Thinking ahead in a poker hand

Let us say that it gets folded around to the cut-off who makes it $3.50 in a NL100 ring game and you are on the button with Qc-Jd. You know that your hand is marginal against a raiser but you do have position and that counts for an awful lot in No Limit Hold’em. But you need to think ahead in the hand and plan what you are going to do in numerous scenarios. But this isn’t straight forward because of the fact that your optimal game playing conditions can vary depending on how many tables that you happen to be playing. If you are playing ten tables for example then you need a simplified strategy for playing this many tables.

So in this instance then if I wanted to play the Q-J against what I thought was a stealer then I would choose to re-raise with it. I would make this play because of the fact that I was sitting at a large number of other tables. If I made it a habit of calling raises with speculative hands whenever I have a fairly decent situation then I would find that I would simply not only be playing far too many hands but seeing too many complex flops. The upshot of all this is that I would be getting timed out on tables and would also be making mistakes in escalated pots. So I would need a simplified strategy of either folding or three betting so that my decisions were easy and required less thinking time. However if I were only playing one table then I could in fact choose other lines of play.

But in a large multi-tabling situations then you need to plan ahead for when situations arise where you would at some stage almost certainly be involved in numerous big pots at the same time with mediocre holdings which would require a lot of calculated thought and this is something that you simply wouldn’t have time to do. Because of this then a re-raise is a good play and making it $14 will pick up the $5 profit a large percentage of the time. If you get four bet then you simply fold and you take the $14 loss but the key fact here is that you are not seeing many flops. If you three bet and it gets called then you have to proceed carefully because there is already $30 in the middle and you have a marginal hand in a called three bet situation. So I would cautiously check back many flops if my opponent checked to me because they could be looking to check-call many flops with a marginal made hand.

While it is true that triple barrel bluffing could get them from the hand, several failed triple barrel bluffs can really destroy your mental state of mind. This is a terrible state of affairs to be in when you are playing so many tables at the same time. There is absolutely nothing wrong with three betting and then checking the flop back if checked to. Your opponent has already signalled their intention to become involved in the hand and so you simply treat your three bet as pot escalation and simplifying your strategy rather than as a prelude to always triple barrel bluffing which is terribly weak poker and potentially disastrous. So you need to think ahead in poker and doing so just helps you to plan for the unforeseen factors that the game throws up at you. If you were single tabling then you can plan ahead more for the hand that you are playing and see more flops based on past action as seeing a flop in this instance would not be detrimental.