Card Player Pro

Game $100 buy-in, 50¢-$1 six-handed no-limit hold’em game
Opponent Weak player
Stacks Mine: $103.50; His: $91.50
My Cards A 9
My Position Small blind

If you want to be a big winner in poker, it’s important to get maximum value from your strong hands. That’s why we generally make strong bets when we have the strongest hands in our range; we want to win big pots! But just like every other poker play, we need to make sure that we’re not just betting blindly because we like the look of our hand. It’s always worth the effort to slow down and think about how we can extract the most value from each situation, even if that means deviating from what might look like the “standard” decision.

I think this concept is well-represented in the following hand:

We’re dealt the A 9 in the small blind. In a 50¢-$1 no-limit hold’em game, the button limps in with about $90 to begin the hand. We choose to raise to $5. We feel like the button is a weak enough player that A-9 suited is a decent hand to raise for value and for isolation. The big blind folds, and we take a flop heads up.

The flop looks great for us — A 6 2. We’ve flopped top pair and the nut-flush draw. Time to pull the trigger, right?

Well, he can certainly call with worse hands: Any spade draw, any worse ace, and most underpairs will call us at least once. But it’s important to consider the merit of our other options, too. If we bet, there are a lot of hands that might fold. If we check, we give those hands a chance to bluff at the pot. Our hand is strong enough that we don’t mind seeing a turn card and giving our opponent the rope to hang himself.

We decide to check, and our opponent bets $10 into a $10.45 pot (after the rake). We call. The turn is the K, and we check again.

By checking both the flop and the turn, we’ve given our opponent chances to put money in with worse hands. Hands like Q-J, J-10, 10-9, 9-7, 5-5, and A-X are drawing incredibly slim against us, but opponents very often feel obligated to bluff on a board like this. He can also value-bet worse hands if we check (weaker A-X, K-X, and weaker spade draws). Finally, holding the nut-flush draw is an added bonus, as he may end up trying to represent the flush if it hits!

Our opponent again bets the pot ($29 into $29.45), and again, we call. The river is a great card for us, the Q, completing our flush. For all of the reasons above, checking is still our best option. Our opponent quickly shoves his remaining $47.50 into a pot of $86. We make the call, and see his J 10 for a straight, which is crushed by our nut flush.

It’s true that betting the flop looked profitable in a vacuum, but by checking, we got our opponent to bet the full pot on every street with jack high, drawing dead on the Q. In the end, the remainder of his money was put into the pot on the river with zero chance of winning. That’s clearly a more profitable situation than just betting and having him fold his J-10 on the flop.

So, remember that even though your hand might look pretty, don’t just bet out. Think about whether or not you might be able to make more money by taking a less obvious course of action.