[PantsOnFire]

This may help you.

Suppose I have AJs in MP in a NL tourney. I open raise for 3xBB and CO calls and others fold. According to the gap concept, CO should have a fairly good hand to cold call a raise. Let's give him two hands, AQ and 88.

Now the flop comes K96 rainbow. You make a standard continuation bet of 2/3 the pot with your hand of A high and no draw. It is verly likely that both AQ and 88 will fold. This is of course player dependent but I am talking generalities here.

So the power of the cbet is to be the pf aggressor and continue being the flop aggressor. In both cases, you are actually losing the hand (both pf and after the flop) but your pf raise combined with your flop bet will get most hands to go away.

A preflop raise and a cbet is good aggressive poker. You are taking charge. This will work against most players. Fish might tend to call with anything and good tricky players will eventually catch on and play back at you. But, in general, it is usually a good play.

As well, as another poster mentioned, if you get caught cbetting a few times, your value bets will get paid off more.

Another way of looking at this is if you never cbet, then any bet means you have a hand. That's not a good thing.