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One of the great opportunities that poker’s popularity
has afforded me is that more and more charities are
using poker as a theme to raise money, and I get the
chance to be part of these great causes. I recently
participated with Phil Gordon in the Chris Dudley Juvenile
Diabetes Charity Poker Night in Portland, Oregon. Having
moved, with a certain amount of reluctance, from Portland
to LA over the summer, it was wonderful to be back in
my old hometown. This is the second year I emceed the
event, which raised over $400k for the foundation.
The night before the event, Phil and I gave a poker
clinic for anyone interested in picking up a few tips
before playing the next night. These clinics are useful
because I get to see the common mistakes players new
to the game make. And the most common error I find is
that new players have a strong tendency to call rather
than raise before the flop. This is a recipe for disaster
in poker.
New players tend to think the only purpose of raising
is to get more money in the pot when you think you have
the best hand. But in a real sense, this is the least
important reason to raise before the flop. Raising serves
many purposes.
First, raising is a powerful way to gain information
about your opponent’s hand. Poker is a game in
which you have to make decisions under conditions of
extreme uncertainty: you know what your cards are, but
are uncertain about what your opponents are holding.
Your job as a poker player is to narrow down the possible
hands that your opponents could have. Raising should
be used as a tool to do this.
Consider this: in a game of No-Limit Texas Hold’em,
if you flat call before the flop and the big blind checks,
you have learned precisely nothing about the big blind’s
hand. You have narrowed down your opponents’ possible
hands by exactly 0%. But what if you raised three to
four times the big blind before the flop and the big
blind still calls? Now how much more do you know about
her hand? Quite a bit! You know with some certainty
that the big blind is not holding a hand like 7-2 offsuit.
In fact, you have probably eliminated at least 50% of
the possible two card combinations she could have. And
if the player is tight, you have eliminated more like
80% of the possible hands she could have.
This information will be a powerful weapon as you play
out the rest of the hand, since the more you know about
your opponent’s hand, the better the decisions
you will make during the remaining betting rounds. When
the board comes 2-5-8, it is much less likely that you’re
opponent has improved her hand when she has called a
pre-flop raise. But if the board comes Q-J-T, it becomes
much more likely that her hand does relate to the board
in some way. Think about how powerful that knowledge
is to you. Information is power and, in poker, raising
is one of the best ways to gain information.
Another very important reason to raise before the flop
is to narrow down the field. When playing Hold’em,
the most likely winning hand is one pair. Because of
this, you want to do everything you can to create a
situation in which, when you flop a pair, it’s
good. The best way to do this is to limit the number
of opponents in the pot with you. Even aces prefer to
play two- to three-handed, because that greatly increases
the likelihood they will hold up.
If you limp in before the flop, it will encourage people
to limp in behind you, thus increasing the number of
people playing the pot with you. Raising, on the other
hand, discourages people from entering the pot, thus
decreasing the number of people playing the pot with
you. Anytime you decrease the number of opponents, you
increase the likelihood of your hand winning. So you
should use the preflop raise as a tool for narrowing
down the field.
Raising also increases your likelihood of winning the
pot by giving you the lead. When you raise before the
flop, you are much more likely to win the pot, whether
your hand improves or not. You will miss the board about
67% of the time, as will your opponents. Generally,
people defer to the person who has raised before the
flop. The preflop raiser will win the majority of the
pots in which her opponents have missed the flop, whether
the raiser has improved or not. If you passively call,
you are giving up this huge advantage.
There is nothing worse than watching a new player limp
into a pot, only to then call a raise from an opponent
that raises behind her. If her hand was good enough
to call a raise in the first place, then she should
have raised the pot herself and taken the role of aggressor
in the hand. She passed the advantage to another player,
but paid the same amount. She has decreased the likelihood
that she will win the pot when her opponent misses the
flop, but put in the same money that would have increased
her likelihood of winning if she had raised in the first
place. Doesn’t sound like smart poker, does it?
There are many other reasons to raise before the flop,
but these are my top three. The power of the raise is
so great, gets you so much more information, narrows
the field so effectively, increases the likelihood of
winning the hand so strongly, that I always recommend
to beginners that, if you are first to act and your
hand is good enough to play, you should raise 100% of
the time. It is no accident that all of the best players
in the world are aggressive. Follow their lead and raise
it up!
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