Playing the Big Pots
By: Guy Downs

The game of poker has many charms, perhaps none sweeter than the buzz we get from playing a monster pot. Your hands sweat, your breathing halts, the turn card hangs in the air for an eternity before gently dropping to the green baize… We’ve all walked this road a thousand times, yet the thrill that comes from playing a big pot never seems to wane. Curiously enough, however, many poker players never really learn just how to play big pots. They know they’re fun to be in, and that they’d rather drag big pots than small pots, but they don’t understand the critical concepts that lead to optimal play.

The first rule of playing big pots is this: always look for a way to eliminate opponents. A24 small bet pot is not the time to get cutesy with your set of queens, or to try and ‘bring in more customers’ with top two pair. The risk you take on by playing a big hand meekly far outweighs the reward you receive for making the pot a bit larger. Most players don’t fully account for the size of the pot when they make their playing decisions, and their results suffer for it.

To illustrate how the size of the pot should impact your play, let’s look at a couple hands. First, let’s say you have the K T, and find yourself sucked in for three bets pre-flop against seven other opponents. The flop comes J 8 6 . All check, and the player on your immediate right bets. What’s your move?

Conventional wisdom says you should just call here and hope to get more players involved. And this wouldn’t be a bad play if the pot were smaller. In this case, however, the conventional wisdom is wrong. Yes, you only have a draw. No, your hand doesn’t have any immediate value. Yet both of these considerations are utterly beside the point. By raising you may get a better king to fold, or someone holding the lone ace of clubs. Furthermore there’s no law saying that the flop bettor can beat a pair of tens, in which case you’d like to see hands like AT, or T-8, gracefully remove themselves from contention. While your flush outs will probably be good no matter what, it’s well worth tossing an extra bet into this mammoth pot if you can ‘buy’ some more outs. Even if your raise only improves your chances of winning by 5% it’s still a good play.

In the above hand we looked at how a big pot can persuade you to take a strange line of attack with a draw. But how about with a made hand? Let’s say you have the A A , and again find yourself in a seven-way pot that’s been three-bet before the flop. The flop comes  K 8 5 . All check to the player on your right, who bets. What’s your play?

Before we go any farther, understand we’re working from two assumptions. First, we’re assuming that if you raise now the flop bettor will check the turn. Second, we’re assuming that if you just call the flop bettor will bet the turn. If both of these assumptions are correct — and they usually are — then your play on the flop is to just call and then spring to life with a raise on the turn. The key here is that anybody who has a draw to a hand that would beat you is going to call two bets in this giant pot as easily as they would call one. Thus, raising here won’t weed out any of the hands that you want to fold. So, you wait until the turn — because while a flop raise here isn’t going to further your cause, forcing the field to call two cold on the turn will eliminate all but the most stubborn contenders. There’s nothing on God’s earth you can do to keep live hands from snapping you off on the turn, so you just deal with it and let them see fourth street. By waiting to raise on the turn you can often keep them away from the river, which will improve your chances of winning tremendously.

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