Pot Control?

What is pot control? When Should I use this? What are the types of hand I should be controlling the pot? Sorry guys. I know I ask too many question. But im still new and want to learn things better. TIA

As with most questions..it depends.

Rule of thumb....small hand - small pot. For example, top pair-mid/low kicker on a dry board....out of position check/call. In position just call. You don't want to bloat the pot with a hand that could easily be second best...ie no raises.

But again it depends....if you are putting your opponent on a draw you need to raise to price them out.

I guess the jist of pot control is just to try to keep the pot small on early streets when you have a good but beatable hand. Get your info after the river with a raise or reraise or just check/call...you're not going to win a whole lot, but your losses if you're beat aren't going to cripple you.

A good time for pot-control (keeping the pot small) is when you are in a fairly common situation called way-ahead, way behind. The situation is basically that you are either dominating your opponent in the hand, or clearly dominated. For instance, you hold AA in the hole, and are faced with a board that reads QQ8. If your opponent has the 8 or another pocket pair, you are way ahead you are way ahead and have him basically drawing to two outs. If he has the Q you are way behind and also drawing to two outs. By controlling the pot, (betting small, or checking behind on the turn) you are ensuring that you can string him along and make a little more cash off him as he is never sure if he is beat or not. If he pops you big at some point, you can get away without getting stacked, since you won't be pot-committed to the tiny pot. If he leads out for a smaller amount, you can decide whether to call his bet as a bluff or surrender the pot, since it wasn't that big anyway.

That said, there are a couple of things to worry about: 1) giving your opponent a cheap draw to improve a hand you didn't expect i.e. backdoor flush and inside straight draw. 2) if either of you has a small stack proportionate to the pot being played, pot control could be difficult since there might be an all in for a pot no matter how trivial.

Also, when it comes to worrying about being bluffed off your hand, the small bets will probably look like value bets to your opponent, and he is likely to put you on the hand you are afraid of too, if he doesn't have the goods.

Hope that is helpful :-)

For example I have TPTK. on a A 6 7 board. in a 1$ pot how much should I bet?

You need to also identify stakes, effective stacks, number of players, your position, what the pf action was, and reads to answer this (I'm going to assume a rainbow board for simplicity). Two example scenarios -

1. Let's say you're playing 10NL, you have $10, Villain has $4 pf (meaning that the effective stack is $4, 40BB), you're HU, you're in position, and Villain is a huge fish who will call down with second pair no kicker. Here you're not worried about controlling the pot size, you want to plan to get money in the middle as quickly as possible.

2. Make it 4 way, you're first to act, all stacks are $10. All your opponents are solid players. Now you need to worry about pot control.

This is an enormously complex topic with a lot of variables - posting sample hands in HA would be easier.

Pot control is something people get way too caught up in, at least as far as small stakes and micro stakes goes. Personally I think you'd be much better off deciding how much money you can extract versus a villain's range than just thinking, oh man I have to go for pot control.

Can you get 3 streets of value versus an inferior pair? It depends on your opponent, but at a lot of SSNL tables, yeah you can. Not three PSB's but you can probably get one PSB on the flop, 1/2 on the turn, and another 1/3 on the river versus a fairly wide range.

Obviously you'd tweak the numbers a bit based on players. When you get to the point where you determine that only hands better than yours are going to call all those bets, well then you have to do something, probably checking, that causes you to estimate a wider range is now likely to pay you off. By doing this, you've just exercised pot control without even thinking about it.

ChuckT wrote a great article on pot on controll and commitment bets.

Here it is.

Pot Control and Commitment bets by ChuckTs

Pot control .... is NOT telling your friends and family where your stash is hidden. ...

Ba-boom-Ding

Controlling your pot is keeping it large. Which reminds me, I'm hungry.

The only way i've been able to control the pot is by checking behind.

My whole problem with controlling the pot is if you bet a small amount to keep the pot small then your are essentially saying "I don't like my hand that much so I don't want to risk that much"

Hmm. There is an instance when we want to control the pot. But our villian is chasing this flush draw. What should I do?

Pot control is the art of manipulating the size of the pot based on the relative strength of your hand. “Relative strength of your hand” refers to how strong your hand is in comparison to the likely range of hands of your opponent. This means that the tighter your opponent is, the stronger hand you will need to play a big pot and the looser your opponent is, the weaker your hand can be to play a big pot.
For example if you have top pair against a calling station fish, you would usually be correct to place bigger bets on the flop, turn and river. With top pair against a tight nit, it’s more of a judgment call, but you still usually want to avoid a situation where you end up with all of your chips in the middle.
Pot control is one of the most important skills for no-limit players. By keeping the pot the appropriate size, it becomes much easier to avoid mistakes. Pot control both keeps you out of trouble and gets as much value for your hand as possible.
There are two parts to pot control:
1. Factors to consider
2. Implementation
Factors to Consider
When practicing pot control, there are several factors one must consider. The easiest is stack sizes. As a general rule the range of hands with which you’re willing to showdown with all the chips in the middle should be wider with a 50BB stack than with a 200BB stack. This means you should be much more willing to put a 50BB stack all in with top pair top kicker than you would with a 200BB stack.
The second factor to consider is the strength of your hand vs. the range of your opponent’s hand. This is more of a judgment call based on past experience, reads of the opponent, table dynamics, board texture and betting patterns. There is a lot to consider when trying to figure the strength of your hand vs. the range of the opponent. This is basically a problem of hand reading. The more you play and the better you get at hand reading, the easier this step will become.
The last factor to consider is the style of the opponent. This is closely related to the last factor but I have separated it for one reason. Two different styles of opponents can have a wide range but you want to practice pot control differently for each one. If you have top pair top kicker against a bad chaser, you will want to bet the hand aggressively and let him pay you off. If you have top pair top kicker against a tricky, aggressive player who has a wide range that you can’t read, you will want to practice pot control to keep the pot small. The aggressive player will be able to put you to difficult decisions in big pots if you don’t have a very defined range of hands for him.
Implementation
Implementation is the actual method you use to manipulate the pot to the size you want it to be. Implementation can include the decisions of whether to bet or check, raise or call, and sometimes fold.
An easy example of this is the top pair top kicker vs. a calling station. If you believe the opponent is on a draw or weak hand and will call any bet, it’s a good idea to bet the full pot on the flop, turn, and sometimes the river. Occasionally, if you feel a weak opponent is on a draw that missed on the river, you can check to him on the river and call a bluff. Other times you will want to go ahead and bet the river again for value against a weaker hand.
With top pair against an aggressive, tricky opponent, it becomes a little more difficult first on analyzing the factors and second on the actual implementation. Aggressive opponents make it difficult to manipulate the pot size because they sometimes raise with strong hands and sometimes with draws, making it difficult for you to distinguish between the two. That’s why I recommend playing for small pots against good aggressive opponents. They usually aren’t going to pay 100BBs to you with a hand weaker than top pair.
Playing small pots against aggressive opponents means occasionally checking behind on the turn with your top pair and then betting again on the river. This line is very common and recognizable but it still keeps the pot small and tempts your opponents to call with weaker hands. It also means sometimes checking the flop – a common scenario for checking the flop is after 3-betting preflop with AK and then spiking a king. Against certain players, checking top pair here is a correct way to play the hand (occasionally, not every time). The logic behind this is that good, thinking players can pretty easily put you on AK, therefore making a continuation bet from you unprofitable – they will fold worse hands, and continue with strong hands.
Of course you don’t want to get into the habit of defaulting to a certain line every time you play a hand against tough players. That would be easily exploited and therefore unprofitable. The best way to protect yourself against these tough players is to mix it up yourself so that they are uncertain of your holdings and less confident in their reads of you to push you around.
There are a thousand ways to play a weak-ish hand for a small pot so I’m not going to get into them all in this article. But I hope I have at least given you something to think about the next time you hit the poker tables. Once you get into the habit of thinking like this, your results will improve dramatically.

If you're confident your hand is currently best, and confident that Villain is chasing a draw, make your bets big enough to give Villain the incorrect odds to draw. Assuming Villain only has 9 outs (i.e., he doesn't have overcards like AhKh on a Th5h4s board, which may give him more than 9 outs), his chance of hitting his flush on the turn is roughly 20%, and if he misses the turn he has roughly 20% to hit on the river, so roughly 40% on the flop. Make your flop bet and turn bet big enough so he doesn't have the correct pot odds to draw.

I use 2/3 pot as a default bet size and vary depending on circumstances - this never gives 8 and 9 card draws the correct odds to draw (note - bigger draws may have the correct odds at 2/3 pot - say you hold JsTs and the board is Qs9s4d, you're a statistical favorite on the flop to beat any single pair hand like pocket KhKd or AhQd, in which case you're happy to get money in the pot).

You'll lose 40% of the time to a determined flush chaser who doesn't understand pot odds (this is common in live play and not uncommon online). 60% of the time you'll win. Take your lumps 40% of the time rather than thinking you put too much money in the pot, because 60% of the time you'll be delighted that the flush chaser stayed in the pot and that the pot was big.

ImolAyrton's post above is very nice - note "For example if you have top pair against a calling station fish, you would usually be correct to place bigger bets on the flop, turn and river. " The draw chaser is a standard cs fish.

Check out this strategy article for common pot odds scenarios - http://www.cardschat.com/odds-for-dummies.php

I guess what everyone is saying, is when your hand is questionable and you need to control the pot size, you lose control of the betting/hand.

of course but as the opponent, it is hard to determine this

Pot control is the arcane and outdated laws that do not allow you to "smoke 'em if you got 'em."