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Try to raise over players who have a very wide pre-flop raising range.

Try to raise over players who have a very wide pre-flop raising range. Most players raise more hands in late position, so that’s a good place to start. If someone open-raises from the small blind, button, cutoff, or hijack, he’s usually a good candidate to be pushed over. Avoid pushing over very tight players—their raising and calling ranges are very similar because they only raise premium hands. Notice how the math changes against a tight player. If a player raises with 20 percent of his hands and calls your push with half of them, you will lose a decent number of chips. If we assume the same blinds and stacks as above, here is what will happen. If your opponent calls 50 percent of the time, you will win 2,750 chips (the blinds and antes + his raise) 50 percent of the time. The other 50 percent of the time, you will have around a 30-percent chance to win a 21,000-chip pot (your 10,000 + his 10,000 + blinds and antes), which gives you 6,300 when called, for a 3,700-chip loss. So, your expectation is 2,750(0.5) – 3,700(0.5) = -475 chips. This is why you must make sure your opponent is loose.

Perhaps the most important factor,

Perhaps the most important factor, which even some professional players fail to consider, is to take stack sizes into account. You generally want to have a stack size somewhere between 5 and 10 times your opponent’s initial raise, assuming he has you covered. If he does not have you covered, then your raise should be between 5 and 10 times his starting stack. For example, if someone raises to 150 at 25/50 and I have 1300 chips, I will usually be going all in or folding whereas if I have 2000 chips, I will never go all in, as my stack is too large. You will find that good re-raise all in stacks are usually between 12 and 30bbs. The closer you can get to 7 times their raise, the better. In the initial example, you see how we were pushing for around 7 times the initial raise and it gave us a huge amount of profit. As you start pushing for more than 10 times their raise, the amount you are risking becomes too high, which means you will lose a larger amount of chips when called, making the play –EV and when you are pushing for only a small amount more than your opponent’s raise, you will start to get called very often, negating your profit from when your opponent folds to your all in raise.