Getting free cards with draws

No Limit Holdem / Marcus Bateman / 01 September 2010 / Leave a Comment

One of the best ways to play good draws against weak players is to put in a flop raise in order to gain a free card on the turn. This allows you to both take control of the betting initiative, as well as often allowing you to see the hand through without having to put in large bets on the turn; a sort of pre emptive blocker bet that makes the hand much easier to play on the whole.

Say you raise from the button with a hand like Ah3h and get a caller from the big blind when playing in a deep stacked cash game. The flop comes out KhJh7c and the big blind leads into you for about half the pot. In this situation, it is a great spot to raise, as a weak opponent will often flat call and check the turn, either looking for some pot control with a single pair or draw, or if playing a set or two pair to trap you later in the hand by feigning weakness.

If you had simply flat called this flop, it is unlikely that your opponent will check the turn often, and they will frequently be laying you the wrong price when they do bet out on the turn if you miss. If you raise the flop, you not only have the option of checking behind if you miss and they check, but if you do hit, you can fire or raise the turn again, giving you the best chance to build a very large pot with your nut hand - something much harder to do with your opponent dictating the price and without the betting initiative.

As a final advantage, weak players usually project their own ideas onto the players around them, and will often not put you on such a hand if you raise the flop and bet a heart turn. Imagine they have a hand like jack king on the flop in the above example. As they don't really consider raising a draw in this spot that often, and certainly not betting strongly the minute they hit the nut flush (the standard weak means strong and vice versa dynamic of bad players), they will often stack of hundreds of big blinds here if you take this sort of route putting you on a much weaker hand. This line not only increases your chances of winning a big pot in terms of the size and frequency of bets, but also in terms of disguising your hand to this player type.

Good players win a lot more, and lose a lot less with their draws than bad ones. One of they key ways they do this is to think through the best ways to not only maximise profits if they hit early, but also to make drawing as cheap as possible if they miss the turn. Raising flops is a great example of this, as against many player types it enables you to have the best of both worlds, an advantage that quickly adds up to huge sums of money in the long run.

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