|
If (a) you are ahead and your opponent has few outs to overtake you, or if (b) you are behind and you have few outs to overtake your opponent – and furthermore, you don’t know which is the case – then you should not be amplifying the pot. This is a very important and relatively simple No Limit Hold’em principle. Yet I see otherwise excellent players frequently misplay such situations. Let’s take a look at a hypothetical example.
Assume that you are playing with deep stacks. An opponent makes a standard raise in early position. With pocket aces, you reraise. Everyone else folds and your opponent calls. Now the flop comes down K-7-7 of three different suits. Your opponent checks, you make a standard bet, and your opponent follows with a pot-sized raise.
This is a classic example of the principle described above. At this point, it would be a terrible mistake to reraise your opponent. If you are ahead, your opponent has, at most, two outs (note that if he has a king and hits his kicker, you still have the best hand). Conversely, if he is ahead of you with a seven or kings full, you are drawing to two outs.
There is no possible flush draw or straight draw on the board, so your opponent cannot be semi-bluffing with a drawing hand.
If you reraise now, you will make it clear that you can beat a hand like K-Q and allow your opponent to get away from a worse hand. On the other hand, if he has you beat, you may be playing a huge pot with a hand that is worse than a 9:1 dog. If, however, you just call, you will be more likely to get paid off later in the hand if your opponent has a king. And if you are beaten, you will be able to control the pot size and minimize your losses. Because the player with the worse hand has at most two outs to catch up, you do not need to be as concerned about protecting your hand.
Note that this is quite different from the situation if the flop were, for instance, J-10-6 of two different suits. In that case, your opponent may be semi-bluffing with a number of draws or pair-plus-draws and your decision becomes more complex. But if the conditions described in the first paragraph all apply, your decision is much simpler – and should almost always tend towards playing for pot control.
Getting back to our hypothetical hand, after calling his flop raise, assume a brick hits the turn and your opponent checks to you. A good way to play the hand now would be simply to check back. This serves a number of different purposes. If he had a monster, you have thwarted his attempt to go for another check-raise, and can now get to showdown relatively cheaply. On the other hand, if he has a king he will almost certainly value-bet it on the river when you can call and pick up a nice pot. And if he checks again on the river, you can be fairly certain that your hand is best (unless that particular opponent would check twice with a seven or kings full), and can now make a value bet that will be more likely to be called by a worse hand than if you had reraised the flop or bet the turn.
We as poker players are taught that we should always be raising or folding. While this is undoubtedly an excellent rule of thumb, we need to caution against following “rules” statically. The concept of playing for pot control provides an exception to the rule that should be relatively simple to understand and implement. And doing so should categorically improve your results at the table.
|
