Here’s a sample hand that will help illustrate some things you should be thinking about in those spots. This hand is taken from the $20 Rebuy 6-max tournament on Full Tilt Poker. The rebuy period is closed.

You have Jacks. You don’t have any particular history with the players at this table, but the SB has proven to be very stubborn in confrontations with other players.

You certainly aren’t forced to raise here – you can call off and hope to set or catch a safe flop. However, if you choose to raise, which is better – a standard raise or a shove? Let’s consider a couple of questions:

What’s the potential post-flop situation?
If you shove, post-flop is a non issue, so it’s important to consider whether seeing a flop will work in your favor or not. In this spot, let’s say you 3-bet to about 1300 or so. You’ll certainly take the pot fairly often, but your first opponent will be getting nearly 3-1 on the call, and if they call, your second opponent may decide to come along as well. Playing JJ in a built pot, potentially out of position, potentially multi-way with about a pot or less left in your stack can be tricky, as an overcard is going to flop about half the time. When seeing a flop might get you in an awkward spot, consider an all in instead of a standard raise.

Which raise best disguises your hand?
Any raise is designed to get your opponent to hopefully call when you’re stronger and fold when you’re weaker. In this spot you’re not looking to make your hand look stronger than it is, because you’re not going to get a hand stronger than JJ to fold – all you’ll accomplish is making more hands that JJ beats fold. Your goal is to make your hand look as weak as possible. In lower buy in tournaments, all in bets are generally perceived as weaker than standard sized raises – I think your typical player at these levels would be able to talk themselves into putting you on AK or 99 here, which is exactly the sort of thinking you’re hoping for. In higher buy in tournaments you won’t get the same monkey calls, but the question still remains the same – what bet size allows you to misrepresent your hand to your greatest advantage? Whatever bet size allows you to get your opponent to misjudge your range to the greatest degree, that’s the one you should choose. In this case, I think an all in allows your opponent to read you as weaker than you are. If you were a little deeper, I think a standard re-raise would work better, as it might look like a squeeze that you can be four bet off of, but a standard raise with these stacks looks pretty strong and you’re unlikely to get medium pairs – the hands you’re crushing – to make a big mistake.

What bet best plays off your opponents tendencies?
Some opponents thrive on post-flop play. Other opponents dread the thought of calling a big preflop raise with a hand like AQ or 99 and then having to play unfavorable flops. Some opponents have no problem folding to a three bet, while others simply cannot let go of a hand once they have some money in the pot. Those tendencies are often critical tiebreakers when you’re considering what kind of raise to make. You basic goal is to determine how you can force your opponent to make the largest possible mistake, given what you know about your opponent. In our example, the stubborn opponent in the SB gives us some motivation to simply shove, as their initial call might serve to pull them into the pot.

The moral of the story: all raises are not created equal. In this hand, it seems like making an all in move is superior to a standard raise. It avoids some preflop awkwardness, makes your hand look far weaker than it actually is and may possibly exploit a core weakness in your opponent. Of course, each hand is a unique situation, but this analysis should give you a framework for determining the optimal point on the raise slider between minimum and maximum the next time you’re in a similar spot.

Playing tournaments online? You could get up to 50% of your tournament entry fees refunded with rakeback. Enter your email below to view dozens of exclusive rakeback offers from PartTimePoker and RakeBackNation.

That conversation is what gave me the idea for this article. It struck me that while a high level of preflop aggression is in many ways an optimal strategy for shorthanded no limit, it’s still going to be tough to utilize that (or any) strategy effectively if you’re using it ‘mindlessly.’ To put it another way, it’s not enough to know that raising preflop should result in a winning outcome. You have to be aware of the effects you’re hoping to achieve by raising preflop and the connection between those effects and a profitable outcome, and that’s exactly what we’re going to discuss in this article.

The concepts discussed in this article are rooted in experiences at mid stakes online no limit 6 max games, but should be relatively transferable to a wide variety of limits, formats and games.

You raise preflop to: Gain position for the rest of the hand
Acting last in a hand on all post-flop streets is an advantage that’s worth your investment. Think of how much easier it is to play somewhat marginal hands like straight draws, top pair with medium kicker, and so on when you get to act last on the flop, turn and river. When you’re one or two off the button with a hand that plays better with position, it’s often worth it to raise just to try and ‘steal the button’, as doing so literally increases the value of your hand.

You raise preflop to: Maximize the value of position
In theory, thinking players should see a direct, positive relationship between the amount of information they have in a hand and the quality of the decisions they make. The better your position, the more information you have, and the better your decision making will be. Getting more money in the middle when you have that kind of fundamental edge over your opponents is a tactic that’s going to yield positive results in the long run.

You raise preflop to: Make opponents play more predictably
Poker is all about the deductive process of determining what hand your opponent is most likely to hold. When you just limp, you lower the risk your opponents face by getting involved in the hand. With lower risk, opponents are likely to play a much larger range of hands, making your job of narrowing that range far more difficult. Raising preflop helps you to tighten that range from the word go. Additionally, raising preflop builds the pot which has two effects. One, as pots get larger in 100BB buy in and under games, it becomes more and more difficult for most opponents to disguise their hands. Two, average players just tend to behave more obviously in larger pots as they begin to freeze and act reflexively.

You raise preflop to: Narrow the field
While there are certainly situations where you prefer to play multi-way pots, the general rule of thumb in no limit hold’em is that the fewer opponents you have, the greater the chance that you’re going to win the pot. Narrowing the field also gives you more chances to engage in direct confrontations with opponents, giving you more information about how they play in various situations, and increasing the potential for you to exploit those tendencies.

You raise preflop to: Build pots
The larger pots get, the more likely bad opponents are to make mistakes, especially if they’re already stuck.

You raise preflop to: Take the initiative
In heads up pots, your opponents miss the flop more than they hit. The same is true for you. Whoever takes the lead in the betting preflop is likely to win the (very substantial number of) pots where neither player flops anything. Raising preflop creates the presumption that you have something, and when your opponent misses (or flops weak), it dramatically increases the chance that you’ll be able to win the pot with a bet on the flop.

You raise preflop to: Frustrate opponents
Whether they know it or not, people generally sit down in poker games with some sort of general expectation regarding how much they should ‘get to’ play. When you raise preflop, you force them to fold some hands that they would have played if they were allowed to limp (or see the flop for cheap / free from their blinds). Eventually, most players will get annoyed (again, whether they realize it consciously or not) by the disconnect between how many hands they expected to get to play and how many hands they’re actually playing, and they’ll often start playing hands solely to make up the gap. Whenever you can make people play hands for a reason other than a positive expectation over the long run, you’re probably doing something right.

You raise preflop to: Isolate bad players
It sounds obvious to say that playing hands with bad players is how you make money in texas holdem. But as obvious as it sounds, a lot of players still don’t take the logical next step suggested by the truism – doing everything (within reason) to get into pots against bad players heads up. When a bad player limps and you have position, or a bad player is in the blinds and you’re opening the pot, not raising allows other people to come into the pot against the bad player, decreasing your equity in the pot. Not only that, but bad players are only going to be at the table (and the site) for so long – you can’t afford to just passively sit back and hope for a confrontation to develop. You have to actively take steps to force that confrontation before one of your smarter opponents does.

That’s far from a definitive list of reasons to raise preflop, but it’s a start. Hopefully it’s enough to get you thinking about what you’re trying to accomplish by raising before the flop – because it’s that sort of thinking that stops your aggression from being mindless and instead develops it into a tool for increasing both your control over the game and your win rate.

Click on the link below to play the file or right click and save the file to store it on your computer for later listening.

Podcast – Preflop Raising in No Limit Texas Holdem

One of the quickest ways to improve your expectation in No Limit Hold’em is to take a serious look at your preflop decisions. The folds, calls and raises you make at this stage inform every other decision you make throughout the rest of the hand, and a small leak preflop can easily explode into a cavernous hole on later streets.

The obvious way to analyze your preflop decisions is to break down starting hands into various groups (pocket pairs, suited connecters, etc) and map out what you tend to do with each group. You might find that you’re limping too early too often with small connectors and getting punished with raises behind that you can’t [or shouldn’t] call. If you have a program like Poker Tracker and a bunch of hand histories, you can take this approach one step further and pore over a report that breaks down the performance of every starting hand from every position. This would probably yield some interesting results as well – you might find that you’re better off limping with AQs-A10 than raising with them.

While both of those approaches are useful for plugging leaks, they don’t really solve the core problem with your game so much as mask it. Poor preflop decisions are the result of a deeper flaw in your thinking about poker – overplaying KJ in middle position, for instance, reflects a more than a misunderstanding about how good of a hand KJ is. It also reflects a basic misunderstanding of the importance of position, the probability of superior hands being distributed to those players still to act, and so on. To put it simply, looking only to your results to improve your game is a bit like noticing that your bedroom floor is covered with rusty nails and heading for Walgreens to stock up on Band Aids and Neosporin.

The truth is, most preflop mistakes can be cleared up with a little structured investigation into your decision-making process (if you like quick tips like that, check out our Daily Poker Tips page). Basically, we want to stop asking what hands you play in a given position and start taking a closer look at why you would want to play hands in a given situation. For too many players, this line of thought begins and ends with a static evaluation of how ‘good’ a hand is. Ask a typical player why they folded Q8o to a preflop raise and they’ll likely say something along the lines of: “It’s a terrible hand.” They may be right, but that doesn’t make them correct. A better player might say something like “The raiser is a pretty tight player so I put them on an over pair, plus with so many people behind I just didn’t feel like taking a shot with that hand.” An even better player might reference all of those factors plus their image at the table and recent confrontations between themselves and the raiser. Point is, the better a player is, the more aware they are that the value of a hand has something to do with the ink on the cards, but a whole lot more to do with the total environment of the table ( and also in extra values like bonuses and poker tournaments overlay). It’s just like diamonds – diamonds aren’t valuable because of any intrinsic worth [like, say, oil is]; diamonds are valuable because of perceived scarcity, because of cultural significance, and because of clever PR and market manipulation by DeBeers to name a few factors.

Now our task should be a little clearer – we don’t need to develop a rigid chart of hands we should or should not value [although such an approach works just fine for limit]. What we need is a system for assessing the value of any given hand at any given point. Luckily, it’s a fairly easy system to articulate and implement. The toughest part of the whole deal is actually realizing that you need such a system in the first place. Consider this basic list of questions you should probably ask yourself when deciding how to act when facing a preflop raise. Even a general answer to each will give you a much stronger sense of how to correctly proceed in any given scenario:

1. What does a preflop raise from this player mean?
2. How strong is my hand?
3. What kind of direct odds am I getting?
4. What kind of implied odds am I getting?
5. How many players are still left to act behind me?
6. How strong will my position for the rest of the hand be?

You can probably run down that list in about 10 seconds flat once you’ve gone through it a few times. Eventually, you’ll consider all of those factors as a matter of habit, but try [assuming you’re playing online] talking them through out loud for the first few sessions. Do it even when you’re in a situation that you consider an auto-call or auto-fold. It will help to train you and you’ll probably be surprised at how much that simple exercise will teach you about how you approach poker. Too simple for you, Captain I’m A Pro? Start breaking down individual items into sub-trees. For example:

What kind of implied odds am I getting?

1. How deep are our stacks relative to the bet?
2. Is my call likely to motivate additional calls behind? How many?
3. Does the raiser always continuation bet? Sometimes? Rarely?
4. Does the raiser typically overcharge or undercharge draws when they hit a hand?
5. Can the raiser lay a hand down when the obvious draw makes?

Another benefit of asking these types of questions before every preflop action is that it sharpens your sense of the table and your place within it. For example, if the action gets to you without a raise, here’s a quick drilldown of relevant factors that should inform your play:

1. How strong is my hand?
2. What’s my goal with this kind of hand – to steal, to build a pot, to trap, or to isolate a single opponent?
3. What kind of direct / implied odds am I getting?
4. What kind of impact will my play here have on my image as a whole?

You might find after a session or two that you’re rarely answering the second question with “to steal” – indicating that you’re not mixing up your preflop game enough and possibly missing out on some value with your big hands. Or maybe you’re answering “to steal” way too often, meaning that you’re sticking your neck out far more than necessary to generate the kind of action you need for optimal play. Either way, the forced reflection – a process you have to go through even before hands where it seems completely unnecessary – gives you a much more realistic picture of how your opponents are likely to act, how they probably view you, and how you should act as a result.

Notice my use of bold above. I don’t just toss out boldings for my health. I know people are reading this and thinking “Yeah, yeah, I can see how that is a useful list if I have Q 10 o and I’m contemplating calling a minimum raise, but I’m not going to waste my time asking all of those questions when I have 8 3o in the BB and UTG goes all in for 220x the BB.” Do me a favor, don’t be one of those people. If you are, you’re missing the point of this article entirely. The point is to identify and ingrain a process, a way of thinking, and the best way to do that is through repetitive application. The only way you’re going to be able to process more nuanced questions is if the basic ones become second nature. For example, here’s a quick list of factors to consider before you try to steal an unraised pot preflop:

1. Who already limped and why?
2. Is there a short stack still to act behind you?
3. How loose are the blinds?
4. Is someone behind you likely to be on tilt from a recent hand?
5. How conservative / loose is your image?
6. How good is your position likely to be if you get called?
7. What kind of hand are you likely to be facing if you get called?

At most online sites, you simply don’t have enough time to accurately answer the first few items, let alone the whole list [and you could probably add another 10 items to the list before you started getting ridiculous] – and this list is on top of the initial question or two you had to answer to even get to the point where you decided to steal. The only way you can hope to process this much information is to make it a habit. Additionally, you’ll find out pretty quickly that asking some questions naturally leads you to ask more questions – so the repetition not only helps you to internalize the decision tree, but it is in fact is critical to building a quality tree in the first place.

Don’t let the simplicity of the approach fool you – this type of structured decision making is a powerful and scalable tool that can completely change your game if you let it. Will you feel a little silly talking out loud to yourself? Sure. Get over it. Will it seem inane to drill down a list of 15 reasons why you’re folding 73o UTG? You bet. Will you often be asking yourself questions you don’t have great answers for? Absolutely – and that’s the whole point, in many ways. Bad habits are often the result of unasked, not unanswered, questions – so start forcing yourself to consider the tough questions you’ve been ignoring. Unless, that is, you really have a thing for band-aids and Neosporin.