A situation that’s fairly common is the dreaded turn-checkraise, where suddenly the early position limper decides to raise your top pair, top kicker. What do you do in this situation?

At low limits, many people call down and find out that they’re beaten. This is an expensive habit, and one you should consider dropping if the description fits you. Let’s look at an example:

Two limpers to you on the button and you have:

You raise. Blinds fold, and both limpers call. The flop shows

It’s checked to you and you bet. Only the early position limper calls. The turn brings:

Limper checks, you bet, and now the limper raises! Are you ahead here? Very unlikely. My guess is that you’re drawing to either 2 or 5 outs (or worse yet, drawing dead), neither of which you have the odds for, as it’s very likely that your opponent either has a set or a straight. Here, it’s important to understand when most people checkraise, to learn how to deal with them.

On the turn, a checkraise is your opponent’s way of saying that he thinks he has you beat with a decent margin.

A “decent margin” can mean different things, depending on your actions and the texture of the board. In the example above, most likely a set or a straight, but two pairs is a possibility as well. With your preflop raise and the K that fell on the flop, he has no reason to believe that you wouldn’t be holding at least a pair of kings, so he wouldn’t checkraise with a hand like KQ here. He’s saying that what you’re representing, he has beat.

Because so many people tend to just give up and call down when they get checkraised on the turn, it’s very rare to see someone attempt a bluff here (unless you’ve shown tendencies to always fold to a checkraise). Use this to your advantage, and lay your hand down now. Save yourself two big bets, getting only slightly better than 4-1 on a showdown, because it’s not likely he’s doing this with a weaker hand more than 25% of the time.

On the other hand, what if what you’re having is much stronger than what you’ve represented? For instance, let’s say you had

and you semi-bluffed bet out on the flop, and caught a lone caller. If you get checkraised on the turn after making the straight, what do you do? Clearly, you have the nuts at this point. How do you extract maximum value? Well, with every hand that he could have (two pair minimum), short of a bluff, he will call your raise and then check/call on the river, with the exception of a set, in which case he’ll likely cap on the turn and bet out on the river. There’s no point in just calling now to lure him bet again on the river - you’ll get just as many (and in some cases more) bets out of him if you go to war now, on the turn.

But unless you’re holding a monster, a checkraise is a very loud alarm that you should - in most cases, barring a read that tells you otherwise (and these reads are invaluable) - let your hand go.