The Chris Dudley Juvenile Diabetes Charity Poker Night – 2006

One of the great opportunities that poker being on TV has afforded me is the ability to give back to charities.  More and more charities are using poker as a theme to raise money and I have had so many opportunities to participate in these great causes.

I recently participated with Phil Gordon in the Chris Dudley Juvenile Diabetes Charity Poker Night. The event took place in Portland, Oregon which gave me the chance to visit the city I just sadly moved from.  It was wonderful to be back home after having moved to LA this summer.  This as the second year I emceed the event, which raised over $400k for the foundation.  Phil as an amazing addition to the event and he did an incredible job as co-emcee. 

The night before the event, Phil and I gave a poker clinic at the Dudley’s house for anyone interested in picking up a few tips before playing the next night.  Giving these types of clinics always highlights for me the kinds of common mistakes players who are new to the game make. The most common error is that new players have a strong tendency to call rather than raise before the flop.  This mistake is a recipe for disaster in poker.

Players new to the game tend to think the only purpose of raising is to get more money in the pot when you think you have the best hand.  But in a real sense this is the least important reason to raise before the flop.  Raising serves many purposes only one of which is to get more money in the pot with the best hand.

First, raising is a powerful way to get more information about your opponent’s hand.  Poker is a game where you have to make decisions under conditions of extreme uncertainty: You know what your cards are but are uncertain about what all of your opponents are holding.  Your job as a poker player is to narrow down the possible hands that your opponents could have.  Raising should be used as a tool to do this.

Consider this: in a game of No-Limit Texas Hold’em, if you flat call before the flop and the big blind checks, you have learned exactly nothing new about the big blind’s hand.  You have narrowed down their possible hands by exactly 0%.  But what if you raised 3-4 times the big blind before the flop and the big blind still calls?  Now how much more do you know about his or her hand?  Quite a bit.  You know with some certainty that the big blind is not holding a hand like 7-2o or any other weak holdings of that ilk.  You have probably eliminated at least 50% of the possible to card combinations he or she could have.  And if the player is tight, you have eliminated more like 80% of the possible hands he could have.

That much information gained will be a powerful weapon as you play out the rest of the hand since the more you know about your opponent’s hand, the better the decisions you will make in playing against him for the rest of the betting rounds.  When the board comes 258, it is just much more unlikely that board relates to his hand when he has called a raise.  When the board comes QJT, it is much more likely that his hand does relate to that board in some way when he has called a preflop raise.  Think about how powerful that knowledge is to you.  Information is power and, in poker, raising is one of the best ways to gain information.

Another very important reason to raise before the flop is to narrow down the field.  When playing hold’em the most likely winning hand is one pair.  Because of this you want to do everything you can to create a situation in which when you flop a pair it is good.  The best way to do this is to limit the number of opponents in the pot with you.  Even Aces prefer to play 2-3 handed because that greatly increases the likelihood they will hold up without improvement. 

If you limp in before the flop it will encourage people to limp in behind you, thus increasing the number of people playing the pot with you.  Raising, on the other hand, discourages people from entering the pot, thus decreasing the number of people playing the pot with you.  Anytime you decrease the number of opponents you increase the likelihood of your hand winning. So you should use the preflop raise as a tool for narrowing down the field you are playing against.

Raising also increases your likelihood of winning the pot by giving you the lead.  When you raise before the flop you are much more likely to win the pot whether your hand improves or not.  You will miss the board about 67% of the time, as will your opponents.  Generally, people defer to the person who has raised before the flop.  The preflop raiser will win the majority of the pots in which their opponents have missed the flop, whether the raiser has improved or not.  If you passively call you are giving up this huge advantage.

There is nothing worse than watching a new player limp into a pot, only to call a raise from an opponent that raises behind their limp. If their hand was good enough to call a raise in the first place, then they should have raised the pot themselves and taken the role of aggressor in the hand. They have passed the advantage to another player but paid the same amount they could have to take the aggressive stance themselves.  They have decreased the likelihood that they will win the pot when their opponent misses the flop but put in the same money that would have increased that same likelihood if they had raised in the first place.  Doesn’t sound like smart poker, does it?

There are many other reasons to raise before the flop but these are my top three.  The power of the raise is so great, gets you so much more information, narrows the field so effectively, increases the likelihood of winning the hand so strongly, that I always recommend to beginners that if you are first to act and your hand is good enough to play then you should raise 100% of the time.  It is no accident that all of the best players in the world are aggressive.  Follow their lead and raise it up!