Poker Poker Elements

To sum up, when dealing with masters, our style should be as balanced as possible, and when dealing with weak players, we can worry less about our balance. If there are obvious loopholes in the opponent's play style, we can find a good way to restrain him. In various situations, we must have various weapons to balance our play style, which can reduce the opponent's profit while increasing our own expectations.

 

Texas Hold'em Poker Element #5: Pot Control

 

This issue introduces another element: pot control. This article mainly answers three questions: why should we control the pot, when should we control the pot, and how to control the pot.

 

Let's look at an example first. At a 9-max table, the blinds are 2-5, you have AhKh under the gun, you raise to 25, everyone folds to the button, and he calls. You have 1,000 and more buttons than you do.

 

The flop comes As 8h 2s, giving you top pair, top kicker, and a backdoor flush, a perfect hand. But the card also has the possibility of a spade flush. In order not to give him the correct odds, you decide to bet to protect your hand. You bet 50 and Button calls. You think he is most likely to be a weak Ace, or has an 8, or is listening to a flush, and you should be in the lead. Of course, there is a slight possibility that he has A8 two pair or a set, but the possibility is small, and you are very sure of your hand.

 

The pot is 150 (for simplicity, the blinds are counted as rake), the turn card is a 5d, and there are no obvious cards except 3-4. You are still very confident in your hand and want to get rid of the spades. So you bet 100, and your opponent still calls. The pot is 350, and the river card is a 9c. You are happy to see that it is not a spade, and you make a value bet of 250, hoping to profit from your opponent's AQ or something like that. To your surprise, your opponents all in.

 

Now the total pot is 1425, and you need the remaining 575 to call. The Pot Odds ratio is 2.5:1, and you need a 28% win rate to call. Considering that your opponent often bluffs and is likely to play this way if the spade call fails, you decide to call. After seeing you follow the bet, your opponent immediately showed 3c 4c. It turned out that he made a nut straight on the turn card and didn't make a strong move until the river card. As a result, your 200BB chips were wiped out in one hand.

 

What’s wrong with the hero’s play style? Or a more basic question is, is that hero so wrong? Considering each step alone, it seems to be right. However, the hero's mistake is that he did not have an overall plan for the process of this hand. Top Pair Top Kicker is a good hand, but not enough to support a 200BB stack on the river.

 

In fact, after the flop comes out, what hero should determine is how much his target investment is for this hand. For top pair top kicker, the final investment should be controlled at 2-8 times the pot before the flop. The looser the opponent, the more your target investment should be; the tighter the opponent, the less your target investment should be.

 

For most opponents, 4x the preflop pot size is a good estimate. Back to the example, the pre-flop pot is $50, so the protagonist’s (post-flop) target investment should be controlled at 2-8 times, that is, $100 to $400 is appropriate. For a typical opponent with moderate tightness For example, it should be positioned at 4 times, which is $200. What is the concept of $200? If you make a pot-size bet every time, the first time it will be $50.

 

After your opponent calls, the second time it will be $150, which has reached the target value. In other words, it is enough for us to place two bets. Even if our bet is not the pot size, but two-thirds of the pot size, then we have reached 292 after three bets (the first bet is 33, the second bet is 78, and the third bet is 181), exceeding 200 is not what we want. So, betting three times in a row on the flop, turn, and river does not meet our target betting range.

 

If our post-flop hand is an overpair, we can set it slightly larger than the target investment for top pair, top kicker, but it should never be higher than 10 times the pre-flop pot. The optimal investment for most opponents should be around 6x.

 

For example, we have A A, and the pot is 50 before the flop, and an opponent flops K 8 2. If the effective chips are 300 at this time, we can safely hold on and think about how to achieve full advancement as soon as possible without being scared away 0pponent; but if the effective chips are higher than 500, I am afraid we still need to consider pot control and not lose everything on a superpair hand type, unless we make a set or a backdoor flush ourselves.

 

The above discussion has not taken into account two more unfavorable factors.

 

First, the factor of opponent raising. As long as the opponent raises a bet on any street, he may have more than 20 times of the pre-flop pot in the river by the time the chips are stacked, which is far more than the 4 times we like, and 8 times higher than our highest value.

 

There are too many; second, location factors. If you have position, you can control the pot more conveniently. However, when you don't have position, the size of the pot is decided by your opponent. He has the right to raise/reraise at any time, and he also has the opportunity to take the last shot. The combination of these two factors makes it not so good for us to top the pair with AK in early position.

 

In the vast majority of cases, we have to check at least one street and perform pot control so that we are not only Losing too much money on a pair of hands.

 

So, what to do with your opponent’s various draws? If we check, wouldn't it just give them a chance to chase? No-limit Texas Hold'em is a game about to balance. There are gains and losses.

 

Yes, we do give our opponents appropriate odds (infinite), which is also a potential error. Here we must weigh which of these two errors is greater. Obviously, the first mistake (not controlling the pot and pushing top pair top kicker too hard) will cause us to lose the entire stack, and the second mistake (giving our opponent the right odds to chase the cards) will cause We lose some of our chips, and the first mistake is more costly, especially when the chips are deep.

 

If the stack is shallow and all the chips are within the range of top pair top kicker, there will be no checking problem. For example, it is still the hand in the example at the beginning of this article, but the effective chip is 300, which is 6 times the pre-flop pot (50). You can safely consider holding all your chips on the flop of As 8h 2s. No check required.