Raising with medium to high pocket pairs in NLHE full-ring

Author: Carl “The Dean” Sampson

Whenever you are sitting in relatively early position in a full-ring no-limit cash game and you get dealt a medium to high pocket pair like 88-TT, it can often leave a player in some sort of dilemma as to what is the correct course of action.

Let us take a look at an example with a hand that I played on Cake Poker last week. The game was ten handed and the stakes were $0.50-$1.00. The UTG player folded and the player to my immediate right limped in for the $1 and now the action was on me with pocket tens.

Now nobody in their right mind folds this hand in an un-raised pot in any position but you have a couple of options as to how to play this. Many players prefer to limp – and that is not a bad play – but my preference is to raise here despite my somewhat perilous early position.

Despite me saying that I would raise, I always strive to balance my play and I would sometimes limp with this hand as well even though the games at these levels on Cake Poker are not populated by serious players.

But I would definitely raise here a high percentage of the time for the following reasons:

1. If I limp, then I may be resigned to playing my hand like a small pocket pair, as any hands that come in after me will not only have position but with each succeeding hand will lessen my chances of winning the pot.

2. A raise by me could leave me in a situation where I win the pot immediately or get the hand heads-up against the limper – which is never a bad result.

3. A raise by me will reduce the range of hands for my opponents to get involved with.

4. A raise will also deter players who were originally intending to limp in behind me.

5. Raising starts to build the pot in case I make a big hand like a set of tens on the flop. This is an often overlooked reason for raising with hands like this.

Back to the hand example and my raise ends up getting the hand heads up with position against the sole limper……an excellent result. The flop comes Kd-5s-3c which is about as good as you can expect most of the time in this situation. Here I am in a good spot to represent the king but I probably have the best hand anyway.

In this hand my opponent checked to me and now I have to figure out what to do. In this situation it is relatively straight forward and that is to bet. I would bet whether I had pocket tens, nines or eights here. There are just too many overcards that can come to overtake my hand plus if I check it back and my opponent bets the turn when a queen arrives then how can I be sure that their bet is with a better hand or whether they are merely betting because I have checked the flop?

Another reason for betting my hand in this situation is because it can actually be a value bet that can get paid off by a weaker hand. If your opponent holds a hand like 99,88,77,66,A5s, A3s or even 44 then my bet with the tens may get some action on the flop and maybe the turn as well unless another scare card comes to freeze the action for me.

In this situation I would therefore make a standard sized bet of somewhere in the region of two thirds of the pot and if this bet provokes a fold then I am happy with that result and if it provokes calls from weaker hands then I am also happy with that result as well.

Going back to the pre-flop stage, if my hand had been pocket nines or eights then I would shift my balance of raises and limps slightly, as these hands are just a little bit more difficult to play after the flop due to the fact that more overcards can arrive to complicate things somewhat.

To conclude then, resist the temptation to limp with hands like medium to high pocket pairs, especially as you move up through the levels. More and more players will be raising purely based on their position and that is going to put you under pressure to hit too many flops. Imagine that you limp with 10-10 and then it is folded around to the button, who raises with 9-8s. If the flop comes A-K-5 then you are going to be in a tricky spot.

If the game is loose and passive and players have the ability to lose their entire stack post flop then limping may be fine. But even in low-stakes games these days there are not too many players seeing a flop on average and money has to be made in entirely different ways.