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Unless you have a damn good reason, you need to make sure that the size of the pot is appropriate to the size of your hand. Is the guy who just bet $200 into a $40 pot bluffing? Possibly, but I throw my KK away on the flop in that situation most of the time. If he's got the hand then you made a good fold and saved $200. If he's bluffing then you'll definitely get his money eventually, and probably sooner rather than later if he's bluffing with giant overbets.

One pair is not a big hand, and you need an awfully solid read or very good pot odds to call a big bet with it. The way to make money in no-limit cash games online is to tread water or build slowly most of the time, and when you have the monster you can play a big pot with some fish who doesn't know any better.

Hopefully while you were treading water or building up your stack slowly you were paying attention to the players and finding the triggers that cause them to get all their chips in the middle. Now you can use those triggers with your monster hand and take their whole stack.

A few minutes ago I lost a $500 pot with a very loose player at a 2/4 NL table on Full Tilt that illustrates my point. I don't make this mistake often, but when I do it annoys me and I try to learn from it.

My opponent was two seats to my left and was VERY loose, even for a 6max game, with a VP$IP of around 65%. This might make you think he is a fish, but if you have read some of my other articles like "Why the Donkey is Whipping You", you know that players that are very loose often play quite well after the flop, and many of them are winners in no-limit games.

This recollection is approximate, I don't have the hand history in font of me

I raised the size of the pot with AQ in the SB and he called me, which I mistakenly assumed meant that he had a real hand of some sort, and that mistake cost me a lot of money. The flop came A69 with two diamonds and I made a good sized raise when he bet out. Or maybe he raised me. Dunno.

The important part is that he put all his chips in with a big overbet reraise. I thought since he was so loose, and I hadn't watched him play for very long, that he was likely to be on a rag ace or a flush draw. I was getting somewhere around 2.5 to 1 from the pot, so I called and lost $200 to A6o.

Just like in the article I mentioned above, I gave him the proper implied odds to call my big raise preflop because I doubled him up when he hit his hand. If he was on a semi-bluff I wasn't that far ahead, but if he a set or even two pair I was in very rough shape.

With a player like this you have to watch them carefully, and find out when it is they are playing big pots. In this case he or she doesn't play big pots without a big hand. Knowing what I know now from watching the player for awhile I can fold a top pair hand easily, and wait for a set or some other monster before calling all-in.

Don't make the same mistake I made.

Incidentally I just broke the guy with a nut flush and he left the table. Patience pays off again, and even after my $200 mistake I'm up $400 for the day.

I'll see you at the final table,

Fox