You usually raise a bet when you have a good set of cards. If you don’t have a particularly good hand, you are probably going to abstain from raising. This is poker 101, right? You don’t raise the bet unless you have a good hand and you wish to get more money than you would normally get for a fabulous hand.

Poker textbook instruction notwithstanding, you don’t raise only when you have a good hand from which victory is fairly certain. Poker is a strategy game, and you have to be flexible enough to consider other less straightforward reasons for raising a bet.

What Raising Can Accomplish

Raising at the right time can accomplish many things. The more obvious result would be to increase the pot money which would in turn increase the money that you can win. Poker players generally raise the bet when they think that they may have the best hand among the players on the table. Raising the bet would ensure that a poker player with a strong hand will win more money at the end of the betting round or rounds.

Raising is also oftentimes used as a manipulative strategy to make the more fainthearted or the less endowed players drop out of the game before other players with stronger cards can have the chance of beating your hand. In a case where you have a hidden pair of aces or kings, you have a pretty good chance of winning if you can eliminate other players with better hands before the flop is seen and an opponent can use the extra information to make a better decision. In a case where you can have a good pair after you flop, raising will also eliminate other players who may have combinations that can beat yours.

Raising is also a good strategy to employ if you want more information about other players’ hands before or after the flop is seen. Before the flop, raising will induce straightforward poker players with good hands to raise the bet as well, so you will know with a degree of certainty that these opponents of yours have good hands. Other players who merely call your raise can be relied on to have quite mediocre or average hands. If you raise after the flop so now you and your opponents have better information, you can still gain more information on the strength of your opponents hands by raising. In particular, if a known straightforward poker player re-raises, then you can conclude with more certainty that he really has a good set of cards and you can save yourself some money that you would have lost had you called all the way.

Finally, raising is also a good strategy for assuming the upper hand. If you don’t have a particularly good set of cards yet you raised the bet, other players may be fooled into thinking that you have a better hand than you actually do, thereby stopping them from raising the bets more before you can get better cards to strengthen your combination.