Now that you understand how to determine if you have a hand that you can open-raise with from a specific position, you will need to learn to make adjustments so that you understand how to play when there is action before you.

The first situation that I would like to address is when to call or re-raise. While calling is a bit more in depth, re-raising someone is a very easily understandable situation in micro stakes games. If you have the following hands, you enough “power” to re-raise:

• Pocket Aces
• Pocket Kings
• Pocket Queens
• Ace/King suited

After your re-raise, if someone raises you again, you will can shove all in with:

• Pocket Aces
• Pocket Kings
• Pocket Queens

If someone shoves all-in over your raise, you will call with:

• Pocket Aces
• Pocket Kings
• Pkv

As you can see, as our opponents actions get more aggressive, we increase the strength of our hands in response. If you recall from the first article, The best way to make money in poker is to fold.

In these raise/re-raise situations, we are not looking to play post flop in a bloated pot. We are looking to take down the pot or get in with powerful holdings. In the micro stakes, players tend to over value their hands. In a raise/re-raise situation, you may find yourself all in against an opponent with pocket tens against your pocket kings or they will hold Ace/Ten against your pocket Aces. We only want to play big pots with big/powerful hands. There is no reason to try to “get lucky” with a medium strength hand in an all-in/re-raised situation. Money that you don’t lose is just as “spendable” as money you win.

Calling a raise pre-flop requires a tiny bit of math. We will call if we have:

• All Pocket Pairs
• Suited connectors Jack/Ten or Higher
• Suited Aces Ace/Nine and higher

But only if the raisers stack meets the following qualification:

The raiser must have at least 15 times the raise in his/her remaining stack. Since we will flop a set 1 out of every 10 times we call, we want our odds to be greater than 10/1. If we follow the “rule of 15”, we always have 15/1 odds. We will also only make our straights/flushes about 25%. This makes us need at least 4/1. The odds above this give us the ability to profit from the call even though we miss more than we hit.

If someone raises and you do not have a hand from the re-raise list, you do not have a hand that we defined as a calling hand, or you do have a calling hand, but you are not getting the odds described above; you need to fold. The best way to make money playing poker is to fold.

Now I would like to address something that is very common at the micro stakes, the pre-flop limper. Limping into a pot is a passive play and always a mistake. We will need to punish the players that limp by raising them. When a player limps, we will raise so that we can push out the other players on the table. This allows us to play heads up against a passive (and in all probability bad) player. This is called an isolation play.

When you make a raise to isolate a limper you can use any hand the meets 2 or 3 of the criteria that we laid out for a playable hand. This give you the opportunity to play a passive player heads up, with a hand that will flop a strong amount of equity. I would like to caution you before you arbitrarily begin raising all limpers without thought, DO NOT ISOLATE A PLAYER WHO NEVER FOLDS. The power of isolating a passive player is that we bet on the flop and take the pot down. If you attempt this play against a calling station (someone who will call with any piece of the board) you will be giving chips away.

So, now we have discussed how to determine if a hand is playable and where it is playable from and we have added how to respond if there is any action before you. The next article will address play on the flop and I will explain how pre/post flop play are not different stages of the hand, but one continuous flowing action.Remember to continue using the 3 criteria that we discussed to determine if a hand is playable and try to incorporate a bit of this discussion into your game.

The most popular form of poker today by far is Texas hold’em played with no-limit betting. There are many ardent players who have played the game on PokerQQ and really enjoyed the whole experience. No-limit betting can be found in all types of poker games, but in Texas hold’em particularly the ability to put all of your chips in at any time can create a lot of stress and anxiety. When this stress and anxiety combines with the sense of entitlement we get from playing against bad players, the results can be disastrous.

Here’s one example. Suppose you have a very passive player who limps in with a lot of various holdings and calls a lot post-flop. This player limps in early position, you raise in middle position with the Ace of spades and the King of spades, and it folds around to our opponent in early position who calls your raise. The flop then comes the Queen of spades, the Four of spades, and the Eight of clubs, giving you two overcards, the nut flush draw, a backdoor nut-straight draw, and the best Ace high possible.

Your opponent checks and you make a bet of almost the size of the pot since you are actually ahead of a lot of one-pair type hands that call, as well as flush draws that may call. Against a number of other hands you are basically a coin-flip, but it’s to your advantage to raise to build a pot since you will be in position and have a larger advantage later in the hand the larger the pot becomes.

Your opponent then goes all-in for about ten times your flop bet, and you have enough left in your stack to call the entire raise. This is an interesting psychological moment. Your opponent would almost never do this without two pair or better, which you are so far behind (despite your otherwise excellent holding) that you can’t call his huge overbet all-in. However, when your opponent goes all-in here, it can trigger feelings that are similar to a minor anxiety attack.

In this moment, you grasp for something to try to make sense of the situation because of the panic his bet induces. What you will probably try to grasp onto is the fact that your hand was looking pretty good when the flop came. This causes you to be optimistic and often impulsively call without going through the normal thought process of deciding if calling the bet is a profitable proposition or not.

The anxiety created in this moment initiates what’s known as the fight or flight mechanism, which is what causes you to just grasp for something and completely bypass your normal analysis. If you were to slow down, take a deep breath and lower your emotional level, you would be able to re-enter a rational state of mind and effectively turn off the fight or flight mechanism. So whenever you’re playing no-limit Texas hold’em, or the no-limit betting variation of any poker game, remember to keep an eye on your emotional level constantly, and if you start to feel anxious, take a deep breath and calm down before you make any big decisions.