The Follow through
When you play baseball and you’re swinging the bat, you’re always told by the coach to follow through with your swing. You don’t stop when you make contact with the ball, but you keep the momentum going and launch the pitch with more force. Well, you can do this in online poker too. Known in some circles as the continuation bet, this is basically your poker follow through. Let’s say you bet hard preflop and make a reraise with a hand like AK. You don’t hit it on the flop and you’re out of position. What is the best course of action psychologically? The poker online follow through of course. You may not have hit your poker online hand, but your opponent doesn’t know that. For all he knows, you could already have a made hand. So you throw out your follow through continuation bet. If you don’t then you’re giving away that you didn’t hit anything on the flop (generally, unless you’re known to slow play), and your opponent will bet at you and you’re almost obligated to fold. If you were to bet, there is a strong possibility that you could take down the pot right there, especially if your opponent is drawing and missed too. Another example of following through basically follows the same principle but this time you do hit your top pair, but there’s a scary draw out there. You know that your opponent can’t have hit his draw yet, so when he bets at you, you reraise on him so as to give him bad odds to call to try to hit his draw. You follow through with your initial bet essentially trying to take the initiative away from your opponent and establish pot control. Because simply put, following through is just another way of saying take the initiative and dominate the psychology of the hand.
