It’s important in poker to make the most of your hands. Aim to extract every chip possible when you are likely to be winning.
Often players will check behind on the river with hands that are likely to be winning because a scare card has come or they are happy to take down a certain-sized pot with their hand.
Mop up every chip available when you have an advantage and this will translate into increased profits.
Here’s some quick pointers to think about when extracting value from hands.
Checking with big hands
This can be a good strategy. Trapping players into thinking you don’t have much of a hand to gain more chips on later streets can work well however you should also be thinking about building big pots with your big hands.
If you find the only way you get action with your big hands is to check them, you may find your overall strategy is a little tight. If you are regarded as a busy player, then leading out with your big hands should get you action. Up your overall aggression levels and you will find you can build bigger pots with your nut hands.
Making thin value bets
A thin value bet is betting a weak or moderate hand to elicit a call from an even weaker hand. Examples of this might be when you bet a board such as 8d 5c 2s with pocket nines and get a call. Say the turn is the Jc and the action goes check, check.
The river is the 2d. This is a good position to make a thinnish value bet with less than top pair. Your hand looks weak therefore nines is actually a pretty strong hand given your range. If you bet the river, lots of hands such as weaker pocket pairs, 8 x hands and maybe even A-K, A-Q will be highly tempted to call you here. So bet away and often you will be called by a worse hand.
Knowing when to make thin value bets is partly down to your read of your opponent’s hands and as you increase your hand-reading skill, you will find many opportunities to put in a good value bet with weak-ish hands.
Flat-calling raises with big hands
It’s tempting to put in a third bet with a big hand when someone raises, however consider simply calling the raise sometimes for deception. This works particularly well with aggressive post-flop players as they will sometimes fire multiple bullets at you, not realising the strength of your hand.
This also can work well if you have a player in later position or in the blinds, who has a good stack size for “squeezing.” Typically these stacks will be around 10-20 big blinds. If you have noticed a player with a propensity for doing this, this can be a good spot to work his aggression against him, these are just a few of the areas where you can pick up additional value for your hands.
There are many spots where you can mop up a few extra chips here and there with well-placed value bets or certain plays so work hard at not leaving any money behind during a hand and you will find your stacks get bigger and your wallet gets fuller.