I was having a discussion with a couple of advanced poker players the other day about the concept of pot control. The fact of the matter is that from their perspective, pot control seems like a weak concept and in certain areas it is. For example the entire notion of pot control is such that you are attempting to reduce and limit the final pot size based on the apparent strength of your hand.
The reason why many players think this is a weak concept is because a strong player once they suspect that this is what a player is trying to do will actually jump on this line and deny their opponent the one thing that they are trying to achieve and that is to control the pot size. So if a player raises pre-flop with say the As-7s from the cut-off and the button calls then we go to the flop heads up.
Let us say that the flop comes Ad-Js-9c giving us the top pair with backdoor flush and straight draws. We can clearly bet for value here and we do so with each player having a 100bb effective stack before the hand started. Our hero bets 6bb on the flop into an 8.5bb pot and gets called making the pot 20.5bb. The turn card is the Qd and on this street our hero tries to control the pot while not giving their opponent a free card.
So they bet half pot and make it 10bb but you can see that our hero’s bet sizing as a percentage of what the pot was has got smaller. They bet 6bb on the flop with the pot being 8.5bb and so the percentage of the pot was around 70%. However despite betting more on the turn than they did on the flop, they have only bet 50% of the pot and so that is the key figure. This is a figure that indicates that an opponent desires pot control.
An astute player may jump on this and raise knowing that they have considerable fold equity. Against a tight and defensive player then that is certainly the case for sure. However pot control is a very powerful concept and as with all strategies, they need to be used at the most opportune times. A strategy that was once good cannot suddenly be bad. What happens is that it becomes bad under certain game dynamics.
However if you return to those same game dynamics then the strategy starts working again. Also pot control is a great concept for lower stakes NLHE cash games when you are multi-tabling.
You need to be able to harmonise your entire theatre of operations and if you are spewing money all over the place then that hardly makes you solid on a psychological level. I often play eight tables at the same time and I couldn’t do that if I was spewing money all over the place. I also couldn’t do it if my opponents were too advanced either.
Carl Sampson is a professional poker player that plays online at www.888poker.com
