Jonathan Little's Weekly Poker Hand: Tough Spot Against PokerSnowie
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 more than five years ago, using the format to focus on particular concepts and common mistakes as illustrated in his hand analyses. In the episode shown below, Little reviews a hand played versus the AI program PokerSnowie.
For this hand, Little set the stacks at 30 big blinds deep in order to simulate a tournament situation. Action begins with Hero holding 3♣3♦ in the hijack seat and watching PokerSnowie make a 3x raise right before him.
Little shows how the program recommends folding here since the stacks aren't deep enough to set mine profitably. Hero calls, though, and after the flop comes 2♦8♣5♠, Snowie continues with about a half-pot bet.
Interestingly, here the recommendation is actually to raise given the board texture and the players' likely ranges. However Little recognizes how in tournaments one would be understandably tempted to err on the side of caution and fold.
Hero calls, though, and the turn brings the 4♥. PokerSnowie leads with another half-pot bet. Little uses the program to show how our opponent's turn bets here are mostly done with value hands (i.e., not two unpaired overcards).
From there Little goes back to discuss the earlier action, and how that call before the flop was not such a good first decision, thus leading Hero into more difficulty postflop.
Watch below and listen to Little's analysis, during which he touches on the following topics:
- starting hand selection
- set mining
- stack sizes
- ranges and range reading
- bluffing and value betting
Jonathan Little is a professional poker player and author with over $7,000,000 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.
