Tournament Strategies
After receiving pocket cards, you are immediately faced with a choice: play your cards and either raise or call the blinds, or fold.
Practice Matters
Reasons to Bet
Reasons to Bet When you make a bet, you need to be sure there is a reason for it. Otherwise, checking may be the best play. Most players try to justify poor bets by saying they think they have the best hand. As you will see, this is not always a good enough reason to bet. There are really only a few reasons to bet. They are for value, for protection, as a bluff and for information. We will cover all these bets in great detail throughout this book, but for now, I will briefly cover each type.
The first reason to bet is for value,
The first reason to bet is for value, i.e., you bet because you expect your opponent to call with a worse hand. An example would be if you raise 3-3 with 150BBs and one opponent calls in position. If it comes A-K-3, you should bet because your opponent’s calling range is made up of a lot of aces and kings. So, you bet and your opponent calls. You should bet again on basically every turn because if your opponent called on the flop, he probably has an ace or king and may call you down. You should again bet the river for value.