There are five main reasons to raise in Hold’em:
• You feel you have the best chance at winning the pot.
• You want your opponents to fold their drawing hands, or make a mistake by
calling.
• You are getting good pot odds to try a bluff or semi-bluff.
• You want to try for a free card.
• You want to determine the strength of your hand relative to your opponents.
One goal in poker is to give your opponents opportunities to make mistakes. When
your opponents are correct to call just a single bet, raising is sometimes a good
strategy to decrease your opponents’ pot odds and force them to cither fold or make
a mistake by calling.
Bad beat hands are not nearly as disastrous as most poker players think. When an
opponent draws to a hand that he shouldn’t, yet still wins, think of all the extra bets
you are earning on the times when he doesn’t hit his hand.