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5.3 Isolation Raise
This is a good tactic to use in the situation where a short stack has gone all in and you are considering playing, but there are still other players involved in the pot who could also call.
Now when we play a big pot / big hand we always want to limit the field to protect our hand, so we want the other players to fold and only play against the short stack.
So the option we have here is to Re-raise to put pressure on the other players not to play and hence isolate the short stack. Remember if no one else calls your raise, then you have only committed the original short stacks raise into the pot.
Illustration
Everyone folds round to you in the dealer button and you put in a standard raise of 3x the big blind. The small blind calls and then the big blind, who is the short stack, goes all in. The action is back on you, and you don’t know whether or not the small blind is getting ready to call the small stacks all in raise.
If you were just to call, then the small blind would be getting good pot odds to also call assuming he has a decent hand (and he has already called one raise) so we need to put pressure on him to fold by reducing those pot odds.
So by raising we lengthen the pot odds as he is going to have to put more money into the pot to call, and hopefully pressurise him to fold leaving us to fight the hand out with the short stack.
This is certainly a very useful tactic in Tournament play, but it can also be used in Cash ring games also.
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