Today’s Texas Hold’em Strategy is about betting. There are not a lot of poker betting rules that exist outside of the overall structure of the game. For a lot of poker players, the act of betting becomes like “Thunderdome”; a place of wild actions and near suicidal gambits that often end in the death of the poker players chip stack. This is especially true in the “wild west” that is online poker. From a poker strategy perspective, people need to remember that not only chips their most precious commodity, but also their most potent weapon. So not should be protected, but also deployed with some thought behind them.
A credo that should apply to the live poker players as well as the online poker aficionados is “bet big or don’t bet at all”. Betting the minimum during a no-limit game doesn’t send any sort of message besides weakness. While there are times when it is appropriate to slowplay, this is a poker strategy that should be rare, so in general, if you are not going to bet big in order to send a message of strength, simply call. By calling, you look just as weak as betting the minimum, and you save money.
If you have got a good hand before the flop, and want to limit the number of callers by betting, a good poker betting rule to follow is to raise three or four times the big blind. If a few players have limped in before you, and you want to put pressure on them, you can a couple of times bigger than that rule of thumb. This will manipulate the odds a bit, and make it mathematically a bad idea for them to call your bet.
In later rounds, when you are betting in a situation where you believe your hand is better than your opponents, a bet of about 75% of the pot would be appropriate. This conveys the message that you have confidence that your cards are the best at the table. Unless they have a substantial made hand, it would be suicidal poker strategy to call that bet with anything less than a top pair (even than it one could question the wisdom of the call).
In short, when betting, think your way through the process instead of trying to feel your way through the hand. Obviously tournaments and all-in gambits have other, special rules of their own, but this is a general advice for cash games.
That is the Texas Hold’em Strategy for today.
