In the “bet it all” strategy you raise all your chips to open a pot or to reraise in a pot. So if the blinds are $10-$20 and it’s your turn to act from late position in a hand, then you just go ahead and open for the whole $1,000 you have in front of you. You will win that $30 in blinds quite often when you bet $1,000, but you’re risking $1,000 in order to win $30! You do the math! Actually, a lot of poker players use this crazy strategy these days. The downside is that you’re risking all your chips, and if your opponent picks up a strong hand you’ll lose the whole $1,000; and for what: $30 in blinds? If someone else opens a pot for $60, and the slider (he likes to slide all his chips in!) decides to play his hand, then he just bets it all. (“Your $60 and $940 more.”) I think the main reason these players do this is that they’re afraid to play their hands after the flop, although some of them just fail to understand the long-term implications of betting a lot in order to win a little.

The good side of betting it all is that it prevents someone with a marginal hand from raising or reraising you before the flop. Suppose that I have A-J on the button and now you raise it to $60 to go in late position. I may reraise you, thinking that you’re weak because you raised the pot in late position (“He’s just stealing the antes”), and therefore I think you’re just trying to steal the blinds. If you have 10-10 and decide to reraise me as well, I may have to call you if I don’t have a lot of chips left. Now we’re going to play an even-money pot (actually, not quite even money, because the 10-10 is about a 13-to-10 favorite over the A-J), which the champion players like to avoid. It’s difficult to win consistently when you play a lot of coin-flip hands in a tournament! When you do bet it all before the flop, my only option left is to fold my marginal A-J.

For a while in the 1990s a lot of sliders reached the final tables at NLH events. Sliding all one’s chips in is probably a good strategy for a weaker, inexperienced player. This way he will get lucky for a big pot or he will be eliminated, but at least the great players won’t be able to slowly pick him apart. Still, for a good or great player, or someone aspiring to be a good or great player, anything that takes away your options in NLH is bad. Sliding a mountain all-in to try to win a molehill takes away all your options and is a very risky play as well. One bad move like this, and you find yourself out of options when the player behind you jumps up from his seat because he has pocket aces. It’s too late now to take advantage of this new information, because you’ve already made your big move all-in!

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By the way, I later did what's called rabbit bunting—looking at the deck after the hand is over, to see what would have happened had additional cards been dealt out—and discovered that the flop would have been K-2-3 had my opponent not folded his pocket K-K hand! I would have had one more bad beat (bad-luck) story to tell if I had only reraised a little bit or smooth-called his $70,000 bet. Of course, my opponent kept rabbit hunting, and he claims an ace was coming on the last card. (I didn't look beyond the flop!)

I will call someone on the end with ace high or worse if I think I have the best hand. I recently called a $30,000 bet from Carlos Mortensen (the WSOP champion in 2001) with K-Q high, and he had me beaten with a small pair.

I like to play conservatively and hang around in an NLH game or tournament until I smell blood or have a good situation come up for me. I wait for the chips to come to me. Eventually, my opponents start to make mistakes that I can take advantage of. When I feel the time is right, I will make some moves. I might call someone with a weak hand when he's bluffing, or I might bluff someone when I smell weakness.

I may even try to trap someone if I make the nuts, but generally I bet the nuts to give someone a chance to break himself against me in a pot. In the hand I mentioned above, where I flopped a set of aces, I actually bet big on the flop before I was check-raised! Most players wouldn't dream of betting when they're heads up with a set of aces but no draw is on the board. If my opponents are playing too tightly, I'll start to raise every pot to steal some chips, especially when there are antes to steal as well as blinds. (Antes aren't usually used in Hold'em, but they are added to Hold'em tournaments in later rounds and sometimes to high-limit side games.)

I play NLH by feel, with some discipline, to make sure I stay around for a while. And I trust my reading powers implicitly. If they punch, then I counterpunch. If they lower their guard, then I strike. I sit back and watch what others are doing, and then I make adjustments to my play. Sometimes I play my style, and other times I play a style based entirely on my opponents' styles.

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I like to take pieces of every different strategy I'll be laying out below and keep them in my arsenal for eventual use. I like to stick to a very tight beginner-type overall strategy, one involving playing very few hands for the most part. In this way, there isn't too much pressure on me to make tough decisions all the time. So most of the time in NLH I like to play only the "NLH fifteen" hands.

When someone behind me is playing too tightly, in NLH, I like to raise the pot to try to steal the blinds from him, whenever it's his big blind.

I trust my instincts when I'm deciding whether or not a player is bluffing. My poker instincts have been very, very good to me. I hone these instincts by practicing reading my opponents when I'm out of the hand being played, to try to get a better read on them for when I need it later. (In mentioning my own play I'm trying only to show you what's possible if you practice and develop your instincts.)

If someone has raised in front of me and I feel that he is weak, I usually fold anyway. But at the end of the hand I'll watch to see if he exposes his hole cards, so that I can confirm that he was weak or see that I was wrong. If I have confirmation that I was right, then I wait for him to do it again. Anyone who makes one weak raise can be expected to make more than one. When that player makes another raise and I feel it is weak, I go ahead and reraise him, to force him to fold his weak hand. This reraise wins many more chips than a mere blind steal would win, but you're also risking a lot more chips to win the pot when you reraise on a bluff.

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• Poker Phils Strategy – Reraise With Nothing Part2 (0)