If you are thinking about playing a hand of poker, you should also be thinking about raising with that hand. Whenever you decide to go into a hand at the casino, you need to try to get the upper hand. When you enter the pot with a big raise, you put everyone else around you on the defensive. When faced with a big raise, your opponents will be forced to re-evaluate their own hands and you’ll have them worrying about what you may have. If you’ve got a good starting online poker hand like pocket Queens, don’t just limp into the pot-leap into it with authority. Raising the blind will chase out the smaller hands, and it’ll give you a good psychological advantage over the other players at the table. Raising before the flop will have your opponents wondering what monster hand you’ve got. If you merely limp into the hand, the other players will suppose that you’ve got a weaker hand, and if the flop helps them at all, they won’t hesitate to chase you out of the pot. If you raise pre-flop however, even if your opponents pull off a decent pair or make a drawing hand on the flop, you have an edge, because all they know is that you’ve got a hand that you like.

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