Some advices on Why to Raise preflop on shorthanded games
You raise preflop to:
1) Gain position for the rest of the hand
Acting last in a hand on all post-flop streets is an advantage that’s worth your investment. Think of how much easier it is to play somewhat marginal hands like straight draws, top pair with medium kicker, and so on when you get to act last on the flop, turn and river. When you’re one or two off the button with a hand that plays better with position, it’s often worth it to raise just to try and ‘steal the button’, as doing so literally increases the value of your hand.
2) Maximize the value of position
In theory, thinking players should see a direct, positive relationship between the amount of information they have in a hand and the quality of the decisions they make. The better your position, the more information you have, and the better your decision making will be. Getting more money in the middle when you have that kind of fundamental edge over your opponents is a tactic that’s going to yield positive results in the long run.
3) Make opponents play more predictably
Poker is all about the deductive process of determining what hand your opponent is most likely to hold. When you just limp, you lower the risk your opponents face by getting involved in the hand. With lower risk, opponents are likely to play a much larger range of hands, making your job of narrowing that range far more difficult. Raising preflop helps you to tighten that range from the word go. Additionally, raising preflop builds the pot which has two effects. One, as pots get larger in 100BB buy in and under games, it becomes more and more difficult for most opponents to disguise their hands. Two, average players just tend to behave more obviously in larger pots as they begin to freeze and act reflexively.
4) Narrow the field
While there are certainly situations where you prefer to play multi-way pots, the general rule of thumb in no limit hold’em is that the fewer opponents you have, the greater the chance that you’re going to win the pot. Narrowing the field also gives you more chances to engage in direct confrontations with opponents, giving you more information about how they play in various situations, and increasing the potential for you to exploit those tendencies.
5) Build pots
The larger pots get, the more likely bad opponents are to make mistakes, especially if they’re already stuck.
6) Take the initiative
In heads up pots, your opponents miss the flop more than they hit. The same is true for you. Whoever takes the lead in the betting preflop is likely to win the (very substantial number of) pots where neither player flops anything. Raising preflop creates the presumption that you have something, and when your opponent misses (or flops weak), it dramatically increases the chance that you’ll be able to win the pot with a bet on the flop.
7) Frustrate opponents
Whether they know it or not, people generally sit down in poker games with some sort of general expectation regarding how much they should ‘get to’ play. When you raise preflop, you force them to fold some hands that they would have played if they were allowed to limp (or see the flop for cheap / free from their blinds). Eventually, most players will get annoyed (again, whether they realize it consciously or not) by the disconnect between how many hands they expected to get to play and how many hands they’re actually playing, and they’ll often start playing hands solely to make up the gap. Whenever you can make people play hands for a reason other than a positive expectation over the long run, you’re probably doing something right.
8) Isolate bad players
It sounds obvious to say that playing hands with bad players is how you make money in texas holdem. And this is exactly what you want, that 1vs1 confrontation againts the bad players to maximize your poitential profit.
Hope this helps you all, have a great day :)
USC
