Overprotecting Your Hand

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Protecting your hand is a well-known poker concept. If you think you likely have the best hand at the moment, you bet to force your opponents either to fold or to pay to draw out. In no-limit hold’em, however, many players tend to overprotect their hands.

Here’s a simple example. When I play live no-limit in Las Vegas, I see this particular play with regularity. A tight – some might say nitty – regular player is first to act before the flop in a $2-$5 game. This player rarely raises before the flop, and when he does he usually makes it $20 to go. But in this situation he raises to $60. Everyone folds, and he shows pocket queens.

Why did he do that? Why did a player who rarely raises preflop decide to make a monster raise this time? I don’t claim to have access to the thoughts of others, but I can guess at what he was thinking, “Pocket queens is a great hand, probably the best out there. If I make it $20, five people might call and then I could end up losing a big pot. It’s better to bomb the pot and get all the riff raff out.”

There’s a simple problem with this line of thought, however, and it gets to the heart of no-limit hold’em. He’s risking $60 to win just the $7 in blind money. With nine players left to act, there’s a roughly 9 percent chance one of the other players will have pocket aces or kings. Laying 8.5-to-1 with a 1-in-11 chance he’s behind, he’s potentially setting himself up for a quite thin margin for profit with a premium hand that should be, over time, one of his biggest money-makers.

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