SHOULD I MAKE THE FIRST RAISE?

Picture this, you are sitting behind a healthy looking set of customised poker chips and you get dealt a nice pair of cards in Texas Holdem poker. You and your customised poker chips are in an early position at the poker table and you don’t know whether to start the action by raising or not. You know you could legitimately raise as your poker hand is pretty good. But can you get more out of the pot by letting another poker player at the poker table do the betting and raising for you?

How would you know whether another poker player will do the raising for you? Take a look around the poker table. If they are exhibiting the poker tells we have been talking about you can use this knowledge to help increase the number of customised poker chips you win, and decrease the number of customised poker chips you lose. If poker players are acting weak they are probably strong and will definitely raise with their customised poker chips when it gets to their turn.

For example, they may be staring blankly into space, acting as though they are not interested in the pot. They may be deep in conversation with another poker player at the poker table or they may be subtly trying to encourage poker players sitting before them to bet and raise customised poker chips. If you have a very strong hand, let this poker player do the raising for you and then re-raise with your customised poker chips (either move all-in if you want to take the pot down there and then or raise less customised poker chips if you want to see a flop and play it out).

However, if you look round and see poker players reaching for their chips out of turn, you know they are trying to act as though they are strong when in fact they hold very weak poker hands and won’t be gambling their customised poker chips this gambling round. Similarly, if a poker player is staring hard at their cards, trying to make out that they are admirable and worth staring at, you can safely deduce that they probably aren’t. They won’t be risking their customised poker chips either. So if you hold a strong poker hand, you should bet customised poker chips into these sorts of poker players. This will maximise the amount of customised poker chips you win at the end of the poker night!