Winning a Lowball Pot With Nothing

Lowball is a game of situations, as I have been wont to say. Sometimes knowing what others have and what they will do with what they have makes much more difference than what you have.

This example came up recently in the $20-limit game I frequent.

Susie, a very straightforward player, opened to the right of the button. The button folded. The middle blind, Bob, another easy-to-read player, called, and the big blind, our tight friend Nick Thorn, called. Nick may be a tight player, but he is also capable of recognizing and taking advantage of situations, which to my way of thinking makes him a good player. I call this type of capitalizing on unusual situations as they arise "playing by the seat of your pants." His main fault is not taking advantage of as many ordinary situations as I think he should, situations that require a bit of risk and gamble, the high-variance plays I like. But Nick is also very able to capitalize on his tight image – something I can't do as often – and bluffs very successfully. He doesn't bluff much, but he bluffs at opportune moments, and because of his image, rarely gets caught. I've heard it said that if you hardly ever get caught bluffing, you're not bluffing enough. (I must bluff enough. I get caught a lot.)

The middle blind, first to draw, took one card. Nick drew two. Susie drew one.

Susie had been running unlucky. It seemed she paired or caught a facecard almost every time she drew. She was down to her last $40, two bets. Bob bet. Before Nick even had a chance to look at both of his cards, Susie started showing the card she had caught, along with the rest of her hand, to the player to her left. She had obviously paired or painted again – that is, caught something that gave her a hand with which she would not consider calling. She was now looking for some sympathy from her neighbor.

Nick now finished looking at his cards. He raised. As expected, Susie dumped her cards.

Bob didn't have to think very long before dumping his own hand. He wouldn't be calling that tight Nick, who had obviously made a two-card monster.

I thought I knew better, though. Bob had not been drawing to a very good hand, because he almost always raised when he had a draw to a smooth 7 or better. Therefore, if he bet after the draw, it was not with a very strong hand, probably an 8 or worse. He had a hand worth a bet, probably, but not one worth calling a raise. He thought it safe to bet into Nick's two-card draw, since a two-card draw rarely made anything to call with, let alone raise. It was definitely safe to bet into Susie. Susie was a calling station. She would call with many hands she'd never bet if passed to. In last position, if everyone passes to you, and they have all drawn, an 8 is worth a bet, but Susie wouldn't bet worse than an 8-6 in that spot. She'd call, though, with a 10 or better. Also, she wouldn't raise with worse than a 6. And she was incapable of raising on a bluff. So, Bob could safely bet into her, because she'd call with many more hands than she'd bet, and if she raised, everyone knew what she had. Given all that, I thought it much more likely that Nick was bluffing than having made a hand. I was also the only one at the table to think that. Obviously, Bob didn't, because he folded pretty quickly for Nick's raise.

Had Susie not given Nick advance information of her intention of folding, Nick would've just quietly folded.

A little later, when someone asked for a new setup and the dealer was shuffling for a new deal, Nick went to the coffee station to pour a cup. I asked the dealer to deal me out that hand, and went over for a cup for myself.

I said to Nick, "You were bluffing on that hand when you raised Bob, weren't you?"

"How did you know?" Nick demanded.

"Nick, I always know when you're bluffing." This is a running gag that I have going with Nick, except there's a lot of truth in it. I often know when he is bluffing, and I tell him so, privately, of course.

"Yeah, well that's why you always beat me."

"I don't know about that, but just don't try bluffing me. You saw that Susie was going to fold, and you took advantage of the situation, didn't you?"

"Yep," Nick grinned. "I made a king. I was pretty sure Bob couldn't call a raise, because he would've raised before the draw if he was drawing to a big hand. I put him on an 8 or a 9 that he was betting for value but would easily dump against me because the pot was small."

Nick had a good point. Many lowball players find it easy to dump a hand for one bet when the pot is small, but as soon as the pot gets large – say, eight bets or more – they call one more bet with the most hopeless hands. This isn't necessarily a big mistake. Better the loss of one more bet than the tragedy of losing the whole pat for failure to put in that one bet. If a pot contains seven bets when you're facing a call, you can be wrong nearly six times out of seven – that is, lose about 85 percent of the times you call – and still profit. Because most players hate to give up big pots, bluffs are seldom made by good players into large pots. Thus, Nick was most likely to try to steal a relatively small pot. In this case, the pot contained six bets after his raise. Nick successfully added a profit of four bets to his stack. If he could identify one such situation an hour, he could easily add more than two bets per hour to his win rate, even given that he misread situations once in a while or someone made a rare multiple-card freak draw.