I’m a big fan of 2000 WSOP champion Chris “Jesus” Ferguson. I admire his unwavering focus and competitive streak at the table. I admire his persistence in teaching proper bankroll management. He had no other reason to play freerolls for months as part of his “Zero to $10K” challenges, other than proving it could be done. And I’m fairly sure I played with him in the early days of the WRGPT (and I admire your longevity in Internet poker if you know what that is).

I strongly disagree with only one facet of his philosophy. Ferguson is consistent in his belief that you should never be limping into pots pre-flop. Either raise or fold, and if there is a raise in front of you, the primary decision should be “re-raise or fold.” He’s proud of never having smooth-called a pre-flop bet during his entire run to the Main Event championship. I’d be proud of whatever won me the biggest prize in the game, too. However, in today’s tournament game, especially online, there are many good reasons to just make a pre-flop call.

Primarily, a pre-flop call is often the best way to control the size of the pot, and there are many reasons to want smaller pots. Many online players, especially at micro-stakes, make big raises, pot-sized or more… so a re-raise against those opponents represents a very large bet. You may want to call to hide the strength of your hand – if you play every pot in position, calling every time, you’ll see lots of flops and nobody will know if you’ve got 97o or a premium hand. Without a huge stack early, you can’t play “small ball” in this style if you’re constantly playing big pots with raises and re-raises.

You may also employ diligent pot control in situations where you have a vulnerable hand out of position. Let’s say it’s Level 1 of a double-stack $24+2 tournament on Full Tilt Poker, the blinds are 15/30, and most players at the table have close to the starting stack of 3,000 chips. You’re in the small blind with AK or AQ. There are four limpers in the pot and the action is on you. If you raise to 150, every limper will call, and the big blind will likely call, too. If you raise much more, you’ll be quickly committing yourself to a huge pot out-of-position with Ace-high. Folding while getting such a good price for a half-bet, plus the readily available money from lesser kickers if you do flop a pair…well, that’s no good either. A call is the best play available to you in this hand, in this particular tournament.

So there may be many reasons to call. But the worst play in poker comes with no reason at all:

The worst play in NL Hold’em is a call because you can’t decide between raising and folding.

To achieve success, every action you take in a poker game needs an underlying reason. And yet, I see “did I play this right?” threads all over PocketFives where the first mistake is a thoughtless pre-flop limp or call. As the hand progresses, the pot grows in parallel with the confusion. Hold’em is a game designed with the most complicated decisions to be made on the flop and turn. If you haven’t given proper pre-flop attention, before those two streets, your road to scooping the pot becomes far rockier.

Your reason for calling doesn’t have to be elaborate, or mathematically perfect. It can be as simple as your implied pot odds being good enough based on stack sizes and looseness of the players in front of you. Or you can mix up your play with a monster hand. Or you can justify a call because of the fact that you’re in position and want the option to take the pot away post-flop. Determining a reason to make a play is, in and of itself, a skill lacking in many of your opponents.

Not knowing whether to raise or fold, and therefore calling, is indecision at its very dumbest. If you don’t know what to do, take the time to figure out what to do. It’s so basic, so obvious I can’t believe I wrote the sentence…and yet, most of the “I didn’t know what to do here” hand histories never show anyone dipping into their time bank to think about it.

I blame a lot of the “dumb call” issues on starting hand charts and books defining the basics of pre-flop play. We’re told that baby pairs and suited connectors are worth playing because they’re often disguised to win large pots. Such hands are easy to fold when the flop misses them. But monster flops for those hands are rare, and you need the right implied odds…usually not available in the middle-to-late stages of most tournaments. We end up torn between the chart burned into our brains, and not being comfortable with being able to calculate implied pot odds based on a read of our opponent’s ranges and how likely they are to stack off. We know the late stages are “raise or fold”…but the charts are for deep stacks and small blinds, not this style of play.

So, when the decision is “raise or fold”…when do you raise, and when do you fold? There are potentially more variables involved in this decision than I have room to list. The two I find most valuable are my relative stack size (use a “# of BB” count or “M,” however you prefer) and my baseline read on any opponents already in the pot (Psycho-Loose, Weak-Loose or Weak-Tight -- defined in an article a couple months back). Depending on the tournament, I also think about what range my opponent might put me on if I raise. At lower stakes, the “what’s my image” question is not part of the decision-making process, because not enough people are paying accurate attention. What you think they think has a better chance of being incorrect.

If you’re having difficulty balancing the decision-making factors, follow these two simple rules:

If you don’t know what to do early (the first 6-8 levels), fold.
If you don’t know what to do in later stages, raise.

But never call because you can’t decide what else to do.
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