Poker Tips from the Pros - Stacking your Opponent in Increments

One of the better ways to play your strong hands is to bet them in such a way as to attempt to stack your opponent in increments. Let us look at an example to show you exactly what I mean. You decide to raise a limper in a NL100 and you make it $4.50 to go. All of the other players fold and the limper calls making $10.50 in the pot and just the two of you left.

You both have $100 stacks and your hand is the Jh-10h. The flop comes like a dream and is 9c-8d-7s giving you the nut straight. Your opponent bets $6.50 into the $10.50 pot and you shove all-in for your remaining $95 or so.

Your opponent takes a long time before they finally muck their hand. You almost got a call or did you? Your opponent could simply have been firing with nothing merely to test you and when you over shoved then you simply blew them out of the pot. The delay was merely an act made to throw you off so you wouldn’t be aware that they were stealing.

But if you call then this then puts $23.50 in the pot. If your opponent has some kind of a hand then they will bet again and if they do then they may be betting somewhere in the $15 range. If you call this once again then this puts $53.50 into the pot and you and you opponent only have around $74 left which isn’t that much more than the pot.

On the river they can either check or bet, if they check then you can possibly bet half the pot and if they call then you have still extracted half of their stack in one hand and they could call that bet with a very wide range of hands simply because of the pot odds. But if they really do have a hand like a set, two pair or say something like pocket tens then they may value bet or put out a blocking bet depending on which bet is the more relevant based on what type of hand that they have.

If they are value betting and bet half the pot then you can simply shove all-in and the likelihood of you getting a call will be high. If they are making a blocking bet and you shove at that stage then you either get most of their stack if they fold or their whole stack if they call.

In this instance you have not lost your market by blasting them out with a huge overbet in the slight hope that you will get called. I see players try to over shove with hands like aces pre-flop quite frequently. They are hoping to get called by kings or queens but in actual fact, all they end up doing is losing their market when everyone folds.