Cash Games, are a great way to earn money, in a relatively low variance fashion. In our latest poker strategy article, poker coach John Bradley explains how to increase your profits straight away by implementing the best cash game poker tips into your game.
Where Does Your Profit in Cash Game Come From?
The way to make profit at cash games, in the long run, is to make better decisions than your opponents.
Over time, every player at the table will receive AA the same number of times, river the same number of straights etc.
Therefore, the way that you will walk away with more money than your opponents, is by doing things differently, and better, than they do.
Your main source of potential profits comes from the players who are making the worst decisions; the recreational players.
You should therefore focus most of your attention on, finding these players, playing in their games, playing as many pots with these players as possible and learning all the different ways that they are playing suboptimally.
A smaller source of profit, and one you should also spend some time focusing on, is the weak regular players.
You should apply the same analysis of weak regulars, but your primary focus should always be the recreational players.
Exploiting Recreational Players
The biggest mistake that recreational players make is playing too many hands, playing them too passively and then not being able to fold to a large amount of aggression.
Therefore, your main avenue to poker profits, is through maximising the amount of money you can get from these players when you have a good hand.
In the hand above, I opened the Small Blind, cbet 75% on flop and turn and then decided to shove 150% on the river.
Versus weaker players, greed is good!
Making bigger sizings on earlier streets, will lead to exponentially bigger bets on later streets, and therefore small increases in your size of bet, can make a huge difference to your bottom line.
This is particularly true, given that many recreational players will play fairly similar versus a 75% bet, as they would versus a 50% bet or even a 40% bet.
Similarly, on the river, many of the hands which will call a 75% bet, will certainly consider calling a 150% bet, and recreational players do not like to fold, especially when they have already invested so much.
Another trick versus recreational players, is to bet thinly for value, for a small sizing.
This has a dual benefit:
- Gets a small amount of value from weak-made hands which would otherwise not put any money in the pot
- Induces some bluff raises from hands which would otherwise not invest money in the pot
In the above hand, I raise preflop and cbet the flop.
I then bet the turn for 66%, and have a spot on the river, where I have the best hand a large amount of the time, but will find it hard to be called by worse.
I therefore bet 33%, to ensure a few more lighter calls, from hands such as 8x, 4x, 3x, 66 etc.
This bet can also induce raises from those hands; or from any draws in the opponent’s range.
That is exactly what happened in this hand, as the opponent raised 3x with A-high.
If I had bet 66% or 75%, the opponent would have likely folded, and if I had checked, he would have likely checked behind.
Exploiting Weaker Regulars
Weaker regular players tend to be a little too tight, and are only looking to put money into the pot when they are sure they have the best hand.
You win big pots versus recreational players, but versus weak regulars, you should be looking to win lots and lots of little pots.
You can do this in the following ways:
- Open lots of pots to steal their blinds
- Cbet and stab relentlessly for small sizings
- Check-raise bluff their cbets; particularly their small cbets
- Slight overbet double barrel bluff if they just call your small cbet on the flop
Additionally, you should try to not bluff catch aggressively versus these players as they will usually show up with the goods.
Cash Game Poker Tips Conclusion
If you want to increase your cash game profits, try to exploit the recreational players as much as possible.
You can also focus on ‘chipping away’ at the weaker regulars.
Use the cash game poker tips in this article and you will be crushing in no time!
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Good luck on your poker journey and if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask them in the poker coaching section of the VIP-Grinders Discord Channel.
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