|
Raise It Up
By Annie Duke
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!
|
|
