Dantepoker

This article is geared towards novice players because it is novice players who make the mistakes that I am going to discuss more often. Raising in position has now become a very well known and well used Texas Hold’em poker tactic. All the poker books discuss position as do nearly all of the poker information websites. So what this means is that the overall level of poker knowledge that is around at this time is far higher.

But yet I feel that many players misplay what are known as steal raises simply because they do not fully understand the main reasons as to why you raise from position. The terms “stealing the blinds” and “continuation betting” have now also become common parlance. But what this leads to is players learning that good aggressive play is the hallmark of a good player and then misapplying what they have read or heard.

I will give a good example here to show what I mean. Our hero raises from the button with 7c-6c to “steal the blinds”. The act of stealing the blinds pre-flop or making a continuation bet on the flop is their only plan of attack. So when they do raise on the button and take the blinds then they feel a sense of achievement. This feeling gets reinforced the more that the move is successful.

The next step is when one of the blinds (mainly the big blind) calls the raise. If the big blind re-raises then our hero simply folds his hand but if the raise gets called then we have moved on to a new stage of the hand. Our hero is unlikely to connect with the flop and in this instance he doesn’t as the flop comes Jc-4s-2d and the big blind checks. Now our hero knows that the big blind has likely missed as well and he also knows that it will only take one bet to get rid of this opponent and so he makes a continuation bet to continue his pre-flop “steal”. Often this second bet will take the pot as well but sometimes that bet gets called.

If he gets check-raised on the flop then our hero simply folds. But when he gets called on the flop then the situation suddenly takes on a whole new level of seriousness. If our hero fails to improve on the turn and his opponent checks again then what does he do? If he checks it back then it simply looks to his opponent that he is fearful of being called and this will surely invite an attack. But if he bets again then this is starting to escalate the pot to dangerous levels. So he feels that continuing the aggression is correct and he bets again.

The upshot of all this is that our hero ends up losing more back in this one hand than all of the little pots that he had won earlier in the session. On top of that is the fact that this loss niggles him more than it should and he ends up going on tilt. This was all because he was raising to “steal the blinds” and never had a plan B.