I often hear bad players cry foul in poker games when they lose hands or fail to hit the flop when in actual fact they very often manufactured their own downfall. Let us look at an example here to show what I mean. It gets folded around to the cut-off in $3-$6 limit who raises to $6 and you have the Kd-Jc on the button and you call. This is a terrible blunder. Remember that we are not playing no-limit hold’em here where calling raises with position can have all sorts of strategic advantages. Here the goal of limit hold’em is to win a high number of pots and not huge pots.
The structured nature of the game means that the pot size will usually be universal within a small range and so waiting for big pay offs in limit Texas Holdem simply will not materialise and so you need to fight ferociously with regards to the pots that you play for. Even if you have the worst hand here and your opponent has something like A-9 then the combination of your position and the possible dead money by both blinds folding means that a raise will usually be +EV.
In this example our hero merely calls and the big blind also calls and the flop comes Qh-8h-7d. The big blind bets and the original raiser calls and now you have basically no hand other than a shaky draw to a king or a backdoor straight. But imagine if the big blind were betting Q-9 while the caller had 10-9 for a straight draw. Had you three bet pre-flop like you should have done then the big blind would likely have mucked their Q-9. Then you are heads up with position against an inferior hand and what could be better than that?
But our hero manufactured his own downfall here by not being aggressive pre-flop. This is where you need to strike the proper balance in limit and I often see players become aggressive at the wrong times with the wrong types of hands. An example could well be the following; it has been open raised by the hijack and our hero three bets with A-6. This play is aggressive but too aggressive. You need to play more respect to the position of the raiser and the fact that your ace could be dominated. An A-6 has what is known as reverse implied odds and if an ace arrives and your opponent has a bigger ace then you are in pay off territory.
In fact if your opponent had a hand like A-9 and you three bet with K-J and the hand was heads up then you could win this pot in numerous different ways. For instance if the flop came 10-8-4 and they check and you bet and they call then you still have the initiative as many players will call a flop bet. If the turn came a queen to give you an up and down straight draw then you could continue the betting and force your opponent off their ace high hand and win the pot without a showdown.