Worrying About a Raise

My latest poker strategy article, Worrying About a Raise, has just been published in the May issue of Two Plus Two Magazine. Broadly speaking, it’s about how to assess the merits of pot control vs. hand protection and building the pot:

A mistaken check can be expensive. Not only does it cost you the equity you would have accumulated from worse hands that would have called, but it sometimes costs you a much larger third value bet that you could have made on the river had you built the pot on the turn. Checking can also cost you a bet from hands that would have paid off on the turn but not on the river, and in worst case scenarios it can cost you the pot when a hand that would have folded gets to see the river for free.

The May issue of the magazine is just now being published, ten days into the month, because of the hacking and subsequent forum downtime at Two Plus Two. I know that a lot of people are frustrated by this, particularly those with SCOOP and/or WSOP packages to sell on the marketplace, but I actually think that Mason Malmuth et al deserve considerable praise for the decision to shut down the forums rather than put sensitive user information at further risk.

I don’t know enough about such things to estimate how much this downtime is costing them, so let’s just agree that it’s a lot. Two Plus Two gets boatloads of traffic that’s targeted and extremely desirable to a number of companies with big advertising budgets. They voluntarily shut down that money machine to protect our personal information. Yes, it’s the right thing to do and I’d expect nothing less, but it deserves a hat tip all the same.