Analyzing the Strength of a Draw

It is my experience that very few players are capable of counting their outs and analyzing the strength of their hand in a correct manner. This is true not just at the low limits; even when playing for higher stakes, you will find that many players just don't know where they stand in a hand.



Overestimating the strength of a draw
For instance, recently a hand came up in which someone I've known for a very long time (let's call him Dave) complained that his premium draws just never get there. He had the J 10, with a flop of K-Q-7 with two clubs. He had gotten into the middle of a raising war, with one player holding K-Q for top two pair and the other the A 10 for the nut-flush draw plus a gutshot draw. When Dave lost the pot, he claimed that every time he has a draw of eight outs or more with two cards to come, he might as well give up immediately, as it will never come. According to his reasoning, he had eight outs twice – 16 cards total. And with just 43 unknown cards left in the deck, he judged this to be a highly profitable situation, one in which he was a clear money favorite.



But he wasn't. He was probably right to stay in the hand because of the money that was in the pot already and the odds that he was getting, but no way was it good for him that the betting on the flop and turn had gotten extremely heavy. Why? Well, first of all, he did not have eight outs. Because the aggressive postures of both of his opponents should have made it clear that there was definitely a flush draw out there, he couldn't realistically have thought that the A and the 9 were outs; in fact, it was almost a certainty that the A was not in the deck anymore, but in one player's hand. So, he probably should have estimated his hand as six clean outs, not eight.



But that's not all there is to it. When analyzing the strength of his hand, this player made the common mistake of thinking that completing his draw automatically meant winning the pot. And as we shall see, this is not the case at all. The fact is that both of his opponents were drawing to bigger hands than he was. Any jack would give the ace-high flush draw a straight that was larger than the one he was drawing to, any club would complete the flush, and any king or queen would create a full house for the person who currently had top two pair. This meant that if one of these cards appeared on the turn, for what is called a "lockout," Dave would actually be drawing dead with his straight draw. And even if he made his nut straight on the turn, his opponents would still have a bunch of "redraws" on the river, simply because they were drawing to bigger hands than the one he just made.



Because of all of this, he did not have a premium draw at all. In fact, it was his opponents who were putting in their money correctly by jamming the pot, one with the current best hand and the other one getting good odds with his premium draw. So, even though Dave has years of playing experience, he still did not see (or did not want to see) that this situation was not as good as he analyzed it to be.



Underestimating the strength of a draw

The preceding was an example of someone who grossly overvalued the strength of his draw. A while ago, I was criticized for allegedly making this mistake. Here is what happened:



With the K Q and three limpers in front of me, I had raised from the button. When both blinds called, six players saw the flop of J-9-2 with one diamond. The small blind bet out, and immediately got raised by the big blind. All the others folded to me. While I was contemplating what to do, the small blind had not noticed that I was still in the hand, and simply called the raise out of turn. I now decided to cold-call the raise, as well, to see the turn for two small bets.



When I eventually won the pot, someone criticized me for calling the raise on the flop. He said, "You always claim to be so hot with your articles and all, but here you called not one but two bets with nothing more than an inside-straight draw. That was clearly a bad play, because no way did you get the proper odds to pay that much with a mere gutshot."



Again, this player failed to analyze the strength of a hand correctly. After all, my hand was not just a gutshot. When the small blind did not three-bet, I thought there was a good chance that he had just a one-pair hand, and the flop raiser didn't need to have better than one pair, either – even though, of course, this was a distinct possibility. What all of this meant for my hand was that there now was some chance that hitting a king or a queen would also be good enough to win the pot, in addition to the 10 that would give me the nuts. What's more, I also had a backdoor-flush draw, which gave my hand some added strength.



Now, if I had not known that the small blind would just call, I might have folded, for two reasons:



• The pot could get raised again, meaning I would have to pay three, and possibly four, bets to see the turn.



• If indeed I called the two bets cold and then the small blind popped it once more, I would know that hitting a king or a queen on the turn would almost certainly not be good enough to win the pot. So, in that case, I would have put three or four small bets in the pot with not much more than a gutshot – clearly a play with a negative expectation.



But now, the mistake that the small blind made by prematurely showing his intentions helped me in making a profitable call by correctly analyzing what my opponent's call may have meant for the strength of my draw or, more specifically, the strength of my overcards. The fact that there were already 12 small bets in the pot before the flop and I called two bets on the flop, for a total pot size of 18 bets, meant that folding the hand at that stage would have been an absolutely horrible decision; yet, to the player who criticized me, it seemed that this would have been the proper play.

This column is an excerpt from the book Hold'em on the Come: Limit Hold'em Strategy for Drawing Hands, by Rolf Slotboom and Dew Mason. The book will be released in March 2006. Pre-ordering is possible through http://www.dandbpoker.com/ and Rolf's site, http://www.rolfslotboom.com/.