A lot of betting after the flop with drawing hands is about guaranteeing that you are getting an overlay on the draw

Discussing post-flop play in any coherent and useful way is a massive and difficult undertaking. Your decisions depend on the pre-flop action, the kind of hand you have, what your position is, what the texture of the board is, whether the players in the pot with you are aggressive or passive, loose or tight and whether the pot is multi-way.

Ultimately, I want to give you the tools to deal with any situation that might come up. A lot of the analysis will be about goal setting, about what you are trying to accomplish with your bets after the flop in terms of maximising information, minimising risk and increasing the earn on each hand you play.

As a preview for what is to come, this series will cover strategy on how to play big made hands (like sets and top two pair), big draws (like two overcards and a flush draw), medium-strength hands (like top pair), weak hands (like middle pair or weak draws), as well as a lot of bluffing theory.

The series will focus on the flop and the turn and then end with a bang on how to play the river. For each of these topics I will discuss how to play these types of hands in position, out of position, in multi-way pots and in heads-up pots. I will also talk about how to adjust your play to the aggressiveness of your opponents.

Obviously, there is a vast landscape to cover, so to start with, let’s look at the kinds of broad questions you need to ask yourself when planning the line of play you take after the flop.

STRENGTH OF HAND

WHAT KIND OF HAND DO I HAVE?

The first and foremost issue in playing after the flop is to recognise the strength of your hand. This matters in terms of the ease of the decision-making process going forward.

When you flop a huge made hand like a set, the decisions you have to make will generally have to do with figuring out how to extract the most money from your opponents. That kind of problem is obviously a good problem to have.

But when you flop a more medium-strength hand like top pair, how you play the hand has less to do with getting the most money out of the hand and more to do with finding a line of play that reveals whether or not you have the best hand. In the case that you do, you need to know how to extract the most money; in scenarios where you don’t, it’s about damage limitation. That is a difficult balance to strike and one that I will spend a lot of time on.

And then there are the drawing hands. When evaluating a drawing hand you need to consider the strength of the draw itself and the pricing situation in continuing with the draw. A lot of betting after the flop with drawing hands is about guaranteeing that you are getting an overlay on the draw or ensuring that you can win the pot without actually making the hand. The ideal drawing hands are ones where you can accomplish both goals at once.

Lastly, there are bluffs. Bluffs can be broken down into three main forms:

• Straight bluffs where you know that you not only have the worst hand, but no chance of making the best hand.

• Semi-bluffs where you know you don’t have the best hand right now, but there is a possibility of making the best hand on the turn or the river.

• Testing bluffs where you might have the best hand or you might not, but there is a way of getting a better hand to lay down.
  

The latter kinds of bluffs are particularly interesting because you don’t know when you bet them if you are value betting or bluffing. Bluffing will be one of the larger sections of this series.

POSITION

WHAT IS MY POSITION?

Position is always going to be one of the most important considerations in deciding how to play any given hand after the flop. When you are playing in position, choosing your strategy is always much easier, as you get to see what everyone in the pot does before you.

Extracting the maximum from your big hands, getting information about your medium- strength hands, controlling the pricing situation on drawing hands and executing bluffs are all much easier when you act in position. Bluffs, in particular, are really helped by acting last.

When out of position, it becomes very difficult to play your hands effectively and accomplish your goals. Because of that I will always be spending more time on out-of-position play than in-position play since it requires much more skill and thought.

TEXTURE

WHAT IS THE TEXTURE OF THE BOARD?

The texture of the board, or how related the cards on the flop are to each other in terms of straights, flushes and so on, is one of the most important factors in determining how you play a hand after the flop. This is for two main reasons. The first is that the texture of the board tells you how much protection from draws your hand might need; but the second, and actually more important reason, is that well-textured boards are likely to make for difficult decisions.

In poker, we obviously want to play hands in a way that makes our decisions easier. The problem with boards where the cards on the board are strongly related to each other is that there is a high likelihood of a card hitting the board on the next street that will make our decision-making process very difficult. If there is a straightening and flushing board, the chances that a scary card will hit on the next street are actually often better than even money.

Due to the difficulty that textured boards can present when you plan your play on future streets, textured boards need to be approached very differently from untextured boards. So when I discuss the play of different types of hands, I will always approach each type of hand two ways, with an untextured board and a textured board.

What is really ingenious about looking at your hands this way is that you will play what looks like the same hand to your opponent (a set for example) very differently depending on the texture of the board.

Opponents tend not to take board texture into consideration when figuring out the patterns of your play and because of this, you get to mix up the way you play the exact same hand without actually playing in a way that produces negative equity or is conceptually incorrect. In fact, you will see in this series that by taking into account position and board texture, your play will automatically look varied to your opponents when in actual fact you are playing conceptually correct poker.

Your opponents will not take into account all the factors driving your decisions when trying to get a pattern on your play so you will confuse your opponents simply by playing correctly.

NUMBER OF PLAYERS

HOW MANY PLAYERS ARE IN THE POT WITH ME AND WHERE DID THE ACTION COME FROM?

Whenever you decide how to play a hand, the number of players in the pot and where the aggressive action came from before the flop are key components in determining how to accomplish your goals in the hand. This is because certain hands want to keep opponents in the pot with them and certain hands want to narrow down the field (depending on their relative strength and vulnerability to outdraws).

In a heads-up pot, you are already two-handed and you just have to figure out how to drive one guy out or keep one guy in with you. But multi-way pots are obviously a lot more difficult to manage.

When you want to narrow down the field, you need to be constantly aware of where the action came from before the flop to determine the most likely place the action will come from after the flop (though the relative aggression of your opponents will also play a part here). Once you figure that out you can decide how best to narrow down the field using either a bet or a check-raise, depending on what your position in the hand is.

There is a subtle art to controlling the action in multi-way situations, and when I talk about certain kinds of hands and what you want to accomplish with them I will focus on both heads-up pots and multi-way situations and treat those two scenarios as their own entities. A strategy that works well in multi-way hands will not necessarily work well heads-up and vice versa, so they need to be handled and discussed on their own.

This is only a sample of the kinds of concepts you need to always be considering when figuring out your strategy for post-flop play. As we dissect examples of each type of hand in coming issues these concepts will become much clearer in their application, so (all being well) you will be able to adapt what you learn to almost any situation that presents itself.

In the meantime, start observing your own thought processes when you get involved in a tricky post-flop situation – make sure you have identifiable goals and always know what you are trying to accomplish with your bets!