likely because they really did not want to get outdrawn. What they are actually doing is opening themselves up to going broke or losing a huge amount of chips every time they played a significant pot. There is nothing wrong with checking or betting around 33% of the size of the pot with decently strong hands, especially on uncoordinated boards. You have to realize that unless you make a huge bet, anyone with a good draw is going to call, so you cannot actually price the good draws out. The problem with betting huge with decent hands like K-J on Ks-Qs-7c is that if you get much action, K-J is usually beat by a better made hand, meaning you are drawing nearly dead. You will find that betting small with your strong, but non-nut made hands conserves chips when you are beat while keeping worse hands in that you crush, like K-9 and A-Q. The last thing you want to do with your decent value hands is play them in a manner such that you only get action when you are crushed by better made hands or against a premium draw.
If you want to continue working on your poker skills and ensure you do not make these mistakes (and many others), be sure to sign up for your free 7-day trial to my interactive training site,
PokerCoaching.com. There you can hone your skills in over 400 interactive quizzes and 35 in-depth homework challenges.
Thanks for reading and good luck in your games!
Jonathan Little Jonathan Little is a professional poker player and best-selling poker author with over $6,900,000 in live tournament earnings. If you want to learn how to play fundamentally sound poker and increase your win rate, check out PokerCoaching.com. Click here to try PokerCoaching.com for free. 
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