Dantepoker

There is an entire sub-culture towards the concept of “floating” in no-limit Texas Hold’em. Don’t get me wrong here, there is nothing wrong with wanting to see flops and turns and river cards if you are better than your opponents. But as you move up through the levels then you are going to be facing tougher players in no-limit hold’em. Let us look at an example to show what I mean.

It has been folded to the cut-off in a $10 No Limit Texas Hold’em game who opens to $0.35 and you call on the button with 8s-7s and for the sake of argument both you and your opponent have $10 stacks so you both have one hundred big blinds. They have Ad-Jd and the flop comes 9d-3h-2h and they make a continuation bet in this situation after both of the blinds had folded. Here again you call to put pressure on your opponent and the turn card is a 4c and they check and you bet and win the pot.

Your opponent saw his “good hand” and raised and you tried to take advantage of their predictable play. This hand paid off for you but let us now look at the same situation only this time played out at NL400. Here a very tough player would bet the turn because your pre-flop call and flop call implies weakness. You would be even less likely to call the turn if a high card came like a king or queen as this could tie in with the raisers hand.

In fact even if you hit the flop in some way with your 8-7s then the chances are that it will only be a pair and you cannot take that to the bank either. If you want to play that type of hand post flop then you are either going to have to make a marginal call on several streets with a very mediocre hand or raise with it which is very dangerous.

The better players at the higher levels will simply shove you from the hand and you will have lost far more money. I like to be more subtle when I play hands like these, this means that if I elect to three bet a raiser then I will only do so in situations where the raiser has been opening too frequently with a higher percentage of their range than what is normal.

I don’t like floating plays at the higher levels because the better players usually punish you for it. Once again I am not saying that you should never do it but it needs careful consideration when your only plan is to win the pot by your opponent retreating into passivity or not having made a hand.

In many cases at the higher limits, the better players will fire multiple barrels when they miss and when they hit then you are calling superior hands with weak hands. If more players could eliminate this trait from their poker games then there would be more winning players at the middle levels.