A while ago, I was in Barcelona to take care of the reports and updates for the annual
European Poker Tour event there. When I arrived in my hotel room late at night, I was faced with the same kind of dilemma, the same trade-off, as usual: Play poker or go to bed? Usually, I opt for bed. This time, I opted for playing. The $25-$50 blinds pot-limit Omaha games were just too juicy to pass on. Plus, the juiciest game of all had one seat open.
As I often do in loose-aggressive games, I bought in for the minimum, $1,000. I posted the big blind and was surprised to see no fewer than seven callers, including a late-position poster. I looked down and saw K-K-10-8 single-suited, a way-above-average hand for a big blind to have, and an even stronger one with all of these limpers. Having noticed that the early-position limpers were very loose and thus were unlikely to have aces, I knew there was only one way to play this hand: raise pot. I made it $450 to go, and got called in no fewer than four places. All in all, a massive multiway pot was in the making - and those who are familiar with my strategies know that this is exactly the way I like it.
The flop came down A-9-4 rainbow - without a doubt, an absolutely awful flop for my hand. I knew that in a pot this big, people would be very hard-pressed to lay down any ace after the flop, even if they reasoned that I could very well have flopped a set of aces. But calling a mere $550 with $2,860 already in the middle would simply be too enticing for most people to "sensibly" lay down even their mediocre hands.
Quite a few players in my position would therefore have reasoned: "Hey, the ace is there. It is simply impossible for me to make them all lay down a better hand with this little amount of money that I have, and there is literally zero chance that I have the current best hand. And with a draw to just two kings twice, cards that may not even be in the deck anymore, I will simply have to give up. Betting here would be wasting $550; it would be throwing good money after bad."
As good as this reasoning seems to be, my view is almost exactly the opposite. By making my pot-sized preflop raise, I have committed myself to the hand. This means that
not a single flop should stop me from betting all in here. I know that if I get called by one or two players who indeed hold a pair of aces or better, I will have made a slight negative-expected-value decision by moving in. However, as opposed to many other players, I usually don't mind making this decision in extremely large pots, if there is at least
some chance that the hand could develop in such a way that I could get lucky and win a massive pot, even while holding the worst hand going in. And as you will see - even in the seemingly hopeless situation that I have here with my kings, good things
are definitely possible.
Here is what happened: I bet all in for $550, got called in two places, and then a highly aggressive player with a big stack moved all in. While some players would think this is a bad situation for me, it was exactly the situation I had hoped for. While the raiser
could of course be raising with a hand like aces up or a set, deciding to end the pot right there, I was well aware of this player's betting and raising tendencies when there was a short-stacked all-in player. This player just loves to make huge raises in situations like this, either with big draws or with fairly weak made hands. By doing this, he hopes to shut out the field, keep his investment in the hand low, get to see both the turn and river for a cheap price, and, probably most important of all, get huge odds of 2-to-1 or even 3-to-1 on his money while needing to beat just one player who could have as little as just one pair.
So, what did this guy have? Aces up, or a set, maybe? The answer is: No, my opponent didn't have either of those hands. He had the truly awful 5-4-3-2, for a pair plus bottom wrap. Against my bare kings, though, it was not a bad hand, by any means. After all, now that the pot had grown to $3,960, and because in the end he needed to put only $550 into the pot to reach the showdown, he would need just a little more than 12 percent pot equity to be in a positive-expected-value situation. Quite clearly, against my hand, he had much more than that. In fact, in this situation, his horrible hand would win about 45 percent of the time, giving him an expectation of $2,030 out of the $4,510 pot - for a net gain of $1,480 from the decision point on. (His net gain for the entire hand was $2,030-$1,000 = $1,030.) This was not bad at all, when taking into account that in the end, he needed to invest just $550 after the flop to get himself into this profitable situation. So, one could claim that by making this massive raise and shutting out the field, he had created a situation with a highly positive expectation.
But, at the same time, he also had created a highly profitable situation for me! What his raise had accomplished was force out all of the better made hands, meaning that my pair of kings was now suddenly the best hand - and now it was
my opponent who required help, not me. Suddenly, just two blanks would be good enough to win me an absolutely massive pot - with a hand that on the flop seemed dead in the water. Now, my kings had an expectation of $2,480 out of the $4,510 pot - which is quite surprising, when at first glance it seemed that I was drawing to just two outs!
Now you see the power of protection. Even though I wound up losing the pot (a small card came on the river to complete my opponent's wheel), by going all in on the flop and inducing the highly aggressive player to protect me, I had turned a clear negative-expected-value situation into a very positive one. Yet, if I had ended up winning this five-way pot with the ace on the flop while holding just unimproved kings, I am certain that people would have called me a crazy lunatic who had absolutely no clue what he was doing - a sucker who thought of pocket kings in a multiway pot as the World's Fair.
Rolf has been a professional cash-game player since 1998. He is the author of the successful Secrets of Professional Pot-Limit Omaha, and the co-author of Hold'em on the Come. He is the creator and presenter of the hold'em four-DVD set Rolf Slotboom's Winning Plays. He is the first-ever Dutch Champion, and maintains his own site at www.rolfslotboom.com.
