After having told you how great raising is, and how much you can gain from it, I want to warn about being overly aggressive and laying implied odds. Playing sound poker and raising at the right times is great, but it can clearly be overdone, and when I’m playing shorthanded I see a lot of that happening. Let me give a limit short-handed example:

$3/$6 limit Hold ‘em, 6-handed.

The aggressive MP raises, CO calls and you call from the big blind with Q9s. There’s nothing wrong with making that call, in case anyone thought so. You’re being offered 5:1 on your money, and you have some high-card strength, suited cards and a longshot to hit a straight. A flop is worth seeing.

The flop comes 9-J-3, one in your suit, giving you second pair and backdoor flush and straight draws. You check, and MP bets, CO calls. With 8 bets in the pot, you’re being offered immediate pot odds that are good enough to continue, so you call. Raising is an option, but not a very good one in this situation; your pair of nines are not more than 50% likely to be best at this point and none of the other two will fold for one more bet. You call.

The turn brings a queen. You check, MP bets, CO folds. Well, you’re very likely to have the best hand now of course, so you raise. The MP re-raises, and you consider the possibility of him having a set. If he does, it’s most likely pocket jacks, but that’s a long shot. It’s more likely that he’s holding AA or KK. You cap.

The river is a brick, you lead out, and he raises. At this point, you have to start giving him credit for a powerhouse, given that he raises a brick river after you cap the turn, so you call. He shows AA, and you drag home the pot.

Get ready to be berated for poor play. If he’s the tilting kind (and people who overplay pocket pairs like this often are), he’s going to tell you that you suck, and you suck badly. Here’s the deal though: If you knew he had AA and you had a strong read on him being very aggressive, you would be dead wrong to fold on the flop. Just look at what happened: He put in 6 big bets after you had made your hand! Your implied odds on the flop were almost 20 to 1, meaning that you would have been borderline correct to make that call with an underpair hoping to spike your two outs to a set, and here you were sitting on at least 5 outs.

What’s the moral of the story? Don’t play your big pocket pairs fast? You most often should. But when the turn gets capped, one pair is almost never enough, but that’s not to say that you should fold (the pot is too big for that). Anyway, what I’m getting at is that when you play this aggressively with a hand like AA, you’re offering tremendous implied odds for anyone drawing against you. Have you ever wondered how the hell that donk could possibly call the flop with nothing but third pair and a deuce kicker (usually something you wonder when he turns two pair or trips to beat you)? Well, if you lost a lot of money on the later streets, you’ve validated his play. You’ve made what was actually a poor play into a correct one. Arguing that your opponent has no clue about odds and wouldn’t know what an “out” is doesn’t change that fact. It doesn’t matter if he knows whether or not he’s playing correctly, it only matters whether or not he does.

Against very aggressive players, I’ll peel more flops, because I know that they’ll pay me off properly if I hit. Learning to recognize the situations when you’re likely beaten is really difficult, but let’s start by (almost) never capping the turn with nothing but AA unimproved (or, in the case above, raise the river once the turn was capped). Don’t lay huge implied odds. The calling stations thrive on it.