Building Pots with Made Hands

So here you are, you’ve been playing with grueling patience for hours, waiting for some sort of decent hand to win a pot.  After all those hours of card-dead boredom, you’ve finally hit a decent hand.  It’s time to get paid!  Read on for some helpful pot building tips.

Made hands don’t come around that often so you want to take advantage of them when they do.  It’s easy to neglect the importance of extracting value with made hands too…some people say made hands play themselves.

First of all, that’s just wrong.  Second of all, it would serve you well to remember that the value you get out of your made hands directly affects your winrate.  Poker isn’t just about avoiding losing money; it’s about extracting money as well.

Now that we’ve got that all out of the way, let’s get to the good stuff.  Building pots with made hands means convincing your opponents to put their money in the middle with inferior hands.

This usually happens in one of three ways:

* You don’t have to do any convincing at all; your opponent has a strong hand (easiest)
* Your opponent thinks you have a weak hand and calls you down with a weak hand
* Your opponent thinks you have a weak hand and tries to bluff you off it

The easiest way to get your opponent’s money is for him to have a strong (but second best) hand.  If you are holding a pair of jacks on a 25J board and your opponent is holding a pair of fives, you’re going to make some money.

You can’t really manipulate what hands are dealt to your opponent but there is something you can do to increase the chances of your opponent hitting a better hand.  How does this work?  Well, it’s a secret and you’re going to have to pay to find out.  Just kidding.  All I’m talking about here is the simple, old-fashioned slowplay.

If you hit a monster hand on the flop, a slowplay will give your opponent a chance to hit the one card he needs to make him willing to put his money in the middle.  The other cool thing about the slowplay is that it makes you look weak because you’re checking and calling instead of betting.  The slowplay kills two birds with one stone this way.

But you want to be careful because the slowplay has three weaknesses:

* It can give opponents free cards when drawing to hands better than yours
* Slowplaying is an old trick.  People will know something fishy is afoot if you check-call on the flop and then checkraise the turn
* Slowplaying doesn’t build the pot.  No money is going in the middle when you slowplay so the bets on the turn and river are going to be smaller

If your opponent doesn’t have a strong hand you can still get his money by making him think you have a weaker hand than you actually do.  There are several ways to do this, but here are a couple of my favorites:

The Slap A Clown Move – This is the move where you bet the flop, check the turn and then bet the river.  It looks like you tried to steal the pot on the flop, gave up on the turn and then tried one last time on the river.

Betting All The Way Down – This move is similar to the Slap A Clown except there is no break on the turn.  All you do is bet on the flop, turn and river.  Have you ever tried to bluff someone off a hand by betting all three streets but instead ending up losing a stack because the fish couldn’t fold his A7?  Well this move takes advantage of that calling tendency.

The best way to build pots is by betting.  You don’t have to blow your opponents away by placing huge bets all over the place.  Just make little half-pot sized to full pot sized bets here and there and you’ll make all kinds of money off your good hands.

It also helps to have an aggressive image in place before you hit those strong hands.  If you play your weak hands hard and fast too, your opponents will never know when to call and when to fold.