Your biggest problem with strong hands is how to get money into the pot and in what quantity. If you have weak hands and fresh air then you either fold, check or bluff. However it is when you have mediocre hands that can cause the most problems and this is especially the case when you get to the river and the pot has been bet on successive rounds and has escalated. Pot control was designed for this very reason but pot control can be used to manipulate your opponent into polarising their range as well.
Let us say that both you and your opponent have $400 stacks and your opponent is really aggressive. They raise on the button in $2-$4 six max no limit to $14 and you call in the big blind with Ad-Jc with the pot now $29. The flop comes Kh-Jd-4s and you bet $20 and your opponent calls making the pot $69. The turn card is the 2h and you bet $45 which gets called again. You could have checked for pot control but you didn’t want to leave yourself in an awkward guessing game situation. But the pot is now $159 and the river card is the 6c and now you need to decide what to do?
Checking leaves you open to a big river bet and if you call then you could simply be paying off a value bet. If you fold then you could easily be folding the best hand as your river check elicited a bluff attempt. However if you bet small like $20 and you get called by a better hand then you save money. Likewise if your opponent calls with a weaker hand when they wouldn’t have called a bigger bet! Also if you do not have to call a bigger bet with a second best hand then you save money here too. However some aggressive players will raise you here because of the size of the bet but when they do then they will tend not to do this with marginal hands themselves that beat yours. This means that they are often polarising their range if they shove or raise and you can call down lighter than what you would normally would do.
