Practicing Pot Control

When practicing pot control, you must take into consideration:

Strength of your hand vs. the range of your opponent’s hand: This is more of a decision call based on past experience, reads on the opponent, texture of the board and betting patterns. There is a lot to consider when trying to guess the strength of your hand vs. the range of the opponent.
Stack sizes: As a general rule the range of hands with which you are willing to showdown with all the chips in the middle should be wider with a 25BB stack than with a 100BB stack. This means you should be much more disposed to put a 25BB stack all in with top pair top kicker (TPTK) than you would with a 100BB stack.
Style of the opponent: If you have TPTK against a chaser (who doesn’t look at odds to call), you will want to bet the hand very aggressively and let him pay you off. If you have top pair top kicker against an aggressive player who has a wide range that you can’t read, you will want to practice pot control to keep the pot small. If you have top pair against a calling station, you will be frequently on the right place to make bigger bets on the flop, turn and river. With top pair against a rock (Very tight player) you still usually want to avoid a situation where you end up with all of your chips in the middle of the table.

Regards