Going Broke In An Unraised Pot
Marcus Bateman
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Marcus Bateman /
08 May 2009 /
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One of the key mistakes players make playing deep stacked big bet games is overplaying hands like top pair in pots which start out small but very quickly get much larger than the hand is actually worth.
There is an old poker saying (I believe coined by Doyle Brunson but don't quote me on it) that a player should: 'Never go broke in an unraised pot'. This simply refers to the notion that you should not be losing your whole stack in what has started as a small pot without a very strong hand.
A classic example of this in action came from a weak player in a $5/$10 live game I was sitting in recently. Although I was not involved in the hand, the action was a classic example of why you need very strong hands in unraised pots to put the big money in.
The weak player limped under the gun and the action was folded around to the button who called, as well as the small blind completing and the big blind checking. The flop was 10c6h2s and the blinds both checked. The weak player fired out a pot bet, which was folded back to the big blind who check raised. The weak player re-raised and eventually they both got it in. The weak player had Jh10h and the big blind had a set of sixes which held up to win a big pot.
The moral of this is that you need a very strong hand to get the whole of your stack in when there are not many big blinds out there. The weak player ends up putting in ninety six big blinds into a pot that contained just four on the flop, all with a very marginal hand - a true recipe for disaster against good players.
One of the key mistakes players make playing deep stacked big bet games is overplaying hands like top pair in pots which start out small but very quickly get much larger than the hand is actually worth.
Always remember that big bet poker gets proportionally simpler the more of your stack you can get in pre flop, and had this been a short stacked hand where the weak player had raised a decent percentage of their stack pre flop, got called, and fired out the rest of their stack in one pot size bet with top pair, this hand would have been fine, as there are so many chips in the pot relative to their stack.
However, in the deep stacked example getting this many chips in with what is in the context of the action a very marginal hand is a massive mistake, and one which will cost you dearly if you keep making it.
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