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Pot control is basically the concept of dovetailing the size of the pot with the strength of the hand that you currently have. One of the skills of no-limit Texas Holdem comes from identifying which hands can stand only one bet post flop, two bets, three bets or more. If you flop the nuts on a Js-4s-2s board with the As-Qs then your hand strength can obviously take as many bets as possible going into the middle.

Finding optimal value in this situation may involve checking or under betting your hand. Often though in aggressive poker games then the clear play is to bet as betting begins the process of escalating the pot to a level where your weaker opponents may stack off against you. In this example we open raise with the Qh-Qd from the cut-off and the button calls us.

Our raise was to $14 and both us and our opponent have $400 stacks. So the pot has $34 in it and the flop comes 10d-8c-5c and the action is on us. Now at this stage we can safely bet for value. We are out of position and our opponent is probably expecting us to bet nearly all of our range here in a continuation bet.

So aggressive strong players will likely not believe this bet at this stage and could call or even raise us here. A bet of around $25 seems about right and we are not surprised to see our opponent call making the pot $84. The turn card is the 2s and we still have the likely best hand and in this instance then our hand can certainly stand a second post flop bet.

Our opponent may still not respect our “double barrel” and could call again with a mediocre made hand like A-10 or even air looking to take the pot away on the river. We make a bet of $58 which also gets called making the pot $200. I think that our opponent has a hand like A-10 or maybe 9-9 or 7-7. If they had a set then they likely would have raised for value before now. It is still possible that they could have fresh air but the likely favourite is a weak made hand.

The river card is the 2h making a final board of 10d-8c-5c-2s-2h and here is where a lot of players check. While I do not think that checking is a bad play, our opponent will only bet with a powerful hand or fresh air. If they had a powerful hand like a flopped set then they would have likely raised before the river. It is possible that they could be looking to launch an elaborate bluff but purely based on probabilities and hand ranges then a mediocre made hand is the favourite.

So a value bet on the river is called for which also balances our range when we fire three barrels with air on future hands. We bet $120 which gets called and we take the pot against the A-8 of our opponent.