As I mentioned in a previous article on tournament hand selection, it is better to raise or fold than it is to call. I didn’t elaborate on why that is true, so hopefully this article will give a little more insight on the advice.*******
First and foremost, raising gives you much more information about your opponents hand than a call would. For example, let’s say you called a raise preflop with A 10. The flop comes 10 5 2. Regardless of your position, you’re faced with a pot-sized bet. If you just call here, what do you know about your opponents hand? He/she represented strength preflop and now on the flop, so it’s very possible he/she has an overpair to the board. What are you to do if he/she makes another pot-sized bet on the turn? At this point, it’s getting very expensive, and you still don’t know where you’re at in the hand.
Now let’s assume we are in the same situation on the flop, but we elect to raise instead of call. Our opponent will do one of three things in response: reraise, call, or fold. If he reraises, chances are we’re beat. I don’t care who you are, maniac, rock, whatever; if you’re reraising like that, chances are, you’ve got a monster hand. Moving on, if he calls, depending on the player, we could be ahead or behind. This is really the only scenario we have to worry about, as the information doesn’t become very clear to us. If he folds, that’s fine, nice pot. See all the information we were able to gather with a raise? So simple, yet sometimes it’s easy to overlook.
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Secondly, a raise may eliminate a suckout. Let’s take the example from above. If our opponent makes a pot-sized bet on that 10 5 2 flop and we just call, what are we going to do if a J, Q, or K comes on the turn? The situation becomes more complicated then, not to mention we still don’t have a clue what our opponent has. If you raise and he/she folds, you don’t have to worry about a suckout.
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Finally, and this applies a bit more preflop but can be applied postflop as well: isolation. If we get dealt AA preflop and we just call, we’re running the risk of butting heads with anywhere from 1-6 other hands. Against 1 person, AA is a huge favorite, against 6 others, we’d be lucky to win 1/3 of the time. A raise helps eliminate opponents so we can focus on a single, or maybe 2 opponents. It reduces our thought process when we have to worry about less people.
Again, raising or folding is better than calling, so work that raise into your poker arsenal, and don’t be afraid! By raising, you’re actually making life easier on yourself!
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