I want to discuss pot escalation again and one of the key areas that gets an awful lot of people into trouble in NLHE is when you have to use more money than you actually stand to gain. Let us say that your stack is $100 and the stakes are $0.50-$1.00. You want to raise to steal the blinds on the button and you make a conventional raise to $3.50. Now that this stage of play you are risking more money than you stand to gain. If both blinds fold then your stack does not become $103.50 but only $101.50.
Now let us say that the big blind calls and the pot becomes $7.50 and roughly $0.50 is taken in rake and so the pot is $7. You make a c-bet of $5.50 after they check but at this stage the pot is $12.50 and you have contributed $9 to that. So while it is correct to say that money already contributed to the pot has gone, what cannot be ignored is the risk-reward ratio because if your opponent folds on the flop then your stack only rises by a mere $3.50 but you have risked $9 to get that money.
This is not far short of 1/3 odds and while I am not saying that there is something wrong with taking odds as short as that, the fact is that when you do so that the frequency with which you actually get the chips that you were looking to get needs to be very high. So clearly then you need other reasons to raise and this could be to escalate the pot, create situations where your opponents make big mistakes and to get the initiative in the hand. Raising also increases the stakes of the game as well.
Pot escalation is a serious enemy in NLHE if you do not handle it properly. If your only plan is to raise and then try to bully your opponent from the hand with a series of bets on each street then you are no better than a punter that takes very short odds simply because the bet has a high chance of winning.
Carl Sampson is a professional online poker player that plays online at www.888poker.com
