Great Poker

There are many subtleties that make a poker player a winner, from table selection and rakeback, to some of the more hands-on skills like the ability to correctly assess the bet size.I know from my own experience that even when I had pretty much every aspect of my play fine-tuned, I still had problems with controlling the pots using bet size, and thus won a lot less than I could have.

This is the very reason why experts recommend that rookies start with fixed limit games, since bet size doesn’t influence the outcome there. Playing cards rather than people (what most rookies do) is more suited to FL play than to anything else. When it comes to playing people, the bet size becomes extremely important.

There’s not much good in happening across a monster if one has no idea how to make the most of it. Remember, statistically, of all the hands you’re dealt, only a very small percentage becomes an eventual winner. You’d better make those hands pay handsomely, because how much you manage to rake in when you win, will mean the difference between being a loser and a winner in the long-run (certainly, the rake and the poker rakeback you may benefit from, will also have a word in it).

Controlling the pot is extremely important even in situations when you might not hold the nuts, or you know you’re easily outdrawn. Control over the pot can only be achieved via bet size and bet frequency.

On the other hand, when in possession of the nuts, pot-control becomes even more important. How many times did it happen to you that you made opponents fold by betting too much? A mistakenly assessed bet-size can cost you a lot of money when you look at it like that.

Building up the pot can indeed be a tedious undertaking, because most of the time it’s a trade off between the likelihood of your opponent(s) calling and the eventual size of the pot, while influenced by a bunch of other factors like your stack size and that of your opponents, as well as the table image you’ve been exhibiting.

When betting into an opponent on a strong hand, one needs to consider the following: the size of the bet will define the odds offered to that opponent, the larger the bet the larger the pot is likely swell, because future bets represent a certain percentage of the pot pretty much all the time. Position can be crucial in obtaining and maintaining control over a pot. It’s much easier for a good player to build a pot from a good position, and it’s also easier to limit its size if that is the goal.

Let’s consider that you’re in an early position, and you want to limit the size of the pot, because you reckon you just flopped a second-best hand. How can you achieve that? Other than checking and praying that the others follow your example, there’s not much you can do. As a matter of fact, your checking will probably be regarded as a sign of weakness and thus it’s likely to prompt a bet or even a raise from the players following in your wake. If you’re in late position though, your check may just be the last word said on the hand on that betting round. The decision of whether or not the hand should be raised, rests entirely in your hands.

Likewise, if you want to build up a pot, betting from early position is by far not an optimal move. That will almost certainly scare all those players away, who don’t really have much but they would’ve stuck around anyway to see if something hits them. No matter how well you size your bet in this situation, it’ll still say that you’re on something big and that you are eager for action. In late position however, a bet could mean a bunch of different things. If you bet after all those in front of you checked, other players might well think that you don’t have anything, you’re merely trying to make the best of the position you’re in, with any hand that you have (sometimes this is the case indeed). At any rate, it’s a lot more likely to generate action, than the same move from an early position.