Avoiding the All-In Shove
On this site we often talk about all the ways that poker has changed since the big poker boom back in 2003, and that list seems to grow more and more as we put more time into thinking about it. Prior to the boom, televised poker had little following, which meant casual poker players didn’t have any access to the top professionals in the game. As a result, these players could not be influenced by the things that pros said, did and wore at the table. However, the mass appeal of current televised poker has lead to a legion of copycat poker amateurs that take great pleasure in mimicking plays they see made on TV by their favorite players, with one of them being the all-in shove.
Going all-in, especially in online poker rooms, is happy far too frequently and more often than not in the wrong circumstances. Smart players typically only push all their chips in the middle when they are forced to do so in order to call a bet, or if they feel that there’s a reasonable chance they will get called and then show down the best hand. But after watching numerous players use all-in as a consistent strategy in all forms of poker media, modern-day enthusiasts are now using all-ins as a crutch instead of as a strong strategy.
A classic mistake that many beginner and novice players make is that they’ll push all-in as a last ditch effort to get their opponent to throw away their hand. The main flaw in this strategy is that talented and experienced players will be able to often recognize when your all-in ploy is a bluff attempt and they will end up calling you. Another situation is when online players move all-in after being raised and/or re-raised, even if they have many times the big blind. They automatically assume that they’ll be getting all the money in on the flop anyways so why not just do it pre-flop, but again these are just cheap, lazy tactics used by inexperienced players.
Ideally, you want to remove any kind of all-in strategy from your playbook and focus on making smarter bets that are designed to maximize the number of chips you can win in the hand. Then, as your understanding of pot sizes, odds and other factors start to become more well-known to you, you’ll be able to start adding in some all-in techniques to your game.
By: Chris Iaquinta
