Making the Right Raise from Under the Gun
When you are under the gun or just after that position and dealt a mid to upper pair, AK or AQ suited, you have a decision to make early on as to how much you raise to try and scare people out of the hand. In order to keep your opponents guessing, you will need to vary your raises and these are the perfect hands to do this with.
While most people will automatically fire out a huge raise with these hands to get people out, because of your position, almost any raise that you put out there is going to be shown as a sign of strength. This will still probably thin out the field and gives you a lot of alternatives depending upon what you are holding and what your opponent does when the action gets to them.
Middle pairs are a tough hand to commit a lot of money to and if you make a large raise in early position with them and you get a few callers before the big raise, you are almost committed to making the call because of the implied odds. This can end up hitting your stack up pretty hard over a bad stretch and is something that can easily be avoided.
The same can be said when you are holding onto AK or AQ suited. While AK is a hand that many people will commit their stack to, it is almost something that you have to get away from in this situation. With multiple callers, it is all but guaranteed that someone is holding at least AA or KK, if not both. You could be drawing dead and just donating to the cause.
Just doubling the blinds in this position gives you a lot of options when someone comes back over top of you here. If you are holding AA or KK, you are in a great position to force a call from your opponent. There will be plenty of money in there after their raise, especially if you had a couple of people trying to sneak in after your small bet. Regardless, depending upon the size of their stack, you have put them in an odds situation that they may not be able to look past.
When you are sitting on lesser hands, you have two situations that you may be faced with. An excessive raise is surely a sign of a big hand and allows you to get away from your hand rather cheaply. A nominal raise will allow you to get in on the hand for a small price and still be able to take down a big pot if you happen to hit your card on the flop or are looking down at all under cards to your over pair.
This is just something to consider to mix up your playing as sitting back just a bit can get you bigger pots that being super aggressive early. You are concealing the strength of your hand with this raise and either allowing yourself to get out cheap or possibly build a huge pot and get isolation against a re-raiser. This will definitely keep people on their toes when they face off against you.
