Jonathan Little: Avoid Overprotecting Strong Hands in Poker

Jonathan Little, a renowned poker strategy expert, runs an elite training site at PokerCoaching.com. He advises against a common misconception among poker players: that they should always try to protect their decently strong made hands. Little warns that playing gigantic pots when you happen to be crushed, which is exactly what happens when you blast money into the pot with your strong, but non-nut hands, can be detrimental.

Consider a scenario in a $2-$5 no-limit cash game with $500 effective stacks. Two players limp from middle position and everyone else folds to the button. The button looks down at a hand like J-J, A-Q, or A-J. A shocking number of players think they are supposed to raise to an amount that forces their opponents to fold because that protects their hand. So, they raise to something huge like $60 and hope everyone folds, which happens most of the time. However, from time to time one of the initial limpers or someone yet to act will reraise to $160 or so. Once this happens, it should be clear that A-Q, A-J, and perhaps even J-J are in bad shape and should be folded. But a lot of players simply cannot make the disciplined fold. They do not properly understand the reraiser’s range and only focus on their normally-strong preflop hand. Instead, they call to see the flop (or go all-in, resulting in them drawing thin).

With hands like A-Q, you will find that you are usually dominated by the player who reraised to $160. This usually leads to you either folding to a flop bet when you miss, winning a small pot when you hit, or losing your entire stack when you happen to flop top pair but still have the worst hand. Instead of making a gigantic preflop raise and then calling the reraise, you should make a smaller preflop raise to $40 or so. This will result in your opponents calling with much wider ranges that you are in excellent shape against. While you will get outdrawn from time to time, you also keep your opponents in the pot with many inferior hands.