Fish Bites Man: Why Raise?

Advice for Hungry Poker Players

Topics: Epic Poker League, Fish Bites Man, Poker Strategy

Ask many players why they raise and you won’t get a straight answer. You’ll get a crooked answer because raising is one of the many things that most players do without really giving it much thought. Maybe they’ll tell you that they raise to get more money in the pot, but that just tells you what kind of hands they raise with – good ones, favorites; ones that want more money in the pot. Well, you know what? Building a pot isn’t a great reason for raising. It’s not even a particularly good one. Here are some other, much better ones, and if you want more on the subject I commend your attention directly to Decide to Play Great Poker, which I co-authored with the estimable Annie Duke, from whom I learned everything I’ll ever need to know about answering the question, “Why raise?”

You raise to gain information. By raising, you force your foes to define their hands. Well, at least if they’re sensible ones. Suppose you raise preflop to something like three or four times the size of the blinds. Is 7-2 sticking around? J-3? T-4? 4-3? No. All those hands are going in the muck – if, again, the players holding those cards have a brain in their heads. (If they don’t have that requisite grey matter then you’re in a wholly different kind of game, one requiring a wholly different strategy that, I think, we shall discuss another time.) So those players who do decide to call have given you valuable information. They have told you that their hands are good but not great. Why not great? Because if their hands were great – A-A, K-K or Q-Q, say – why, then they would reraise. So now you have a sense of your opponents’ range. You know you’re up against good aces (bad aces in a loose game), pairs of all sizes and maybe unpaired paint. That’s it. All those up-down hands, like K-6, Q-7 and J-4, those hands have gone away.

So that’s what else raising does. It makes bad hands go away. And that’s great, not because bad hands have gone away, per se, but just because other contenders for the pot have left the field. It’s axiomatic that almost everything you try to do in poker works better against few opponents. Obviously the optimum number of foes is zero. If you raise and everyone folds, you win without a fight, and that’s the best possible outcome, bar none. All profit – albeit small profit – and no risk whatsoever. So raising is great because it narrows the field. Sometimes it narrows the field all the way down to none of the above. And that makes us happy. Happy, happy us.

Taken together, these two elements mean that raising preflop forces your foes to be selective. What you end up with is a narrower field and a better-defined field. You have fewer foes to fade, and a better sense of what kind of hands (good but not great) those foes have. How great is that?

Wait, wait, wait, it gets better. Because raising preflop not only narrows the field and gives you information and makes your foes be selective, it also gives you control of the hand, and that is just a consummation devoutly to be wished. Tell me, how many times have you heard at a poker game (or how many times have you said at a poker game), “Check to the raiser.” It happens all the time, all day every day at poker tables all around the world. You limp, I raise, you call. The flop is whatever the flop is. Two thirds of the time the flop will have missed you because two thirds of the time the flop misses everyone. But you surrendered initiative preflop, so you “check to the raiser.” I bet my nothing, you fold, I win, next case.

Sure, you might be trapping or floating or check-raise bluffing, but you know what? Most players don’t do that. They check to the raiser and then they fold. That’s the way the game goes down, and that’s why preflop raising is so very much better than calling, almost all of the time.

Hey, consider these two hands, A-J versus 5-5. Let’s say A-J raises and 5-5 calls. Now the flop comes K-6-3, a perfect whiff for both players. Who has the initiative? The preflop raise. He bets, and pocket fives folds the best hand. Is not the heart and soul of poker getting your foe to fold the best hand? Isn’t that what they call bluffing? But hey, this isn’t even bluffing, really. This is just riding the initiative of the hand to its logical conclusion. Because we can turn those holdings around. We can give 5-5 the preflop raise and A-J the preflop call. Same flop, same K-6-3. Now pocket fives bets, and A-J has nowhere to go but into the muck. So the best hand won. Yahoo. It’s just another hand of poker, another hand where the postflop outcome was determined by preflop aggression.

I know what you’re thinking: “My opponents would never stand for that. They’ll see through my bully behavior and trap me and crush me.” You know what? Not so much. Yes, there are high level games with high-level thinkers, and if you’re in one of those, you’ll certainly want to adjust your aggressiveness accordingly. But average poker games are – by definition – average. If you’re in one of those games, then raising preflop is going to work quite well. It’s going to give you information, narrow the field, make your opponents be selective and give you control of postflop play. Are you raising preflop with sufficient frequency? If not, I suggest you start doing more of that right now, and I suggest you know the reason why.

And I really, really, really suggest that you check out Decide. In the short span of months it’s been out, it has revolutionized countless players’ games, and it will do the same for you. I’m not tooting my own horn with this. I can only take responsibility for the pretty words in the book. All the brilliant concepts are my co-author’s, and preflop raising only scratches the surface of what’s brilliant about Annie Duke.