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About the Author

Curtis Mayfield III is a freelance poker writer with several years of online and live experience.

He is also the son of R&B superstar Curtis Mayfield. As a player Curtis excels in all forms of poker and prefers No Limit Deep Stacks tournaments.

Curtis is author of the Do or Die Poker blog

He resides in Chicago, Illinois with his wife and 2 daughters.

Favorite Quote: “In order to live, you must be willing to die!” –Amir Vahedi

Bet strong to force opponents out

Posted by Curtis Mayfield III on Tuesday, October 20, 2009 - 04:41

I happened to stop by my local casino this weekend to play in a Deep Stacks tournament. This isn't out of the ordinary and I just happened to be feeling particularly well and decided to make the jaunt over. We started out with stacks of 11k each and of course we were playing No Limit Texas Hold'em. There were 90 players and ten tables to start off the tournament and the payout was for ten players. Great!

Things started out a bit slow and I lost about 2k early getting involved in hands while the raises were small and the blinds were minimal. After the first our the blinds had gone up to $200/$100 and I decided to slow down a bit when I picked up [Kd][Jd] on the button. I had about $8000 left in chips at this point when there was a raise to $600 in front of me with two callers before the action came around. Normally I would have folded this hand but there was so much in the pot I decided to take a shot and call. I also had position as well if the flop came down in my favor. Here is how the hand played out:

The flop came down [Ad][X][Td]

Bingo! This is exactly what I was looking for plus I had the nut flush draw as well. The original raiser made it $1000 to go and the other player called along with myself. The Turn was a [X]. The raiser then made it $2500 to go and we both called again.

The River was the [Qh] giving me the inside straight. The PERFECT card for me as the flush might very well have caused at least one player to fold. The original raiser pushed all of his chips in along with the other caller and I busted them both for a huge pot. Great!

So what went wrong here? The bet on the Turn was a really bad bet. It was far too small considering there were two players in the pot. You want to get your chips in the middle at that point to eliminate any draws. I also could have come over the top but I still only had a draw albeit a strong one. The moral of the story is that when you have a strong made hand you need to bet it accordingly especially when there is more than one player in the pot.