Often when you raise in no limit Texas Hold’em, it will be in situations where your hand isn’t strong enough for that line of betting. In deep stack cash games then this can be a very serious problem. In poker tournaments then it is different because the blind to stack ratio is much smaller. So a hand like top pair top kicker is a strong hand in tournament poker when you don’t have too many big blinds in your stack. In fact it is fair to say that a hand of that nature could really be classed as the nuts.

But in cash games where you have a relatively deep stack of say 100 big blinds and so does your opponent then things are a little different. Let us say that an early position player raises and a middle position player calls and you elect to call on the button with a hand like A-K. The flop comes A-Q-9 and the UTG player leads out with a strong bet of near the pot and the other limper folds.

Raising here would be very risky and probably a bad play all round for several reasons. Firstly a raise reopens the betting and allows your opponent to three bet or move all in. If you are raising with the best hand then your opponent will fold all weaker hands but if you are doing so with the worst hand then you could likely get pot committed here and end up losing your stack.

Having top pair top kicker makes it too soon to fold at this stage but a raise is overplaying the hand. In other forms of poker like limit for example then reopening the betting in this way with the worst hand is not as bad from a theoretical standpoint and you will come to understand this as you learn poker. If you have outs then the raise still has plenty of equity so it isn’t that much of an error. But a raise in no limit play is a substantial commitment.

It can be this way with far stronger hands than top pair top kicker. Let us say that you have 5-5 on a board of J-10-5 rainbow. Your opponent bets the flop and you raise and they call and the turn card comes and is the Ad and they lead out for another bet again. Here I think that it is a mistake to raise with bottom set and you may already be drawing to only one out if your opponent has a bigger set. Raising here reopens the betting and allows your opponent to not only get away from a weaker hand but to also pot commit you to the hand.

Some may say that you are committed to losing your stack on this board but in very deep situations then I think that this hand is one that can be got away from against decent players. The lesson here is that you need to be very careful about reopening the betting except when you hold the very nuts or close to it.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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