Poker – Risk vs Reward: When It’s Worth Going the Extra Mile

Sometimes the most profitable action in poker involves making a decision that will make you lose a hand more often. This may sound ridiculous, but it’s true, let me explain.

Let's say you can raise on the turn and win the hand 95% of the time. However, if you don't raise, you'll be in a very profitable situation on the river where you only win 75% of the time. However, when you do win on the river, you're up a lot of money, and when you lose, you won't have put any extra money into the pot to make that bet.

Three times out of four you will walk away with a pot full of chips. Therefore, a quarter of the time you will lose the hand.

You might be thinking that you could avoid all this mess by just betting the turn. However, the best players always aim to reach the point where they can win the most money possible. Even though this has a lot of potential for failure, you need to learn to let it go.

To illustrate, let's discuss a hand I played in a no-limit tournament with a buy-in of $1,000.

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Flopping the world at poker

We were playing poker with blinds of 400-800 and antes of 100, with nine players at the table. To start the action, a relatively tight player opened for 2,200 from early position. A loose, recreational player then called.

In the big blind, I held :Jd :9d . I don't think our hand is foldable in this situation, even if the aggressor is opening with a conservative range, which he is. As if to prove my point, I called and flopped a flush, :Kd :Qd :4d .

A choice to increase

I checked and the aggressor chose not to make a continuation bet. So the player in position bet about 1500 into a pot of 7500, a weak bet that pointed to a weak hand. Of course, at one time or another in this situation he might have flopped the nut flush with :Ad :Xd , and the small bet would just be a way to pick up a few more chips, but I didn't think that was the case.

So I figured the original aggressor wasn't ready to fold his hand either, but I would definitely fold if he raised. So I just called, and as I had predicted, he called too.

The turn brought a :4h and a repeat of the story I just told you. The preflop aggressor and I checked and the loose player bet 5000 into a pot of 12000.

If I were to raise here, it would definitely be a shove (we start the hand with about 30,000 effective stack). That way, I could represent wider ranges and get called by hands like :Ad X, KQ or small flushes.

But notice that there aren't many hands that give me action here. Will he really call a shove with something like KJ, with no gold in his hand?

On the other hand, if he is semi-bluffing with JT, he is drawing dead. If he has :Ad J or :Ad T, he has six outs (the :Td gives me a straight flush).

Extracting from weakness

Since the board is dangerous, we expect vulnerable hands to raise. So, I don't expect them to have hands like KQ. In short, when we sense a lot of weakness in our opponents in poker, we can't put too much pressure on them, since we are dead against the best games and completely crush the weak hands.

Since this is true, it seems obvious that we would want to keep these weak hands in play. However, since we have a flush, many players would argue that raising is the correct play in this situation.

In my opinion this is a mistake because we have an advantage against almost every card that could come on the river. Let's say a third 4 comes, then any K or Q beats us, we don't need to call a bet. Let's say a gold card other than the :Td comes, again, we don't need to put any more money into the pot in this case.

So even though calling in this situation will lose us the pot more often than going all-in, we can still make more money from hands that can't beat us. We can hit a river that comes :Ad , check-raise a river that comes :Td , check-call blank cards, or even try a hero check-raise in any situation.

Theory into practice

The river came :7d . I checked and the preflop aggressor, who had checked twice, now bet 4000 against two players in a pot of 22000. The recreational player, who looked irritated, folded and I calmly folded the hand, knowing that I had done the right thing.

Article translated & adapted from the original: Risk vs. reward; or, Go Ahead, Let Them Draw Out On You