how would you play this cash game?

We have a weekly home game ($0.50/$1) that is very loose, aggressive. It's a very tough game and playing in that game every week has really helped me improve my game a lot.

One thing about a weekly game is you get to know the people. Knowing how each person plays helps a lot in developing a strategy. But that can backfire on you too. We have one regular who will call just about anyone down with bottom pair. I regularly see him losing huge pots to to people who are holding middle pair. Yet it seems like he's always got the nuts when I'm in a hand with him. I lost a huge pot to him just a couple of weeks ago with the second nut flush to his nut flush and another huge pot just last week with KK against his AA on a queen high board.

The most consistent winner at our game is the tightest player I've ever played against. He almost never completes his small blind even if the entire table has limped in. He might play 15 or 20 hands all night. He plays them strong and people pay him off. He rarely walks away from the game with less then $150 in profit.

Alli is the biggest overall winner and she does it by playing very aggressively. Everyone has her pegged as a maniac and call her down pretty loosely and she gets paid off a lot. She is also capable of making big bluffs which often work, and which she occassionaly gets caught on. But because she gets caught making a big bluff once or twice a night, people call her big bets with very marginal hands and she wins a lot of big pots most nights.

My approach to the game is to really mix up my play. I generally play pretty tight, but connectors are a big part of my arsenal. I've developed a loose image so people tend to call me loosely. I don't bluff hardly at all, people are just too likely to call me. I almost never make continuation bets into a pot with 2 or more other people in it. I play my strong hands strongly and really pay a lot of attention to who is in the pot with me and how they are playing their hands.

The main problem I see with your game, is you don't have enough money on the table for the blinds. Let's say you pick up AK and make a standard raise of 4x the BB. You've got 1 caller and the flop comes ten high. There is $4.75 in the pot, so your standard continuation bet is about $3. If you don't get a fold and don't improve, you can't really continue in the hand. If he calls you (depending of course on who you are up against) then he probably has something. But you've now got half your stack gone. At our game, the buy in is anywhere from $20 to $100. I always buy in for the maximum, as do most people. We have a few that will buy in for $20 or $40. Those are the people that most consistently rebuy multiple times and never cash out. They just don't have enough play with the chips they have. And when they do catch a big hand and get paid off on it, they aren't able to capitalize on that because they don't have enough chips to win a really big pot. They are also easier to make moves against. It doesn't matter how much you have in front of you, it's difficult to make a decision for your whole stack without pretty close to the nuts.

And going south with the chips is something that is absolutely not allowed at our game. You'll find that is the general rule at most cash games, including in casinos. Whatever money is in play has to stay in play. We've had cases where people wanted to protect their winnings, but that's just not allowable. If there are players who are stuck, they want a chance to win their money back. If it disappears from the table, they can't do that.

One thing I would suggest is playing micro stakes cash games online if you want to work on developing a cash game. Alli always considered herself a tournament player and we'd go to local cash games and she'd generally lose multiple buy ins. She had this mentality that she was a tournament player and not a cash game player. It's really a completely different game, though lessons you learn in one format can apply to the other. I was winning consistently at these cash games, but her losses were a wash against my winnings. We talked about it and decided she just needed to work on cash game skills. So we put $100 each on PokerStars and played $0.01/$0.02. We critiqued each other's games and discussed key plays in the session. I religiously track all of our results and I graphed the results of our sessions. After a slow start, things started to click and she was outperforming me at those tables. Since then we've started our home game and she has won nearly 4x's as much as I have at those games. So getting some experience at cash games is certainly valuable. Even though the $0.01/$0.02 tables online can be pretty tough since most of those players really play badly, it's not too difficult to beat those tables over the long haul. And that can give you the confidence in your game that you can take to the live tables.

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Nobody is always a winner, and anybody who says he is, is either a liar or doesn't play poker. -- Amarillo Slim

You say how could I make that call? How could you make that bet? We're playing poker, not solitaire. -- Doyle Brunson