Big Pot, Big Hand

With all of the head games and psychological trickery going on at the poker table, it’s easy to lose sight of the most fundamental clue about your opponent’s strength: the amount of money he has put into the pot. There is a simple and necessary relationship between pot size and hand strength that underlies all of the more complicated strategy of poker, and when in doubt, you can fall back on it to help you figure out how strong your opponent is.

Of course it is possible for a player to make a big bluff or loose call with a weak hand, but if he does these things too often relative to the number of strong hands in his range, then he is easily exploitable. Though it may contain some weak hands, a strong range is required to play a large pot profitably.

Consequently, as the pot gets larger, you may need to reexamine some of your earlier beliefs about your own hand in light of new information about how much your opponent is willing to risk. This may mean making some big folds or passing up thin value bets when the pot is already large. Similarly, you must be careful about giving your opponent too much credit for a strong hand when he has not had to put a lot of money into the pot.

With marginal hands that can beat only bluffs, players will generally keep the pot as small as possible, checking and calling but not betting or raising. Even many hands good enough to bet for value will still not be willing to get all in.

A player may also make a big bet or raise with a weak hand, hoping to steal the pot. Though trying to represent a big hand, he would still prefer to risk as little as possible in the process given that his hand is in fact not very strong at all. Even when bluffing, most players will put as little money into the pot as they believe necessary to accomplish their objective.

There are game theoretically sound reasons for playing this way. No matter who your opponent is, proper poker strategy entails folding more and more of your weakest hands as the pot grows larger. This is true whether you are betting or calling. You can think of a range as a triangle that narrows to a strong, sharp point as the pot gets larger.

This may sound obvious, but many players don’t act on all of the logical implications when reading an opponent’s hand. It is often incorrect, for example, to call with a bluffcatcher simply because an opponent is representing a narrow value range. In a large pot — no matter how it got large — weak hands become increasingly unlikely relative to very strong hands.

Suppose that in a $2-$5 no-limit hold‘em game, there is $100 in the pot when your opponent checks to you on the river. The board reads J 10 5 4 2, and you bet $50 holding K Q. Your opponent check-raises all-in for $350. Should you call him with the second nuts?

There is only one card in the deck that you are worried about. Is it really that likely that he holds the right one of the remaining forty-five?

I’d say it is, given his willingness to put $350 into the pot. As unlikely as it may seem that he holds the ace, you must consider the relative likelihood of the alternatives.

He would have to be pretty clueless to shove a worse hand for value. Considering that you could easily have the ace or king yourself, he’d have to expect you to call with a diamond as weak as a 7 before he could hope to show a profit by shoving the queen. A player with a worse diamond than yours wouldn’t be trying to play such a large pot. He might call or he might fold — he might even make a small raise — but it’s hard to imagine him making such a large raise.

If you called here, you’d be hoping to beat a bluff. But a bluff is unlikely considering how much money your opponent chose to put into the pot. If he wanted to represent the diamond, he could have done so by simply betting the flop, risking something like $50 or $100 rather than $350.

If he believed that a check-raise would be a more effective bluff than simply betting the flop, he still could have risked less. Putting $200 on top of your bet would be a pot-sized raise, and it’s telling that he forewent this option and put an extra $100, the maximum amount that he could, into the pot.

So while the ace of diamonds may be a small part of his range on the turn, that range changes drastically when he raises more than the pot on the river, and you need to respond accordingly.

Suppose that instead you held K Q and the board had come out 10 8 5 2 4. If you bet the flop and the turn, you might well be correct to check the river even though you have the second nuts. Each time you bet, he folds more of the hands you’re ahead, and his range for continuing gets stronger. It’s quite possible that you are still ahead when he calls the turn, but, especially since you hold the queen, you will not be ahead of his range if he puts another bet into this already-large pot. In that case, you’d be correct to check and probably fold if he bet.

One last word about the meaning of “large” in this context: we’re talking about large relative to the blinds. A pot of $100 is large in some games and small in others. Late in a tournament, there are no truly large pots. A hotly contested pot ends preflop or on the flop, and both players tend to have relatively wide ranges because there isn’t room for multiple betting rounds to narrow them.

Physical tells can be faked or misinterpreted. Timing tells can mean a variety of things. Table dynamics are a constant leveling war with all players trying to guess what their opponents expect and then giving them the opposite. The only unequivocal show of strength, the one that can’t be faked without great expense to the faker, is playing a big pot. Ignore it at your own peril. ♠

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.