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The question now arises as to whether you should reraise rather than just call. As we have stated earlier it is extremely important to reraise the initial raiser if he may be stealing.

You cannot give him that extra way of winning by out flopping you on fourth poker street if, in fact, he didn’t have a hand. It also can be a good play to reraise if the ante is high and you simply do not want other people to play correctly behind you because of the odds that they are getting.

You may want to reraise the initial raiser, knowing full well he has a hand, simply to make sure, if possible, that it gets down to you and him.

There is, however, one important reason why I am reluctant to put a double bet in on three poker games, especially against weak player, and especially if my hand is only fair to good.

The reason involves Fourth Street play. If there is only a single raise put in on third poker street, it is correct to throw your hand away on fourth street if the raiser catches a good card and you catch a bad card.

Likewise, it would be correct for him to throw his hand away if he catches bad and you catch good. We’ll speak more of this in the next chapter.

However, a bad player who starts off with three good cards will almost invariably call again on fourth street even if it comes good hand for you and bad to him.

This is a nice edge. Unfortunately, by putting in a double raise, you have eliminated that edge because you now are almost forced to come again on fourth street regardless of how the cards fall.

This is a very important concept. By making it down to a single raise, you have given him the opportunity to make some sort of poker game mistake.

(I have been in a games where this is true to an even greater extreme. In these games I might limp in on third street rather than raise a man who has already limped in because I know that he has a hand and that he will come again on fourth street no matter what happens. A player who plays this badly when there is only a limp bet in there should not be given the chance to play almost correctly which would be the case if you raised him and put that extra money in the pot.)

This concept or principle of online poker games is one of the reasons why I am reluctant to reraise on third street especially when the ante is small and my opponent is weak.

If the ante gets very large it is unfortunately necessary to reraise simply because of all the “juice” already in there in the form of the bring-in and the antes.

The final situation on third street would be where an opponent has only limped and you now must act. Well, once an opponent has limped you should give up all thoughts of stealing the ante.

The question is whether you should raise with the hand. The answer is “sometimes”…. As we have already noted, if there are no further low cards behind you, you can even limp without a hand in the hopes of out flopping him especially in the $30-$60 game structure.

In this situation, especially if your opponent is a good poker player, you should frequently limp when you do have a hand since he knows that you could very easily be limping without a hand. Now you may trap him.

Another time to just limp in behind an initial limper is if you are quite sure that he is slow playing a very big hand.

However, if there are even more low cards behind both of you, and there is a reasonable chance that the initial limper has decided to limp in with a decent hand, it is usually necessary to raise simply to cut down the field.

Once again this is truer in the bigger ante games than in the smaller ante games. However, if by just limping in behind the initial limper, you can get loose players to come in with all kinds of hands, you can consider playing it that way.

You might even limp in behind an initial limper with an extremely good hand with the hopes that someone raisers behind you. Now you can reraise.

In general, I have no qualms about reraising with very big hands with the right cards out. The reason is the opposite of the reason mentioned a few paragraphs earlier.

With a very big hand, it is correct for me to call on fourth street no matter what I catch even if there was only a single raise. Why not make it even more correct by putting in the double raise?

Another time you might want to put in an extra raise on third street is if there is a high card playing. Even here you might consider not doing it in order to throw off your opponents.

While I haven’t covered every possible situation that might arise on third street.