A Word About Raising

A long post, but I think it is worth a read.

It is amazing to me how many players do not understand how to raise. They understand that they should raise. They understand that raising is important. But they don’t understand when to raise, or, more importantly, how much to raise.

To these players, raising serves one of two purposes. One, it gets more money in the pot when they have the best hand. Two, it steals pots when they are bluffing. When they want to do the former, they seem to always raise too little. When they want to do the latter, they seem to always raise too much.

We can take my post yesterday as an example of raising too little. In the first hand, I have flopped a flush draw holding Jh6h. The flop is the kind of flop that misses a lot of players (KcKh4h), a pair of high cards and a very low card. The pot was un-raised, so there is a lot of reason to suspect that neither of my opponents has a pocket pair. This is a perfect chance for someone from the blinds to put in a good bet and steal this flop. An added benefit is that I have the flush draw, so my bluff is really a semi-bluff with many apparent outs if I get caught. So I bet, $3 into a pot of $3.50, an aggressive bet at a small pot.

My opponent (who later will claim that I am a fish), guesses correctly that I am trying to steal this pot. It is a pretty reasonable conclusion. He has paired the 4 and thinks he is ahead, which he actually is. A good read. Good reads like this can make good poker players. Unless, there is another hole in their game. Then it makes them broke. He demonstrates his hole. He needs to raise here for two reasons. One, he needs to define his hand and find out if he is really up against a king. Second, he needs to get rid of many other possible hands that can beat him. Any holding with two cards higher than a 4 is actually only about a 3-1 dog to him right now. So, even if I hold J6o, I am still going to end up drawing out on him 25% of the time. But, since I bet, it is pretty reasonable to believe that I have even more outs, something like a flush draw. Well a flush draw is 4-1 to hit on the next card and 2-1 to hit by the river. In reality, my combination of a flush draw and two overs to his pair makes me about 50/50 to win this hand by the river. Given this, he needs to raise significantly to try to deny me odds to call.

What does he bet? He raises to $6. A raise of $3 into a $9.50 pot. There was $6.50 in the pot. He called $3 and raised $3. He gave me more than 4-1 odds to call that bet. Awful… absolutely terrible. What on Earth was he attempting to do with that raise? I cannot even speculate as to his misguided thinking. Either weakly call, or don’t even bother with that raise. My speculation is that he is trying to represent the king here. He is raising to tell me that he has the king. OK, do that. Make a play. Represent the king. But don’t give me odds to call EVEN IF YOU HAVE THE KING!!! Jeez! If he had the king, I would bet 4-1 to have him beaten on the next card. He is giving me more than 4-1 with his raise. Not good. Terrible. Fishy!!!! A more reasonable raise would be to give me 2-1 odds to call. Something like a raise to 12. So, he is calling $3 to put $9 in the pot and raising by $9 more. There are $18 in the pot and I need to put in $9 to call. I would only be getting 2-1 odds from the pot. I would need 4-1 to call and would have to fold (in most cases). But he flubs it. He raises by $3. Yikes.

I easily call his raise. The pot is now $15.50. Not only am I getting odds now, but I have to question whether he even has a king.

Some may say, but you actually put in $6. $3 for the bet and $3 to call his raise. This is true, but the two bets were unconnected. My $3 bet was because I thought I had excellent odds to win the hand right there (with outs if I lost that bet). Once that bet was made, it was gone. It became part of the pot. I lost that bet. The raise was a new bet. Therefore, he had to give me or deny me odds based soley on the amount of his re-raise, which he did not.

Players like this are players who are consistently being sucked out on. They don’t realize that they are supposed to be being sucked out on, not because they are unlucky, but because they suck!

I miss my card on the turn, damn it! Oh well, I am going to give this one up. I didn’t catch, but that’s cool, I pretty much had odds the whole time. I check. Wait, WTF. My opponent bets $5. What the hell is that? Wow, the pot is paying $15.50 and he only bets $5? That’s $20.50 and I only need to call $5. I need 4-1 to call here and get pot odds. He gave me exactly the right pot odds to call. Hmmm…wait a minute. Is this guy smarter than I am giving him credit for? Does he already have a full boat? Is he purposefully giving me the correct odds to call? Hmmm… NA. I call.

Sure enough my flush card comes. I make a medium sized bet. He calls, and I take the pot down. Now think about this. He lost $23 on this hand because he didn’t know to put $6 more dollars into that raise. Here is the conversation that follows.

Allnightwc: damn fish
HERO: looks that way doesnt it

This is very telling in an of itself. He doesn’t realize that HE is the fish. He doesn’t even realize that he has totally misplayed this hand and just given away money. He believes that all players who river flushes are fishes because he has heard that fish chase. No, my friend, good players will sometimes bet their draws and good players will almost always chase when you give them the right odds. You, my friend, are the fish.

Let’s move on to the last hand. He plays this hand so poorly that it gets really ridiculous to even talk about. First, let me say that raising with 72s is a really bad idea. Don’t do it. It is stupid. But, but this point, I thought it would be funny to try to take this guy out with the hammer. I was actually hoping to win this on the flop with a continuation bet, show it to him, and get him even more worked up. Things worked out differently than I had hopedJ

I flop the flush. The pot is $8.50. He bets $3 at me. I raise, which considering how weak my flush is, is a very smart play. My hand is pretty safe right now, considering that the Ad is already out there, but still, I don’t want him drawing with a lone Kd to beat me. I raise to deny him odds to draw. He has 7 outs if he has one diamond, which is about 6-1 against catching on the turn. I bet enough that the doesn’t get near those odds. I bet $10, which is a call of his $3 and $7 more. He will need to put in $7 into a $24 pot. I am manipulating the pot to only offer 3.5-1 on his call. A call by him with one diamond is not unreasonable, but he needs implied odds to think it will pay off. Trust me, if a fourth diamond came, I was not putting in one more red cent, so he had NO implied odds on this hand. But he didn’t know that. His call was not totally unreasonable.

Anyway, here he goes again, raising. He raises $4 more. What? HUH? What the hell is that? Again, he misunderstands the fundamental reason to raise. He is raising just because he thinks he has the best hand. But, if he is correct and he does have the best hand, then this raise is totally screwed up. It protects nothing. He isn’t even holding a diamond. So, at the very least, he MUST protect his top pair against a flush draw. Again, a flush draw is 4-1 to catch on the next card. What odds does he give? He gives 35-4 or 9.5-1 odds. Yikes! I am calling that with a gut shot let alone a flush draw. Not that it mattered, because I had a flush already, but… even if he is right and I can’t beat a pair of aces right now, his raise is pathetic! He must raise enough to deny me odds to draw to a lone diamond. It is that simple. He does not because he does not understand why you raise. There was $22.50 in the pot at the time. He had to call $10. So a bet of $30 was pretty reasonable if he thought he had the best hand. That would take $20 to call. He would be offering 52.5-20 or about 2.6-1 odds. Not good enough to draw on with a lone diamond. Of course, it was ridiculous to think that his pair of aces with a 2 kicker was good at this point, so any raise was a pathetic move, but if he was correct in the read then his raise was completely and utterly wrong. He reopened the betting for no legitimate purpose.

I moved in, because I suspected that he had a lone diamond and was protecting my flopped flush. At this point, there is $35 in the pot and I need to call $4 more so the pot will end up somewhere around $40. I only wanted to give this nut 2-1 odds to call figuring that he would probably tolerate that. Since I need to put in $40 more, and I have him tilted already, I figure an over bet of his whole stack would stand a good chance of looking like a bluff and getting a call from him. I push all-in and sure enough he makes the ridiculous call with a pair of aces and a two kicker into a made flush.

Here is the deal. If you raise, you are raising with a purpose. You are trying to protect your hand. You need to raise enough to do that. You must make a raise that is pretty close to the size of the current pot to properly protect most hands. Don’t raise if you don’t suspect that you are ahead. Never raise too little. Never reopen the betting unless you need to do it to protect a strong hand. If you are going to bluff, bluff like you have the hand. Make a bet that people will believe is commensurate with the raise they would expect from the hand you are bluffing that you have. If you bluff, but your bluff is too small to protect the hand that you are pretending to have, don’t be surprised when you get called. Mostly, don’t raise without a purpose... ever!

I wanted to say a few things about raising too much, but I have done that in the past. Read about my dad's driving leasons below for my thoughts on giant bluffs.

Anyway... good luck at the tables.