Poker-Strategy: Buying Flop Texture

03.10.2008, Lesen Sie hier den Bericht über «Poker-Strategy: Buying Flop Texture».

by Nick Eisel on Pokerpages.com

Every poker player loves to raise.
Can you blame them? Raising is action and action is exciting, with all those chips splashing in the pot without certainty of an outcome.

I'm sure most of you have read at least one poker book and all of the reasons the author says we should raise. It gets value with the best hand, can fold out better hands on occasion and, of course, makes you trickier to play against. I know one reason for raising that I've never read in a book though, and that's what I want to talk about today.

Raising with the intention of "buying" flop textures.
To fully understand and appreciate this concept, you have to think of the game of Hold'em in its entirety. What level is the opponent thinking on? If you take a given action, what range will he likely put you on? It's very important to know the player in this instance, because the better he is, the more likely he is to assign you a range based on your image. Bad players will simply put you on AK or a big pair in most situations when you raise, whereas a good player's view of your range will have more thought put into it.

So what does all of this mean?

It means that you should raise more and then represent boards that likely hit your preflop range. That's just the beginning though, as each specific situation will be different.

The first situation you can easily use to gain post flop value is when you raise from an early position. In this type of spot against a solid and tight opponent, you can fire two barrels on almost any reasonable board and get a fold. The reason, of course, is that the majority of your range will be large overpairs, and while the opponent may peel the flop with a middle pocket pair, he will surely fold to the second barrel. You can also easily represent an Ace or King that flops.

Taking this a step further, you can create a ton of value by three-betting weaker players preflop and then representing your likely range on certain boards. This works best against players who are average or decent hand readers that will usually give you the benefit of the doubt. Not only will they fold preflop a lot but you can move them off of lots of good hands post flop if you aren't a super loose player.

Since the majority of solid Holdem players play a tight style, you can easily exploit this by raising more and then representing stuff post flop. Even if they call you down a few times, the average player will get run over by just calling a lot preflop, as they can't call anywhere near enough flops to make it profitable.

I realize this may be somewhat common sense if you really think about the game in depth ,but the point is that people come up with lots of reasons to raise and this is one of the more important ones that I don't hear mentioned often. The next time you are opening for a blind steal you should realize that you aren't directly risking your raise to win the blinds. There are plenty of situations where you will just get called and can take the pot away because you raised preflop. This is yet another reason why limping is bad in general and I'm pretty sure every player out there could benefit from applying more logic in this direction to his or her game.

May every raise you make buy you a good flop texture to steal on.

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