4 easy ways to play post flop

4 Easy Ways to Play Your Hands Post Flop

New Online PokerPoker Strategy

So many new players just bet for the sake of it, without really knowing if they are bluffing or betting for value, others check for mysterious reasons like “I want my opponent to think I’m weak”

Are you ever unsure on whether you should Bet on Not? 

Well in this post we are going to look at a great technique to give you a complete game plan on what to do with all types of hands. We can then use this as a base for our strategy and build on it!

Which hands do we bet?

  • Premium Made hands
  • Draws

Which hands do we Check?

  • Marginal hands
  • Missed hands

What does this achieve?

This means that we are balanced, meaning our bets and checks are not obviously strong nor weak, as we will be checking without marginal made hands as well as our missed hands. At the same time, we will be betting with not only strong hands but draws too, so even when we are putting chips in the pot we could have the best hand or just a draw to a good hand.

This is the key to poker, being unpredictable, if you are too easy to read in poker you will be easy to play against.

When we are easy to play against opponents can make good decisions, this means we will not make much money… we want to make our opponents make mistakes, with putting our hands in these categories our opponents can fold the best hands when we are betting with draws, call with worse hands when we are betting our premium hands and bet with worse hands when we are checking with our more marginal holdings.

How does this look in Practice?

We will look at an example here where we raise in Mid Position and the Big Blind calls…

Flop 9♠ 8♠ 2
BB: Checks
HERO: ?

So which hands are we looking to Betting here… 

We will want to bet all our Premiums such as sets, overpairs, top pairs and two pairs, which is going to be around 19% of hands and looks like…

98, 22, 88, 99, TT, JJ, QQ, KK, AA, A9, K9

We want to do things that make sense in poker and understand why we are betting always, so with these hands it’s pretty obvious we have very strong holdings with our weakest hands being top pair with a strong kicker, so in this spot we will look to bet for value to build the pot against all the weaker holdings our opponents can have.

Let’s look at another bet we will make…

So clearly we can’t just bet these hands otherwise we will be too predictable and only betting when we have a huge hand! This would allow our opponents to just fold to our bets and we would never get value when we hit the board.

So to balance our betting range we will be adding in other drawing hands like our flush and straight draws, this will add another 25% of hands to our betting range…

QJo, 67o, JT0, 67s, JTs, T7s, QTs, QJs, KTs, KJs, KQs, A2A5s, ATs, AJs, AQs, AKs

OK so we have now balanced our betting range and our opponents won’t know whether we have a made hand or just a draw!

Let’s look at when we are going to check on this type of board…

So we want to check all of our marginal holdings, the reason we do this is we don’t ever want to bet in Poker without a purpose, if we bet with too many hands we will be building pots when we are beaten or turning hands we have marginal equity into complete bluffs, so with a good chunk of our range here around 42% we will be checking to control the size of the pot. This 42% looks like this…

33, 44, 55, 66, 77, 56s, 97s, T9s, J9s, Q9s, A7s, ATo, AJo, AQo, AKo

This marginal range includes some underpairs, some overcards, some top pair hands and some draws…. so even when we check and see a turn card we can have a very strong hand still, making even our checks hard to play against.

So what’s left? Just our Junk… So let’s check this too!
Hands like KJo KQo that just completely miss this board will just go into our Junkpile making up around 4% of our opens, with no pair, no draw we don’t want to continue with these complete misses that give us the lowest equity from our opening range on this particular board, so these are the hands we are hand to check and give up with.

And that’s a wrap!

Hopefully, this gives you a nice insight on how you can play your hands on different boards. In game it can be good to try and think about how good your hand is compared to other hands you will have in your range, so if you are ever thinking of whether you should bet, think do you have many better hands in your range you would bet on this board? If so you may want to work this into your marginal range and check the flop… If the answer is no, you are high up in your range, then fire away for value!

There is nothing better for your Poker game than getting in the action, so get involved in some multi-table tournaments and use your new found skills today…

poker stars casino888Poker has some amazing value tournaments daily, with great satellites on offer, play $100 games with massive prize pools from just $5 feeder games.

Sign up today with our great offer and get FREE MONEY!

£20 Free Play