“I wanted to raise enough to not give him odds to draw” - “I was hoping to knock some players out when I made it two bets” - “Limit sucks, you can’t make anyone fold”

You know what these three statements have in common? They’re common, that’s what.

Also, they sort of boil down to something that seems to be some people’s no-limit mantra: Don’t give your opponents odds to draw. That means that if there’s someone with a flushdraw, you want to put enough money in the pot to make it unprofitable for him (in the long run, as always) to call, or same thing for someone drawing to a straight. The idea itself is good; If you can force your opponents to fold, the money that is in the pot will belong to you, without you having to go through a scary showdown where your hand may or may not hold up.

The problem with statements like these is when they stop being helpful pointers for some situations and suddenly become self-imposed truths. “Bet so you can thin the crowd; don’t give free cards.” Ok. WHY? The objective in poker is to win money, so “how does thinning the crowd help us maximize our profit” is the question we need to be asking ourselves. “Isolating” is not an end, it’s the means, don’t forget that.

Now, not only is the “make them fold”-crowd busy making huge bets with strong hands “because someone could have a flushdraw” but they seem to be upset when someone actually does call their huge bets with draws anyway, at least if I understand some of my opponents correctly. If it was incorrect for Mr. Donkfish (or any othe r variant on the theme that angry players call bad players) to call a pot-sized bet with his sucker-end of an inside straight, is it somehow bad for you when he does? Doesn’t it feel more like it should be the case that if your opponents make mistakes, you stand to gain from this? Of course it does. Or at least it should!

So let me make this clear: You make money when your opponents make mistakes, and you lose money when YOU make mistakes. Hence, your mission in poker is to avoid making mistakes and induce mistakes for your opponents. What’s a mistake? It’s when you draw despite paying too much for it, or it’s folding when you would actually be better off calling. For instance:

No-limit hold ‘em. I have A-K offsuit in the small blind. Everyone folds to me, and I raise to three times the big blind. The BB calls, getting 2:1, with his T-9 suited. The flop comes 3-3-3, and the pot is $12. I bet $8, which is all it takes to put the BB all-in. He has about a 30% chance to win if he calls. Should he call? The answer is easy to figure out. If he calls, he’ll have to pay $8 which he will lose 70% of the time, which means he’ll lose $5.6 (70% of $8). But 30% of the time he will instead win $20, or $6 (30% of $20).

So he wins slightly more than he loses if he calls. He should call! Now, how do I feel about that, being in the big blind? Well, if he makes a correct call, I’m likely not too happy about that. In fact, it’s easy to guess that if he makes on average $0.4 ($6 - $5.6) every time he calls in this spot, I will actually lose that exact amount on average compared to if he folded. I would prefer him to make the “mistake” of folding since that will make me win more money on average. And in this spot, getting about 2.5:1 on their money, most people would probably fold T-9 suited, even if they knew what I was holding.

But if he had had $10 left and that’s how much I bet? Then the situation would be different, he would actually lose on average $0.30. Now if he loses on average $0.30, do I want him to call or fold? I’m sure you got it right: I want him to call. If he folds, he has just saved himself 30 cents, and I’d prefer that money to be in my pocket rather than his. This example serves to show that the line between the two kinds of mistakes can be slim, sometimes.

Now let’s return to the example I gave first, where we “don’t want to give someone odds to chase a flush” and say that we have 4-4, on a board of A - 8 - 4, two are suited. The pot is $100, and we’re up against one opponent (again, the big blind). We both have deep stacks. How much should I bet?

I won’t answer this question in specific terms, but in general ones: Our objective is to make him make a mistake. There are two principal mistakes any player can make:

a) put in money when he shouldn’t
b) fold when he shouldn’t.

For instance, if we check to him and he goes all-in with A-8 he has made a mistake, because he shouldn’t have put any money in. We successfully trapped him. The other mistake - which is very rare among beginners - is that if I bet, he folds a hand he should have played on, like a flush draw if I offer him good odds but he folds because “it’s just a draw” or something weird like that.

I repeat: This is a very rare mistake. People are much more prone to calling too often than folding when they shouldn’t have. I repeat something else, too: Our objective is to make our opponents make mistakes. So if calling a lot is our opponent’s worst mistake, then how do we exploit it? We bet. We don’t bet enough to drive out a theoretical “drawing hand” like a flush draw or some other strong draw, instead we bet enough to make him think that he has odds when he really doesn’t. It’s really difficult to make a hand like a flush draw incorrectly fold on the flop (especially factoring in implied odds) but it’s really easy to make hands like A-8 in the above scenario call bigger bets than they should have. So if one mistake is easy to induce, and one is difficult, guess which one we should aim for!

But your objective with raising is not to “drive people out” when you have strong hands, it’s to make them make a mistake by calling. There’s a big difference.

If someone thinks that I’m being ambiguous because I’m saying partially that you shouldn’t raise (”don’t drive people out”) and simultaneously saying you should bet, you’re right, I am. But doing the right thing for the wrong reason is almost as bad as doing the wrong thing altogether.

When you make a bet that a flush draw can’t profitably call, cross your fingers and hope that they do.

Fredrik