Overprotecting Your Hand

Protecting your hand is a well-known poker concept. If you think you have the best hand at the moment, you bet to force your opponents either to fold or to pay to draw out. In no-limit hold’em, however, many players tend to overprotect their hands.

Here’s a simple example: When I play live no-limit hold’em in Las Vegas, I see this particular play with regularity. A tight — some might say nitty — regular player is first to act before the flop in a $2-$5 game. This player rarely raises before the flop, and when he does, he usually makes it $20 to go. But in this situation, he raises to $60. Everyone folds, and he shows pocket queens.

Why did he do that? Why did a player who rarely raises preflop decide to make a monster raise this time? I don’t claim to have access to the thoughts of others, but I can guess what he was thinking: “Pocket queens is a great hand, probably the best out there. If I make it $20, five people might call and I could end up losing a big pot. It’s better to bomb the pot and get all the riffraff out.”

There’s a simple problem with this line of thought, however, and it gets to the heart of no-limit hold’em. He’s risking $60 to win just the $7 in blinds money. With nine players left to act, there’s roughly a 9 percent chance that one of them will have pocket aces or kings. Laying 8.5-1 with a 1-in-11 chance that he’s behind, he’s potentially setting himself up for quite a thin margin for profit with a premium hand that should be, over time, one of his biggest moneymakers.

He’s overprotected his hand. He’s so eager to reduce his chances of losing that he’s squeezed most of the value from his hand. No-limit hold’em is about building up pots in a way that preserves your advantage. To build pots with an advantage, you need weaker hands to call your bets. You can’t just slam the door on these hands; you have to entice them to play with you.

When you bet or raise in no-limit, you should usually want one of two things: better hands to fold or weaker hands to call (and sometimes, both at the same time). If your bet will only get weaker hands to fold, you are likely overprotecting your hand, and you can probably play the hand a better way.

Here’s a hand that I saw someone play recently: It was a $2-$5 game, and most of the players had $1,000 or more. A good player opened for $25 from three off the button. A tight regular called from the button, and the big blind called. The flop came K 7 5. The big blind checked, the preflop raiser bet $50, and the button called. The big blind folded, making the pot $177 to the turn, which was the 2. The raiser checked, and the button bet $200. The preflop raiser folded, and the button flipped up the K Q and said, “I thought I had you.”

The button’s turn bet is an example of overprotecting. With top pair on a relatively uncoordinated board, after the preflop raiser’s check, the button can assume there’s a good chance that he has the best hand. But that’s not reason enough to bet. To bet, you want either better hands to fold or weaker hands to call. The next stronger hand is A-K, and it’s overly optimistic to presume that an opponent will fold that hand. So, better hands likely won’t fold. Will weaker hands call? Again, it’s not likely that will happen, either. A $200 turn bet with more than $700 behind is a very powerful bet. A good player might suspect that he still has the best hand with something like J-J or K-10, but it’s too much to ask him to call a bigger-than-the-pot turn bet with the threat of a possible pot-sized bet on the river.

A few relatively unlikely weaker hands like the 8 6 will call a $200 turn bet, but for the most part, weaker hands will not call. Since better hands won’t fold and weaker hands for the most part won’t call, this turn bet is overprotection. The upside — getting some hands that you already beat to fold — is relatively small. A hand like K-10, for instance, has three outs, giving your opponent only about a 7 percent chance to draw out. There’s $177 in the pot, and giving a free card risks losing that money 7 percent of the time. So, on average, a free card costs about $12 (7 percent of $177). In one way of looking at it, you are risking getting trapped for $200, and your average upside if you’re right is in the neighborhood of $12.

The situation is more complex, of course, especially since there’s so much money remaining for river betting. But the basic idea is correct: When you overprotect a hand, you are often putting a lot of money at risk, and the upside if things work out for you is often quite small in comparison. There’s little margin for error, and even if it does work out and you win the pot, you frequently could have won more money if you’d played differently.

In this example hand, you could play the turn in two different ways. First, you could check. The downside, as I’ve discussed, is that you give a free card to some hands that can beat you. But the upside is that you improve your chances of being called on the river by a weaker hand. Let’s say the river card is the 6. Your opponent checks. You can bet $80 or $100 now and have a much better chance of getting curious calls from weaker hands. I played a very similar hand recently in which I checked the turn and bet the equivalent of about $100 on the river. I was called by 10-10.

You also could make a much smaller turn bet, like $80. I might make this play if I know that my opponent views me as aggressive and prone to bluffing. With the smaller bet and a suspicious opponent, you can now expect worse hands to call.

The main point, however, is to think about why you’re betting. If you’re thinking, “Gosh, this is a good hand; I should try to win the pot now,” you might be overprotecting. When you have a good hand, don’t play in fear of being outdrawn. Instead, think about how you can get money from players with weaker hands.

Ed’s latest book, Small Stakes No-Limit Hold’em, is available for purchase at smallstakesnolimitholdem.com. He is a featured coach at stoxpoker.com, and you can also check out his online poker advice column, notedpokerauthority.com.