Poker Portal

One of the biggest factors behind why novice poker players get themselves into trouble is when pots get too large relative to the size of your hand in no-limit Texas poker. This can be a serious problem for players that may have had a limit hold’em background or play a lot of poker tournaments. In tournament poker then your chip stack is often not that large in relation to how many big blinds are in your stack. So it is clear that all-in moves do not carry with them the same danger that they do in cash games where you can buy-in for 100 big blinds.

Let us look at an example to show what I mean and this is where pot control comes to the fore when the stacks are very deep. Let us say that you raised with A-K in a no-limit Texas hold’em tournament and you only started with 20 big blinds and the blinds were 200-400 and so your stack was 8000 before the hand started. You raised to 1200 and an opponent min-raised to 2400. Because you only started with 20 big blinds before the hand then you cannot make a deep stacked mistake.

The bigger the pot becomes then the greater the potential mistake. If you make a mistake for 100 big blinds then that is a bigger and more costly mistake than a mistake for 20 big blinds. But when you look at the A-K situation again in a cash game with 100 big blinds then your opponent re-opening the betting by min raising is a warning sign for your hand when you have 100 big blinds. The re-raiser has still only put six big blinds into the pot and so you have the chance here to control the pot size by calling.

Your opponent has position on you so that is another problem. So if you re-raise here then you are dangerously escalating the pot with a hand that isn’t even a made hand. Although you are less likely to be up against AA or KK because your AK reduces the number of combinations, you must still be alert to the possibility of these hands in no-limit Texas hold’em. Another re-raise by you with AK is basically putting your opponent into a situation where they cannot make a mistake.

You have basically declared that you have a very powerful hand by putting in the third raise pre-flop and you opponent can get away from the situation very cheaply by only losing six big blinds. This is precisely why the concept of pot control is a very important one in poker and especially no-limit Texas hold’em cash games where the stacks can start off very deep and stay that way. Players in cash games have the option to top up their stack and also to buy back in should they lose their stack. This means that they have constantly got a big stack in front of them and are always at risk of making a mistake in a deep stack situation.

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