Controlling the Pot Size From Early Position
If you are playing against aggressive opponents, it is important to control the size of the pot in some tournament situations. It’s not uncommon to come across players who are willing to stick around and make large bets with marginal hands on the later streets.
It can be somewhat of a headache to have an aggressive player like this sitting in the seats directly to your left. If these players are experienced and know how to recognize situations where they can bluff against you, this can put you at a disadvantage. For example, consider a hand where the board shows something like 10-9-3 and you are holding J-10 for top pair. Although you may have the best hand, most of the over-cards that can come can be considered scare cards.
Since this is becoming common knowledge amongst some players, you’ll see a lot of aggressive players trying to bluff against you when the board brings these cards. However, it is usually not a great idea to just assume that someone is trying to bluff you because they are known to be an aggressive player, especially when your tournament life is on the line.
Even if you suspect that a player is likely to try and bluff you off of your hand, it can still be hard to put the rest of your chips into the pot with a mediocre hand. If you are betting on every street, when your opponent decides to bluff you, the size of the bet may be too large for you to call with a medium-strength hand. An easy way to deal with opponents like this is to control the size of the pot. If you keep the pot small, when your opponent decides to try and bluff, it is more likely to be for an amount that you will be able to call. This means that you will be able to pick-off a higher percentage of the bluffs that are attempted by aggressive players.
This discussion doesn’t apply very well to cash games. As long as you can afford to play in the games that you are sitting in, you should be able to foster up the courage to go with your gut instinct. If you are wrong, you can always just put more money onto the table. However, in a tournament there is always the threat of elimination.
The reason that this blog entry is written in the context of a poker tournament is because there is value that can be attributed to survival in a tournament setting. In other words, even if you are getting good odds to make a call, if it requires that you put your tournament life on the line, it can be proper to fold what you believe might be the best hand. Sometimes it is just too risky to call off the rest of your chips under the assumption that your opponent is bluffing.
Another aspect of controlling the pot size is that doing this can allow a player to withstand the different misfortunes that can occur throughout a poker tournament. This means trying to minimize the amount of chips that you have at risk during the course of a hand. This idea has been discussed a little throughout the strategy blog and will undoubtedly be brought up again in the future.
It should be also pointed out that controlling the pot is something that you should be doing with marginal hands when you believe that they have some showdown value. If you have a hand that is dominant, you should certainly be looking to play a large pot .
Related posts:
- Pressing a Small Edge
- Protecting Your Chip Position
- The Advantage of Position in Poker
- Full Steam Ahead
- Jeet Kune Poker
Categories: Poker Strategy
