CRAI
Stands for Check-Raise All-In. Often seen in questions such as, ‘Should I lead or is CRAI a better line?’ Other similar terms include: b/f = bet/fold; c/c = check/call; c/f = check/fold; b/3b = bet/three-bet.
Sklansky bucks
Named after poker author David Sklansky, this is another way of tracking your play in poker and is a good way of avoiding results-orientated thinking. In essence Sklansky bucks represent the amount of equity earned in a poker hand, rather than the actual money lost in any given poker hand. As the man himself says, ‘Basically, if you lose a hand but your opponent made mistakes, such as drawing to a flush without proper pot odds, you may lose the pot but you have earned Sklansky bucks by causing your opponent to make a mistake. On the flip side, if you are drawing without odds but you get lucky and draw out on your opponent, you win the pot but you lose Sklansky bucks.’ Many poker tracking programmes such as Hold’em Manager have a feature called ‘All-in EV’ which is very similar.
WA/WB
If you ever see something along the lines of, ‘I think you should check both for pot control and because this is a spot where you are either W/A or W/B,’ the W/A and W/B stand for ‘Way Ahead’ and ‘Way Behind’. May also appear as WA/WB or wa/wb.
PSR
PSR stands for Pot-to-Stack Ratio and you’ll often see it used in conjunction with the term PSB (Pot-Sized Bet). For example: ‘His flat call of my preflop raise left me in an awkward spot as after a PSR bet I only had 1.7xPSB left in my stack.’ It is obviously advantageous to keep an eye on the PSR when you are trying to manipulate the size of the pot, so that you can either get it all-in by the river (should you wish too) or so you don’t get stuck in a pot.
Underfull
An underfull is a full house which is not the best possible full house. For instance, if you hold 8-8 on a K-K-8-J-3 board you have an underfull. It is a situation that occurs often when playing pot-limit Omaha but not so much in no-limit hold’em.
Cold call/Cold four-bet
To cold call means to call a raise when you’ve got no money previously invested in the pot. As an extension of this you can cold four-bet. A cold four-bet occurs when a raise and a reraise (the three-bet) has already occurred and a player with no money in the pot raises again. This is obviously a sign of immense strength.
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