How To Win More Pots With Hero Calls

Things you will learn:

• Why sometimes it can be correct to call even if you aren't 100% sure you'll win the hand

What is a hero call? It’s when you make a call holding a poor hand, because you’ve correctly decided that you opponent’s cards are even worse!

A hero call isn’t calling with top pair, bottom kicker in a big pot. That’s the heroic equivalent of saving a cat from a tree. We're talking about:

• Calling someone down with third pair when the board is full of straights and flushes
• Calling with ace-high when someone’s raised you all-in on the river

Now, having got you all excited about making hero calls let’s be clear about something - you can get away without ever making one and still be a winning poker player at most levels. It’s certainly not a move you should be pulling too often.

However, in the right spots these calls can be profitable and if you aspire to playing at higher levels it’s a skill that should be part of your arsenal.

Hero calls, like any heroic acts, shouldn’t be done to show off - they should be done because it is the right thing to do.

Occasionally you’ll get a gut feeling that your king-high is ahead but it’s tough to advise on that. More interesting are the opportunities where you work through a hand and decide you’re getting the right odds to call with a very mediocre hand. It’s important, too, not to view marginal calls as difficult or ‘heroic’ even, but to have worked through everything that has happened and to decide if making a call is profitable or not.

Like everything in poker, it’s best to keep emotion out of your decision making. Let’s look at an example of a thin call on the river.

In this example the table is deep-stacked and everyone has limped round to the player in the big blind position who has made a big raise. The other players fold but you decide to call from the small blind with 6♦ 4♦ hoping to hit a big flop. The flop is Q♣ 10♥ 2♦ so at that point you are right to think you are done with the hand.

However, the pre-flop raiser decides to check. This means one of two things: either they have flopped a monster and are trying to get some action or they have missed with something like A♠ K♠ or a random hand that they were trying to pick up the pot with pre-flop. The turn brings a 7♦ and so you both check again.

The river was a 6♠ so finally you have a pair, but it is only the fourth pair on board, so you check again. At this point your opponent comes to life and bets just under the pot. This is confusing behaviour, as they could just turn over their hand for free if they are confident of winning the pot.

If they did have a big hand it didn’t make much sense to let you go all through the hand without trying to get more chips out of you.

The only possibilities that make sense are that either they’d played a monster strangely or that they’d missed and were trying to pick up the pot.

In this situation you are getting 2/1 from the pot so you only needed a 33% chance that they are trying to steal. You call and win the hand after your opponent shows A♠ K♥. You have just made a hero call!

This example will give you some idea of the thought processes you should be making. It’s a standard hand-reading exercise that involves putting your opponent on a range of hands, understanding what percentage of the time you’re ahead and whether it’s enough to call based on the pot odds.

A lot of the time you can make thin calls when it’s very difficult for your opponent to bet on the river.

For instance, let’s say you have position on your opponent with a mediocre hand. They have bet out on the flop and the turn and you’ve called them twice. Now a scary card arrives on the river – an ace or a flush card, for example, and they still bet.

This creates an interesting paradox because you’ve shown resistance throughout the hand representing that you have something, and now a card has arrived that should be worrying them if they have anything but the strongest of holdings, and they still want to put money in the pot.

Now you have to think through the possibilities; it could be that they have a huge hand and are simply trying to get value from you, but it’s also possible that they are trying to buy the pot or keep it to a manageable size with a blocker bet. Very often in these ‘they have got everything or nothing’ spots the pot odds dictate that calling will make you money in the long run.

As with all poker concepts you must adjust the theory to the player. These calls are harder to make against a player who doesn’t think and simply bet their hands regardless of your resistance and/or the board texture. On the other hand poor players are usually bad at extracting maximum value from their hands, so if they’re betting when scare cards arrive you can often eliminate marginal holdings from their range.

Thin calls are often attempts to pick off bluffs so work on becoming more aware of when your opponents are more likely to be making a move.

To give you a simplistic example, let’s say you’ve had the lead throughout the hand, betting the flop and turn, and your opponent has been calling you down. If you now check the river they may see this as an opportunity to pick up the pot - and rightfully so.

This is especially true if you suspect that they’ve missed a draw and they know the only way they can win is by making you fold. Remember, a decent player will know they can check down and find out if their mediocre hand is good so analyse their reason for betting - do you think that they’re trying to steal the pot? Is your average hand is a mile in front? If so, you can call and pick off the bluff.

This is what you need to be aware of when you look weak in a hand. Let’s say you’re out of position and have decided to try and control the size of the pot by check-calling on a couple of streets. You have to be aware that you look weak to your opponent, especially if they’re being aggressive.

If you take this kind of line your hand values for calling down should be lower than normal, as the strength of your holding is often very underrepresented in the eye of your opponent. Be prepared to call a lot more on the river, even if a scare card comes.

Now before you go and put all this advice into practice, there’s one final point to be made. Don’t hit the tables and become an unbluffable calling station. There’s a fine line between making a good but thin call and paying off like a slot machine. The key is to analyse every situation, be aware of the pot odds on your call, and make good poker decisions.

Now go be a hero.