Before the Flop - When There Was a Raise Before You
by MiiWiin
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Introduction
In this article- How to play groups of hands when there was action before you
- How different types of opponents influence your playing style
- How full-ring and short-handed games differ
In the article about pre-flop basics, you examined which theoretical concepts influence the game before the flop, and which goals to aim for at this point in the hand. In the next article, it was made clear when and why you should enter the hand pre-flop as the aggressor. Now, in this third article regarding the pre-flop game, you will learn how to play when there were already raises before you.
If there has been a raise before you, the following questions become relevant:
- Who raised?
- From which position was the raise made from?
- Have other players entered the pot?
- Where are you sitting?
- What cards do you have?
- Who is acting behind you?
- Do you have the relative position post-flop on the current aggressor?
- Are you playing short-handed or full-ring?
It is not easy to view all of these points at once, so we will analyse how your playing style changes in different situations with the help of specific hand samples. For instance, we'll examine how your play changes in different positions, or with certain reads on your opponents.
As reads are a very wide topic, we will only use three values here: VPIP, PFR and AF. These values show how often a player enters the hand pre-flop, how often he raises and how aggressive he is post-flop. Further values can of course be helpful in many situations, but they would only make things more complicated.
In the previous pre-flop articles, you learned about a way to categorize every starting hand.
Four categories were distinguished:
- Very strong hands (e.g. high pocket pairs)
- Marginal hands (e.g. KQo)
- Speculative hands (e.g. suited connectors)
- Steal hands (e.g. A4s)
We will examine hands from these categories during the course of this article and analyse the playing style more closely, always with the one important question in mind: what do you do when there has been a raise before you?
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