What Is A Raise In Poker?
1 minute
Last Updated: December 19, 2023
In poker, the term “raise” describes an action in which a player increases the size of the active bet by instead of just calling or folding.
With a raise, a poker player essentially says: “I have strong cards, and you need to put more money in the pot if you want to continue participating in the hand.”
It is important to note that in some formats, such as Texas No Limit Hold’em, when a player wants to raise, the minimum raise he can make is double the amount of the previous bet.
For example, if the big blind is $100, the minimum bet to raise would be $200, $100 to match the bet, and $100 to raise. This rule is called a minimum legal raise.
There are two main reasons why poker players make raises:
- To increase the size of the pot when they have good hands
- To bluff opponents from the pot when they don’t have a good hand
However, raising too much or in the wrong situations can also cause your opponent to perceive you as overly aggressive and cause them to play back at you.
For this reason, it is important that you balance your raising frequencies and make yourself hard to play against. At the same time, it is still better to keep raising whenever you enter the pot rather than just calling in most cases because you give yourself a chance to win it at once if everyone folds. Moreover, whenever you are playing against a limp, you should raise almost all of the hands you decide to play.
Poker Raise Example:
Let’s say that you are playing $5/$10 No Limit Hold’em, and you are the first player to act preflop. You look at your cards and are holding As Ad, so you decide to continue with your hand and 2-bet to $22.
In this situation, your $22 bet is called a raise because you are increasing the size of the active bet from $10 (the BB) to $22.
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