Instructor:
Brian Townsend is a lead instructor and co-owner of CardRunners.com. He is a regular in the highest stakes games on the internet, has appeared on “High Stakes Poker,” and plays stakes as high as $1000/$2000/$4000 no limit in Bobby's Room at the Bellagio. His training videos are available exclusively at CardRunners.com wherein he explains his thoughts and analysis behind every hand.
Medium Strength Hands Vs Aggressive Or Passive Opponents
In no-limit hold"em, it can be to tough to play very weak and very strong hands optimally, but medium-strength hands are even tougher. When your intrinsic hand strength is far to one side of the spectrum, there are often just a few questions you need to ask yourself when you"re deciding if and how to bluff, or how to get the most value from your hand. When you"re in the middle of the spectrum, however, you need more questions in your head and more techniques in your arsenal; pot control is one of those techniques.
Whenever it"s my action, I determine the strength of my hand against my opponent"s possible holdings. This is critical no matter what my hand is, as this process is the foundation of every continuation bet, value-bet, bluff, check, and every other decision I make. When I flop a medium-strength hand, and I determine that it"s usually way ahead of or behind my opponent"s range, I will often check the flop. For example, if I raise with A4s and am called by the big blind, who checks to me on a A33 rainbow flop, checking behind him can be a great move. No matter what the blind has, one of us is far ahead of the other (or we"re almost certain to chop).
In this sort of situation, I don"t imagine that many hands I beat will be able to call me down. Therefore, betting for value is very thin.
Checking here has many benefits: for example, I both induce and protect against bluffs. If I bet and were checkraised, and then faced more pressure on later streets, I"d only be able to beat a bluff and would therefore usually have to fold my hand. Meanwhile, many opponents will interpret a check as a sign of weakness, and turn their whiffed hands into bluffs; it will be much easier to call these bluffs down when they only have one more street (or no more streets) to pressure me with.
As always, you need to take your opponent"s tendencies into account. For example, suppose you"re playing against a very passive player. You can comfortably fold to a checkraise--usually you"d be afraid of throwing away a winner, but you almost never have a winner when this kind of player raises you. Therefore much of your reason for checking is gone, and you can go ahead and bet. It might happen that he folds the flop but would have called a bet later, but generally your opponent"s passivity will turn this situation into a betting spot. A bet prevents a free card (albeit a relatively benign one); it"s good for balancing your play, as you"ll certainly be betting here with a lot of bad hands; and you might get a suspicious call anyway.
Against a maniac, however, the reasons to check here are amplified. Some opponents just won"t be able to keep themselves from bluffing the turn and the river if you check the flop. If that"s the case, you should definitely check. Why not give them the go-ahead to put a lot of money in the pot while drawing nearly dead? Meanwhile, the discomfort you"ll face against a checkraise is also increased. The blind would have to be staggeringly wild before you"d be very comfortable calling a checkraise and planning to fade all his future action in that bloated pot with just a bad Ace. Checking the flop, therefore, gets you much more good action than you get if you bet.
No-limit hold"em is a game not only of making tough decisions well, but molding situations in which you"re less likely to have tough decisions. Pot control epitomizes this: you trade bad, tough spots for profitable, easier ones. As with any technique, you need to account for both your opponent"s range and his tendencies, but with experience you"ll find that opportunities often arise that are best handled with pot control.
