No Limit Texas Hold'em Pumping the Pot Preflop
Most players tend to assign their preflop hands to one of three categories—hands that should be folded, hands that are worth a call and hands that are worth a raise. If, for instance, a typical player finds himself on the button with pocket 6’s after four players have limped in, he’ll usually just limp along as well, since pocket 6’s are strong enough to call with in this spot but not strong enough to raise with.
The problem with this approach is that it’s predicated on the notion that the purpose for the preflop raise is strictly to reduce the pot odds that drawing hands are getting from the pot. Think about all the articles you’ve ever read on raising before the flop. Virtually all of them say the same thing: “Raise your big pocket pairs to shut people out of the pot”, they declare. Or “Raise it up so that your opponents don’t get to draw cheaply against you”. This kind of thinking is fine, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t address one of the biggest incentives for raising preflop, which is to simply build a bigger pot.
Take those pocket 6’s, for instance. Yes, this is a speculative hand. Yes, your odds of flopping a set or better are only about 8:1 against. But what happens when you do flop that big hand? For one thing, you have a very well disguised holding. And secondly, you have a hand that is probably a) the best hand right now, and b) the best draw (since you’re drawing to a full house). Lastly, you will usually catch a few players who are drawing nearly dead. Any hand with two overcards, or one pair, has virtually no chance of catching up with you. In sum, when you flop a set you want action, and preferably lots of it. And the best way to ensure that you’re going to get action is to build a pot so big that your opponents will feel ‘pot stuck’, and will chase with hands that have almost no chance of winning.
Let’s say you limp in after four callers in a $2-$4 game. At this point the best case scenario is that you flop a set, and catch someone with top pair who will pay you off. However, since the pot was originally so small it’s going to very hard to find someone who will play a big pot with you if all they have is a pair. The reward—which in this case is a modest sized pot—just doesn’t compensate for the risk that their hand is no good. But let’s say you raised to $12 with those 6’s. What happens now? Well, assuming all four original callers call the raise you’ll have built a $60 pot—and that doesn’t include the blinds. Now a player with top pair is going to be much more likely to play a good sized pot with you, because his reward for doing so is so much higher. It also increases the chances that someone with a hand like middle pair will at least take a look at the turn. And if they’re ‘lucky’ enough to improve on the turn they’ll often lose all of their chips to you.
By putting in a ‘pot building’ raise before the flop you’re only reducing your immediate pot odds by a small amount, but the trade off is a substantial increase in your implied odds—which is to say, the odds you’ll be getting from the pot if you do make your hand. For this reason it’s often correct to make raises of this sort when you’re in late position and a number of players have already called. Hands like small pocket pairs and (to a lesser extent) small suited connectors are great candidates for these kinds of raises, and you should always be on the lookout for these kinds of opportunities. They tend to come around fairly often—and are frequently the rule, as opposed to the exception, in loose passive games—and over time they will prove to be exceptionally profitable.
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