12:25pm: One of the most common questions I get asked on a daily basis is:

How do you know when to call in tough situations?

The thing is, in some cases I don’t - that is, until I take a second and think about the situation. By and large, one of the biggest mistakes I see people make in poker is to act on impulse, without much logical thought. I’m not saying you have to play Sherlock Holmes and recall every single detail of the hand. However, it is sometimes very beneficial to get into the habit of pausing 10 seconds before every tougher-than-normal situation you make.

What this does is forces you to think about whether your gut instinct has any kind of logical substance to it at all. For example, the other night while at Harrah’s New Orleans for a 2-5 NL session, I almost folded the winning hand. I had AsJc in the cutoff and there was an ace exposed pre flop, which happened to make the hand a lot more complicated than it normally would be. I raised to $30 (standard raise at Harrah’s New Orleans), hoping to take it down right there but was called the guy on the button.

The flop was: Ad Kh 3d

At this point, I usually make a decision whether I think the hand is good, and if I believe it is, then I’m going to play the whole hand under the assumption that I’m ahead. I decide the hand is good (due to the exposed preflop ace) and the fact that I was relatively sure the guy wouldn’t call a preflop raise with A3 or K3. Taking all that into consideration, I fire out $50 on the flop and the guy on the button doesn’t think very long before calling. At this point, I was torn 50/50 between whether he had a king or a flush draw. Either way, I was pretty sure he was weak because quick calls usually indicate weakness, as people who do this usually want you to stop betting.

The turn: 8s

At this point, I’m thinking that the guy is thinking that I probably don’t have an ace because of the one that was exposed preflop, so I felt like if I bet he would call me with an inferior hand. In addition to this, if he happens to have a draw, I don’t want to let him draw for free. Having said that, I would also like to leave myself room to get away from the hand if the guy completes his draw, so I fire out $75 on the turn and was indeed called by the gentleman. At this point, I’m a little bit more convinced that it’s a flush draw than a king because I had been playing with this man for over 4 hours, and he didn’t strike me as the kind of guy who would stick around this long by just calling with middle pair.

The river: Kc

This was the worst card in the deck for me because I knew that if I checked it to him, no matter what he was going to bet. If he had a flush draw, then he would probably attempt to represent the king and if he had a king, he was going to value bet his hand. If I bet, I’m probably facing a large raise and I felt like it would be more beneficial to me to check it to him because on the off chance that he did miss the draw, I could extract more value out of the hand should he decide to bet and falsely represent the king.

I did just that and checked it to the man, and as I expected he starts playing with his chips. He was taking a really long time messing with different configurations of how he was going to stack his chips and place them in the middle. At one point he had $275 stacked, ready to place in the middle but the man thinks about it for 2-3 minutes and then decides to bet $150.

My spur-of-the-moment gut instinct was to fold this hand. However, I decided to just take a second and breathe and think the hand through some more. At this point, I thought back to what kind of night the man was having. Two hours earlier, he had been called down by ace high on an attempted steal and told the man who called him, “You’re a fucking retard. Why’d you call me?” 20 minutes later that same man won an even bigger pot when he called him (all in) with bottom two when he held top two, only to suck out on him when the bottom card hit the river. At this point, I decide that a bluff at this point might indeed be possible as the guy was having a pretty bad night and probably perceives me a solid player who would make a good fold here, figuring that he had the king.

After much thought, I decided that the man had missed his flush draw and was trying to manufacture some momentum by representing that he had the king, so I called. The man dropped his head when I put the chips in the middle, and then mucked his hand.

So you see, sometimes it pays to take a second (or ten) and breathe. Had I acted on impulse, I would have folded the hand.