Hacker Speak

With poker tables online full of more and more new players around the world each day, it seems like you can’t sit down at most any lower limit poker table and see people just showing their greenness. As auspicious as it is, there’s nothing that irks me quite as much as the min-raise, where a player essentially just doubles the blind or the bet behind him. Sometimes you’ll see this play at high level poker when someone is messing around or trying to test the water in a way that also confuses his opponent, but for the most part this play does nothing but in the long run lose a ton of chip equity.

Min-raising preflop is particularly egregious, as all it will ever serve to do is build a pot, which can then be yanked from you when you don’t make a hand. When you have a big hand and you min-raise, it also builds pot odds for you opponent to call with almost anything and spike a flop against you that will make you pay them off and cost you quite a bit. Most average poker books will recommend that if you are going to raise, you should raise 3 to 4x the big blind, which therefore kills some of the more speculative limpers’ abilities to come in cheaply.

Minraising on the flop or turn or even river when there is a lot of money out there makes even less sense, as if you are doing it with a weak hand you are just begging to get reraised, and if you are doing it with a strong hand you are asking to be drawn out on (unless you have the immortal nuts and you are just messing with your opponents’ head, though even this situation is rarely optimal, if ever). Poor and missized betting is the number one reasons players make errors in chip accumulation and bank roll building. Don’t let it happen to you. Raise right.