How You Should Look at Poker Hands

In order to make correct decisions in poker, you need to look at each situation on its own.  However, some people tend to treat this decision-making process as a separate entity without the whole hand in mind.  And when you start doing this, you quickly lose control of a hand.  That’s why great poker players make decisions based not only on the present situation, but with the entire hand in mind as well.

To illustrate how much a single decision can impact an entire hand, let’s take a look at this example:

You’re playing a $2/$4 short-handed No-Limit Hold’em cash game and the average stack size is about $250.  The player under the gun raises the pot to $10 and you decide to call while sitting on the button with Jh-Jd.  Everyone else folds to the raise and the flop is 8c-Jc-3h.  Your opponent decides to throw out a $12 bet and you re-raise the opponent to $20.

Feeling confident, the player calls the raise and the turn is a Kc.  The other player checks, and so you check in order to avoid a possible check-raise.  The river is dealt and this turns out to be an 8d.  Once again, the other player checks (this time out of fear of the full house) while you put out a $40 raise.  Your opponent calls leaving them to reveal Ac-Qc while you show a full house and take down the pot.

Now it might seem like you’ve raked in a nice pot here, but the truth is that you lost out on opportunities to earn even more money through what turned out to be a monster hand.  What you should have been doing instead of concentrating on each decision by itself is looked to have taken your opponents’ entire stack.

This means finding opportunities to get more money into the pot each step of the way.  For instance, when you hit trips on the flop, gauge your opponent to see if they’ll call a $30 raise instead of a $20 raise.  The more money they put in, the better off you’ll be.