Thinking Ahead

I’ve been helping my brother learn No-limit hold’em the past couple weeks, and he recently made the discovery that a little bit of planning goes a long way. We’ve talked about pot-control, inducing bluffs, and other somewhat complicated concepts. He summarized it in a much simpler, more effective way.

He told me that when the flop comes down, he looks at the board, and at his cards, and asks himself “How big a pot do I want with this hand?” Once he has the answer, the actual play of the hand is easier.

A couple example hands:

Hand 1, a small pot hand:

.50/1.00 NL, $100 effective stacks.

Hero raises As2s to $3 on the button. The BB, a somewhat loose but not terrible player, calls.

The flop is: Ad 4h 4s (pot: $6.50)

How big a pot do we want with this hand? Not a very big one. If we get the remaining $97 into this $6 pot we will undoubtably lose.

There are no draws, so our opponent will rarely have a worse calling hand, and any Ace or better is ahead of us. With that in mind, we would want to get one, perhaps two streets of small betting in at the most to get value from pocket pairs.

If we decide to bet the flop and get raised, a possibly tough decision (is he bluffing? does he really have a 4?) becomes simpler: The pot is getting bigger than is acceptable for our hand’s strength, so we fold.

If bet-folding is uncomfortable, perhaps we check the flop, and our opponent makes a midsized turn bet. We call, intending to call a midsized river bet – hopefully we have induced a bluff.

Things have gotten much simpler now that we know how big we want the pot to be. If our opponent tries to force the pot larger than we are happy with, we simply fold and save some $.

Hand 2, getting value:

.50/1.00 NL, hero has $100 and villain has $25

Folded to hero on the cutoff whe raises to $3 with JhJd. The villain on the button, an unknown shortstack, calls.

Flop: Td 8d 7c (pot: $7.50)

Our opponent has $22 left in a $7.50 pot. With so little left to bet and so many draws out we are happy to get $22 in the pot.

So, we bet full pot ($7.50) so our opponent gets as close to allin as possible before the board can scare him or us. Villain minraises to $15, we stick to the plan and shove, and he calls. (pot: $51.50)

Villain shows Jc8c for middle pair and a gutshot. The turn is a K and the river an A – our Jacks hold up, but the turn and river would have made it very difficult to get villain’s whole stack had we played it slower. Or worse, if we tried to induce bluffs we might have ended up getting pushed off the best hand!

Planning is a powerful tool in NL. Take a look at the flop, and the board before you take an action. Ask yourself “how big of a pot do I want?” With a little practice even tough decisions can become much easier.