Jonathan Little's Weekly Poker Hand: Tight-Aggressive Play Works for a Reason
Poker pro and coach Jonathan Little has been producing a wide variety of strategy content for poker players for some time, including authoring multiple books and sharing videos and articles on his website and elsewhere, much of which is free to players of all levels seeking to improve their games.
Little started his popular "Weekly Poker Hand" series on YouTube several years ago, and recently he decided to switch up the format to begin featuring footage from live small- and medium-stakes cash games and tournaments.
In the episode shown below, Little returns to Stones Gambling Hall in California to analyze a hand from a low buy-in no-limit hold'em bounty tournament.
The hand comes from the final table where the stacks are all relatively shallow. Action begins with a player named RC being dealt K?K? and raising 3x to 48,000 from early position. As RC only had about 11 big blinds to start the hand, Little discusses how he might have open-shoved rather than make the 3x raise.
It folds to a player named Sue on the button who with a relatively big stack of more than 30 BBs calls with J?9?. Here Little notes how calling the raise with a speculative hand like this isn't as preferable when an opponent's stack is so shallow, thus providing less in the way of implied odds.
The pair go heads-up to a 5?10?9? flop, and RC bets 100K into 120K. As RC had just 181K at that point, Little points out that he probably should have just open-pushed given the coordinated board and the fact that with kings he had one of the better made hands.
In any case, RC's bet puts Sue in a somewhat uncomfortable spot, caused in large part by the preflop decision to call with jack-nine suited. Should Sue call the bet or raise all in here? Watch the video below and see both what Little recommends and what Sue ended up doing.
Some of the concepts discussed in the hand analysis include:
- tight-aggressive strategy
- bet sizing
- pot odds (and implied pot odds)
- board texture
- fold equity
Take a look:
Jonathan Little is a professional poker player and author with over $6,900,000 in live tournament earnings. He writes a weekly educational blog and hosts a podcast at JonathanLittlePoker.com. Sign up to learn poker from Jonathan for free at PokerCoaching.com. You can follow him on Twitter @JonathanLittle..
