Calling With a Purpose

How do you decide whether to call a raise preflop? Do you just go with what feels right in the moment? There’s a lot more to it than that. Do you make a plan for how you’ll proceed after the flop? You should. And you could easily have different plans with the same hand depending on your position, your opponent, your stack size and other factors. In this article, I’ll introduce a simple method to get you started thinking about why and how to call a raise.

Is The Raiser Strong or Weak?

There is a world of difference between raising and calling a raise. When you raise, you often count on having some chance of stealing the blinds. You don’t know with certainty who, if anyone, will end up seeing the flop against you. You can and should make some educated guesses, but you don’t yet have anywhere near all of the information you’d need to start making a plan for playing after the flop — you don’t even know whether you’ll see one!

When you’re contemplating calling a raise, though, you know there’s a good chance you’re going to have some postflop decisions against the player who raised. Your assessment of that player’s raising range will help you determine whether to call, and if you do, how you’ll proceed postflop.

Of course, the more specific you can be with your read, the better your planning and decision making will be. For starters, though, you can keep it incredibly broad and simply decide whether the raiser has a strong or a weak range. If you believe he has a strong range, perhaps because he is a tight player and/or raising from early position, then you must assume that he will often have a strong hand after the flop. There are very few truly bad flops for big pocket pairs, and good broadway hands like A-Q make very strong hands when they do hit the flop. A hand like A-K can be even be strong when it doesn’t improve on the flop, depending on the situation!

If your opponent has a weak range postflop, then he will rarely hold a strong hand on the flop. Note that this is true no matter what the flop is. A low-card flop does not mean that a player with a weak preflop range has probably flopped well. A weak range is a wide range, and it includes more than just small cards. A wide range is weak because it contains more hands that need improvement than does a strong range, and many hands in that range are still relatively weak when they do improve. For example, 10-5-4 is a well above average flop for a weak hand like 7-5 suited, even though it produces only second pair with a bad kicker.

Calling to Crack

Though you should call with fewer hands than you would against a weak range, a strong range doesn’t have to mean you fold all but your most premium holdings. In some cases, you’d actually prefer your opponent to have a strong range when you call with something weak. The important thing is that you go to the flop knowing what you’re up against and that you will need a lot of improvement.

I call this “calling to crack.” You expect your opponent to have a big hand, so you call on speculation, intending either to fold the flop and lose a small pot or flop big and win a huge pot.

To make this work, both you and your opponent need to have a lot of money behind relative to your preflop investment. How much exactly depends on how often you’ll get the flop you’re looking for and how likely your opponent is to pay you off, but just know that these calls are profitable only because of your implied odds, so you need to make sure those odds are there before you call preflop.

You also must be careful to avoid the temptation to continue with your hand when you get only slight improvement. It will often be correct to check/fold a pair to a single bet because of the high probability of your opponent holding a better pair.

For example, a tight player raises to $50 in first position at a nine-handed $5-$10 table. Everyone else gets out of the way because they know he’s strong, but you call in the big blind with a pair of eights for the same reason. That is, you believe he has a good hand, too, but with $1000 left in your stacks, you are trying to flop a set and win a big pot.

The flop comes 5-3-2, you check, and your opponent bets $80. Even though you have an overpair, you should fold. You were calling to flop a set, and it didn’t happen this time, so stick with your plan and get out. A range of big pairs and big aces has more than 75 percent equity against your eights. Knowing before you even see the flop that you will fold in such a circumstance can help give you the resolve actually to do it when the moment arises.

Calling to Disbelieve

When you believe your opponent to have a weak raising range, you can call with a very different purpose in mind. Now are you looking for any excuse not to fold the flop. You’ll certainly call or raise with any pair and any flush draw or open-ended straight draw. Depending on the situation, a gutshot or even complete air could be enough of a hand to play back.

The math behind this is simple and intuitive. The possible unpaired starting hands in Texas hold’em greatly outnumber the pocket pairs. The pairs are also among the easiest and most profitable hands to play, so even relatively tight ranges tend to include them. The larger the percentage of hands your opponent raises, the more unpaired cards he must be adding to his range. When you start without a pair, you’ll pair one of your hole cards less than one-third of the time on the flop.

Thus, ranges that are heavy in unpaired cards rarely make a pair on the flop. Even if your pair is weak, it figures to be ahead. Ace-high could well be worth a call, depending on the board. And even without a pair, you may be able to represent one and take the pot away, especially if you have some sort of draw to fall back on.

Because judgment calls and bluffs are often involved in calling to disbelieve, it’s best done with position. Of course everything is better in position, but when you’re calling to crack, position is less important. If you hit your hand, you’ll usually know where you stand, at which point it’s just a matter of building a pot.

Not so when you flop a weak hand against a weak range. You know your pair will be worth a call on the flop, but if your opponent keeps firing, you’ll have to determine whether he’s bluffing or if his range is no longer so weak.

Conclusion

Of course, we have only scratched the surface in terms of analyzing your opponent’s range and formulating a plan based on that. This method should serve as a springboard to more sophisticated analysis, but I think you’ll find that even on its own it makes a big difference relative to calling preflop without any plan at all. ♠

Andrew Brokos is a professional poker player, writer and coach. He blogs about poker strategy on ThinkingPoker.net and is co-host of the Thinking Poker Podcast. Andrew is also interested in education reform and founded an after-school debate program for urban youth.