Cash Game Basic Strategy

Cash games are considered by many to be the purest form of poker and the one where the skill element is at its strongest. Unlike tournaments when a player loses all their chips they don’t have to stop playing, nor is a player committed to playing for a minimum amount of time. They may not have the thrills and spills of a tournament, but cash games are a very appealing form of poker, particularly because you have so much control.

Cash Game Selection

In a cash game you get to choose the stake, the table, how long you play, how much you buy-in for and even the seat you sit in. If you are not happy with any of the above you can get up and find another table. Game Selection is one of the integral skills in cash game poker, there is an old maxim that if the 9th best player in the world sat down with the top 8, he would be a big loser, but if the 9th worst player in the world sat down with the 8 guys worse than him, he would be a big winner. Good game selection is about finding players worse than you to sit with and equally, avoiding the good players. If you find a player who you have been beating at the cash tables, add him to your buddy list or put a note on him, so you can sit with him again.

The table you select is just one factor in table selection, another equally important skill is seat selection. There is such a thing as a bad seat on an otherwise good table full of weak players, as well as a good seat on an otherwise tough table. Because you can choose which seat to sit in, it is very important to have position on the weak players, ie. sit to the left of the bad players. You extract the most money from the players on your immediate right, so you want to maximise this by sitting to the left of the worst players. At the same time you do not wish to be out of position to one of the better players, although it isn’t so bad to be out of position against a tight ‘rock’ type of player because they are for the most part predictable and easiest to play again out of position.

The skill edge is greater in cash games, but as long as the people you play against have less skill than you, you should expect to make a steady profit from cash game poker.

Cash Game Complexities

Cash game poker requires a much broader range of skills because even though the conditions are the same in every single hand (Unlike in a tournament where every situation is unique) you have to be much more aware of a lot more subtle information across the length of a session (or number of sessions), particularly in your interactions between other regular players.

Because you will almost always have a deeper starting stack (100 big blinds usually) it means you need to know how to handle a deep stack. In tournaments usually if you haven’t got all the money in pre flop you can expect it to go in after the flop, but that usually isn’t the case in cash games and that means you have to know how to play the turn and river well. Look out in particular how people play on the turn and river because this is usually where the biggest mistakes are made.

Another big element of cash game poker is your table image and that of other players. Your table image is what you think your opponents will think of you based on how you have acted so far at the table and vice versa. So if you haven’t played many hands at all they might think you are a rock and if you have re-raised every other pot they might think you are crazy. Likewise if you have just had someone call a massive all in on the river with bottom pair you might think they are a little bit crazy too.

It’s very important to be aware of table image at all times because you can exploit it to make more money. For example if you think you have a really aggressive image at your table then you might want to bet big with a strong hand because you are much more likely to get called as everyone will think you are bluffing. If you haven’t played a hand all day then you might get away with a well timed bluff because everyone thinks you are tight. Similarly if you have been called down several times by a bad player with bad hands, you should know not to bluff them based on their table image.

Also table image is a good reason to use your player notes, so you can pick up right where you left off the next time to share a table with your opponents.

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