Poker Strategy

Part II of 6 handed cash game play
In last week’s article we discussed how to play pre–flop, and one of the major points was the importance of raising preflop as often as possible. Ideally most of the time you win the pot preflop. But occasionally your opponents will call and you will see a flop. You are still in a good situation here, regardless of your cards, because your raise preflop means you can creditably represent a good hand on the flop. So in general the best option is to continue with the hand by firing a continuation bet. There are two important considerations, how much, and when.

Its crucial that your opponents are unable to get information from the size of your bet, so you should make the roughly the same size bet for every continuation bet you fire. Around a 2/3 sized pot bet is usually ideal, but this can change according to the texture of the flop and the tendencies of your opponents. You should be aiming for a raise which is just big enough to dissuade your opponents from calling, but small enough to make the process as profitable as possible. The smaller a bet it takes to make your opponents fold their hand, the less you lose when they call you (since most of the time you don’t have much of a hand!). Knowing exactly how much to bet is an art more than a science, so you should experiment and find a formula that suits you.

That’s the ‘how much’, now we will consider the ‘when’. Of course if you actually have a real hand (like top pair, a set or overpair) you should usually continuation bet. Here we will look at what to do when you have no hand, ie one that is unlikely to win in a showdown.

In hold’em, its difficult to make much of a hand on the flop. If you start with two unpaired cards, like TJ, you will only make a pair on the flop about a third of the time. Some portion of this time your pair will not be the top pair. Since the preflop raiser has already shown strength, normally the caller needs at least top pair to continue with the hand, so you can see how profitable it is to make a continuation bet against one player. However for each extra player in the hand, the chance of someone having a good enough hand to call, or raise you with, increases exponentially.

So against a single player you should continuation bet most of the time. Against two players you should be more cautious, and also take into account the board texture. A board like Q22 rainbow is a good board to continuation bet against two players. The only hands that can call your bet are a 2, which is unlikely given the preflop action, or a Queen. A bad board to continuation bet is something like 78J with two hearts. Here there are innumerable hands that will call your bet. In general the less coordinated the better. And it also helps if there is a easily identifiable hand that you can represent. On the Q22 board you are representing AQ.

Against three players or more, Its rarely advisable to fire a continuation bet. There is just too great a chance that someone has a hand good enough to play on with. An important point to remember however is that good, thoughtful opponents will be conscious of how many players you are firing a continuation bet into, so remember to take this into account in those rare times when a few good players call you!

There are also three smaller points to consider when deciding to fire your continuation bet. Firstly, what hand do you have? The less likely your hand is to win in a showdown the more inclined to fire you should be. This brings us to the second point, when in position you should be inclined to check behind from time to time, especially when you have a hand with showdown value, like an ace or a pair.

Checking behind from time to time makes you look less aggressive and makes you harder to play against. (Your opponents can’t depend on being able to check raise you.) And that brings us to the last point, always be aware of your image. The better your image the more chance a continuation bet has to work. And conversely, the worse it is the more you will be looked up.