The Poker All In Bet

Going all in when playing poker is putting in all bets one can muster. It's a powerful technique in poker, especially in No Limit Hold 'em. But we have to use this technique in its proper context.

First of all, decide what going all in should achieve in the game. In poker, going all in may either be for discouraging the opponent or getting the opponent to lose all betting chips. For instance, in a 5/10 no limit poker bout with 9 players at the table, and the hand is a confident faces cards. The flop is something like a hand of ace, queen, and jack. Now, the opponent seems to be holding a hand of weak ace---say, an ace and a 5. Due to this, the opponent might read or guess one's hand and might give up. One's hand may end up a poker straight. He had placed a considerable bet, and one thinks of raising one's bet.

At this point, one might be tempted to go all in. But think again. Going all in at this point in the poker game may not be wise. If, say, the opponent has bet 50 and one thinks of raising the bet at 200, the opponent may be scared and fold. But if the opponent reads one's hand correctly and calls the raise---and suddenly ends up with something higher than one's hand, the bluff will have proved too risky just to scare the opponent away. And if there's a poker win in it for one's hand, the win will have been too small anyway.

In the above scenario, if it were an ordinary cash gambling, losing would be easy to rebound from. Just rebuy or bet again. But if it were a poker tournament, losing all in may spell the end of it all. Most of the time, in poker, if the desire is merely scare off an opponent, betting a large amount would often do the trick. There's no need to bet all in. When we want to scare off the opponent sometimes it sends off the wrong effect on the opponent. The opponent reads our scaring tactic as a panicky shooing off bluff---because our hand is a poor one. Thus, when the opponent sees through our all-in betting, he cals it off, reveals his hand, and we find the joke was really on us instead of the opponent.

In no limit hold 'em poker, betting all in may be a wise move, but mostly it needs reconsideration.