Sunday, January 1, 2012

The goals of betting

As mentioned in the last to posts:
You want your bets to have purpose and you want your bet to tell a story to get your opponents to act the way you want them to.
How do you do this?
First, you have to identify what you want them to do.
There are only three possibilities: fold, call or raise.
One example:
Your on a 9 player table and you have KQ offsuit. You raise to 3 times the big blind preflop and only one opponent is left. The flop brings King of hearts and Queen of hearts and four of spades. You hit a top two pair. What do you do now?

Even though you hit top two pair, it is still a scary flop. Your opponent might have a flush draw or a straight draw. You want to end the hand right now.

The first thing to determine is what kind of player he is.
A: Loose (more likely to chase cards)
B: Tight (most likely to fold)

As your opponent will only hit the draw 1/3 of a time betting half the pot will likely get a tight player to fold because the odds are not in his favor for the amount of money he has to put in.
Against a loose opponent a 1/2 the pot bet is probably to small. You will have to make a full pot bet or even over bet the pot to try to get him to fold. In some cases this may mean going all in.

3 comments:

  1. I've been in that situation before, I hit 2 pair AK, other guy river'd a flush of diamonds; sucked hard :(

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  2. Interesting and informative read, as always. Keep it up!

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