Jennifer Harman Poker Strategy

Jennifer Harman is a very important figure in the poker world for many different reasons. She won two World Series of Poker bracelets in open events, she authored the Limit Hold'em chapter in Super System II, she won more than two million dollars in live tournaments and who knows how much more playing in live nosebleed cash games. Jennifer Harman proved that poker is not just "something that boys do" and she inspired many women to try their luck and skill at a poker table.

She also encouraged poker players to 'give back', organizing many charity tournaments and raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for charity. In this article, we're going to take a look at some of the famous poker hands from Jennifer's career and try to figure out what allowed her to be so successful playing against the top live pros for so many years.

This hand might look simple on the surface but there are a few interesting things about it. Jennifer had the image of a tight-aggressive player, so her hand selection was somewhat unorthodox, but also smart since she had a number of call happy players behind her (like Jamie Gold or Sammy Farha) which made it all the more likely that she would see a multiway pot with a suited connector. As for the flop play, raise would be the default for most players given the board texture and it was especially good against Daniel Negreanu in that specific situation.

First of all, as we can hear in the table talk during the hand Negreanu had a very tight image that session so he was somewhat more likely to have a strong holding. Second, of all, Daniel knows that Harman is a tight player so there's actually a non-trivial number of combos missing from the top of her range in this spot.

She might 3bet KK and TT and she shouldn't have hands like K7 or T7 in her range which leaves her with 77, KT and a bunch of combo draws which in turn makes Daniels play easier to justify.

Another hand that might look simple on the surface, but it only reinforces the image of a very solid player that Jennifer managed to create over her long career. Sure, almost everyone knows that triple barrelling aces for value is a good idea on a dry board, but it's easier said than done when playing aginst Phil freakin' Ivey.

 And yet, Harman acted like it was just another hand against just another player. She made a standard cbet, followed it with a barrel on a scare card and ended the hand with a solid, hard to read bet that wasn't trying to telegraph that her range is overly polarized (some players might be tempted to go with a pot size bet for the sake of making their range seem more polarized).

This hand illustrates the striking contrast between Harman's solid approach and the goofy stuff Phil Hellmuth loves to indulge in. While Phil was busy with the limp-trapping and blind checking, Jennifer made a calm isolation raise and value bet.

It could be argued that there was one more street of value to be had in this spot and Harman talked about that at the end of the hand, but at the same time the board development was far from favorable for her and the texture looked like one that should absolutely smash a preflop limping range.

Highly unusually bad beat that practically played itself. No matter of Jennifer decided to ship the flop or flat the flop like she did both players would eventually see the same showdown. The only difference is that playing this game slow Harman left herself vulnerable to a very strange and painful slow roll.

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