The importance of check raising in limit games

Poker Variants / Marcus Bateman / 31 March 2010 / Leave a Comment

Weak no limit players frequently try to check raise too much, with the result that they end up just giving people free cards and stacking off later in the hand to back door draws.

Many players who come from a limit background check raise way too much when they start playing no limit games, and pot limit and no limit players tend to check raise too little when they first encounter limit.

This is because your check raising frequency has to be much higher in limit games, simply because forcing players out of pots and gaining extra bets is much more important in limit games, and check raising is one of the most valuable tools when trying to do this.

In a limit game, people value bet much more thinly, simply because they can never be raised more than a single bet. They also call one bet much more often in multi way pots (as people are value betting thin, so people start calling thin), which means to push people out of pots you need to do more than just bet out. This leaves people much more open to exploitation by check raises, and as a result limit is a game where you need to be check raising often to achieve different goals.

Compare this to no limit and pot limit games. In these games people rarely call in multi way pots without something of a high standard, and as you can adjust your bet sizing, you can easily force a player off a weak hand with a large bet (something you simply cannot do in limit games). As a result, you are much better off check raising a much lower frequency of hands in no limit games, simply because it does not achieve better results than other courses of action in most spots.

Weak no limit players frequently try to check raise too much, with the result that they end up just giving people free cards and stacking off later in the hand to back door draws. Weak limit players often tend to lead out too much, not thinking about the best course of action in terms of either protecting their hand or building a pot. In both situations people are playing too far from the optimum line considering the structure of the game, and over the long run this will severely dent any profits you intend to make.

Making the transition from limit to no limit or vice versa can be a very difficult business if you do not make an effort to really study how the games differ. They really are as different as chalk and cheese in terms of winning approaches, and no where is this more obvious and important than in terms of check raising.

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