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Often when you play no-limit Texas Hold’em poker then one of the key skills is in extracting value from hands that are very strong but in situations where your opponents are holding weak or mediocre hands. This is why checking to induce action can be a very good play in no-limit. Usually if an opponent has a mediocre hand then they may put in one fair sized bet post flop but they will certainly not put more than two when the pot is growing geometrically.

Let us say that you have raised pre-flop with K-K and the big blind calls you with J-10s and the flop comes K-10-4 rainbow. There is simply no way in a deep stacked game that any decent player would call three bets on the flop, turn and river with middle pair medium kicker. They may call down in limit but in that form of poker, the punishment for being second best will only be 2.5 big bets or 5 big blinds.

In no-limit Texas Holdem play then the loss would be many more big blinds and so the player with a hand like J-10 may not even call one bet on the flop if you bet. Another factor behind calling your flop bet is that it faces the player with having to call two more even larger bets. Let us say that the pot has 7.5 big blinds in on the flop and you bet 5 big blinds. Sometimes this bet will be called and sometimes it won’t. Let us say that your opponent calls and folds 50% of the time so in this instance your average only 2.5 big blinds by betting.

But if you check then your opponent could interpret that as possible weakness and they now know that they only have to put money in on two betting rounds and not three. So if the turn comes low like a 3d and you make the same 5 big blind bet then this will certainly be called and if the river card is a jack or lower then you will almost certainly get action on the river as well. So you could end up getting as much as 15 big blinds in profit buy checking when by betting the flop you would have got maybe 2.5 big blinds.

Bets are key in no-limit play but you also have to figure out how to extract them from your opponents. Always betting after you raise pre-flop may put pressure on your opponents but better players will play back at those lines. But by checking then what you have done is to de-leverage the hand for your opponent as they can get a better estimate of their total risk in the pot whereas on the flop it was more unknown.