Back to Basics - Raising Preflop With Big Pocket Pairs

During a recent poker lesson with "TopToad," we talked strategy while I sweated him in a $160 online multitable tournament. Unless he asked for my opinion, I let him make whatever play he chose (as is typical for my lessons).



If I disagreed with his chosen play, we discussed it afterward.



He had roughly the $1,500 with which he started. We were only 20 minutes into the tournament, and the blinds were $15-$30. Everyone folded to him in late position, and he had the Q Q. I fully expected him to raise to $90 or so, but he caught me completely by surprise by flat-calling. The small blind (SB) called, and the big blind (BB) checked his option.



The flop came A-7-3. The blinds checked to TopToad, he bet $100, and won without a fight. I said nothing as the hand played out, but once it was over, my obvious question was, "Why didn't you raise preflop?"



His Response

I've been giving that situation a lot of thought, and I think that early in a tournament, I'm better off limping in with big pocket pairs, for two reasons:



1. The blinds aren't worth stealing. If I raise to $90 and win the blinds, I'm picking up only $45. On the other hand, if I limp, maybe one of the blinds will flop a smaller pair, and if he can't bring himself to fold it, I could end up winning a decent pot.



2. It adds deception. If my hand gets shown down, my opponents will see that I limped in with a monster. That will make them more wary about raising me later, when the limits go up.



My Thoughts
I knew that TopToad had taken some time in reaching his conclusions, so I wasn't going to summarily dismiss them. Plus, I am a big proponent of avoiding patterns and remaining unpredictable, so even if I favored one strategy over another, he knew I would never suggest that he always make the same play in a given situation.



So, I told him that if he wanted to add deception to his game by occasionally limping in with big pairs, that would be fine by me. But I maintained that most of the time, he is far better off following conventional strategy by raising preflop. Here were just some of my counterarguments:



1. Naturally, you'd rather win more than just the blinds, but I see that as an argument for raising, not limping. While winning $45 might not be too exciting, that is only one of your possible outcomes. Another is that you'll get called by one of the blinds, thus creating a halfway-decent pot, with the Q-Q presumably being the best hand preflop. And now that you've built a pot, you can realistically make larger bets each step of the way. If your opponent has an underpair, you can potentially take a nice chunk out of his stack, if not the whole thing.



Let's say you limp, and the SB calls. Now, the pot contains only $90. Therefore, if you want to make a bet on the flop that might be called by a lesser hand, you realistically could bet only $100 or less.



On the other hand, if you raise to $100 preflop and get called by something like K-J, and the flop comes jack high, there is now an excellent chance that you could get a large payoff. You could make a $200 bet on the flop and expect some action, and since the pot triples every time you make a pot-sized bet and get called, you could make a $600 bet on the turn and possibly get paid off on that, too.



2. Furthermore, your opponent is a lot more likely to become attached to his hand if he has called a raise. Let's say you limp in preflop and then come out with a large bet on the flop. If your opponent has a medium pair, he easily could say to himself, "This guy could be bluffing, since he's making such a large bet, but with only $90 in the pot, I'll let him have this one. I can wait for a better spot."



Instead, by raising preflop, you've built a pot worth chasing. That's not to say your opponent is getting any better pot odds. As long as you make pot-sized bets, he's still getting the incorrect price to chase. But psychologically, he sees a bigger pot at stake and doesn't want to concede it. And as the hand progresses, the pot is only going to get bigger, making him want to contest it even more.



3. While you want to add some deception to your game, I don't see the future value of limping with a big pair. In a live game, it might make a little more sense, because you'll probably have hands with which you'd prefer to limp, and you'd rather not get raised in those situations. But this is a tournament, and there are very few situations in which you should be limping. Preflop, you should usually either raise or fold. So, I don't think your deception has earned you any benefits.



Plus, we're talking about an online tournament as opposed to one in a brick-and-mortar casino, and your opponents will typically be less observant online. In order for them to be "deceived" by your play, not only must the hand reach showdown (so that they can see your queens), but they must follow the action from start to finish, and not many online players do that once they fold a hand. They have to remember that you limped in preflop, and they have to be at the same table with you long enough to put that information to use. It's not likely that all of those factors will hold true, so the value of any deceptive plays decreases even further.



4. Most importantly, you don't want to give the blinds a chance to outflop you for free. A player with K-3 offsuit in the BB has very little business calling a preflop raise, but if you limp and he flops a king, you have no one to blame but yourself. You're then in the position of either laying down your queens immediately or losing some money before you realize you're beat. You could always put some heat on and possibly bluff the kings out, but that's a complicated situation that easily could have been avoided by raising preflop.



It's even worse when one of the blinds has two cards lower than a queen and catches a lucky flop. Let's say the flop comes 10-6-2 rainbow. Once you see a flop such as that one, you will probably be willing to give heavy action with your queens. But with no preflop raise, one of the blinds could have 10-6, 10-2, or 6-2. He probably would not have called a raise with any of them, but since you gave him a free look, you again have no one to blame but yourself. What started out as an effort to be deceptive, and win more than just the blinds, might end up costing you your entire stack, when a simple tripling of the blinds would have prevented that disaster.


Conclusion

There is absolutely nothing wrong with questioning conventional poker wisdom. Once in a while you might discover new and profitable strategies. Even when you don't, you'll reach a greater understanding of the conventional wisdom just by questioning it. My hope is that this was one of the latter situations, and that both you and TopToad are reminded of the reasons that raising preflop with big pocket pairs became the standard play.

Matt Lessinger's Book of Bluffs is available at www.CardPlayer.com. While there, you can also find other articles of Matt's in the Online Poker News newsletter. Please visit his new website at http://www.mattlessinger.com/ to learn more about him.