If you re-raise, then anybody who comes over the top of that bet is certainly indicating a very powerful hand indeed, because they are raising a raiser and a re-raiser. This leaves A-K looking decidedly second best.
Deception is very important in poker, because any time that your opponent knows the rough content of your hand, it is going to hurt you. But whenever you are playing straightforward poker and your bets and raises are not deceptive in any way, then this means that your opponents’ reactions to you can be respected more than if you had started the process off by being deceptive.
In the last scenario that we looked at, by calling the raise you created the impression that your hand was a lot weaker than A-K, so your opponent’s re-raise cannot be trusted — it can only be read in relation to your call. If you re-raised, at least you’d find out where you stood in the hand.
Position in No Limit play is absolutely crucial. and you must respect the fact that all hands in Hold ‘Em play much better when they have position on their side.
0 As we move on to middle, position, it remains the case that you really should not be getting involved with hands that can cripple you in No Limit Hold ‘Em, and especially in raised pots. But
I see players all the time who limp along in pots with a hand such as K-10 simply because there has been no raise.
The flop comes 10-6-3 and they lose their entire stack needlessly because someone else with 3-3 had also limped in cheap in the hope of making a big hand.
But the difference between these two hands lies in the ease with which the players can get away from their hand. If the flop comes J-6-2, the player with the 3-3 still has a little bit of something, but it is so weak that folding is not a problem at all.
Contrast this to that 10-6-3 flop to the K-10 and you can see the 3-3 situation and the guy with the K-10 (or worse still A-10), because the latter is now telling himself that’l have top pair top kicker’ as though it is a through ticket. The next thing you know, he has put his stack on a pair of Tens.
What complicates the entire process in poker is the almost infinite number of situations that exist within the game. By this I mean the differences in player types, game types, players moods, stack sizes, game size and so on. It is almost an impossibility to experience exaxctly the same situation twice in poker.