To Slow-Play or Not to Slow-Play

It was New Year's weekend, a jam-up time in Las Vegas. The casinos invite their best customers to town at that time, and many of them find their way into the local poker games.

Playing $30-$60 limit hold'em, I had limped in from the button with the Q 10, trailing a series of limping New Year's vacationers who were looking for any excuse to play. Both blinds came in, we took the flop off sevenhanded, and it hit me dead solid, Q Q 10 - the nut full house. The field, consisting mostly of passive players, checked to me.

I often see players slow-play and check their hand when they flop the nuts - sometimes correctly, sometimes not. Some concepts that make it correct to slow-play applied to this situation. My hand was very strong, and not vulnerable to danger from giving a free card. Generally, slow-playing is a method for getting more money into the pot when your opponents are drawing thin to dead. But, if you can get more volume of money bet and a higher expectation on your hand by betting, betting will net you more money over the long haul. In this situation, because of the texture of the board and the tendencies of my opponents and my opponents' perceptions of me, betting was a better play.

I had gotten caught bluffing a missed draw in the last hand I played, so my opponents would likely think that I might be up to my old tricks again, especially after being checked to by the field. The style of many of the players was such that they would call the bet on the flop with any draw, and some of them with even a draw to a draw or an overcard draw to a pair, even though the board was paired!

The flop contained both a straight and a flush draw, making many draws available for my opponents. And it wasn't just any straight draw, because the high-card texture of the board made it one that many of my opponents were likely to have. And they were likely to call with as little as a gutshot. I tossed a bet into the pot, thinking I would get some callers. Five players called, and I wondered what they all could have!

The turn card was the 8. The field checked to the player two to my right, who fired a bet forward. The player between us folded. Now the situation had changed, and was ripe for slow-playing. The bet had doubled, and the likelihood of my opponents folding if I raised was much higher. I didn't want to blow out players with hands they thought could be good at the river. I wanted the extra bets. I had three opponents behind me who might call and were likely drawing dead. For obvious reasons, bets placed by opponents drawing dead have greater value than other bets. By letting them in, they might make a big hand, but not big enough to beat my full house, and go off for multiple bets. I called, and two players behind me called.

The river was the 4, filling the flush. The player in the small blind led into the pot. The second player folded, and the player who led on the turn called. As the last player to act, I raised - as there was no point in slow-playing from that position! The small blind quickly called. Mr. Lead-The-Turn stated, "You've got the flush, don't you?" and called. I turned my hand over. The small blind showed the 8 6 for a flush. Mr. Lead-The-Turn stated that he had made a straight on the turn.

Sometimes you should slow-play and sometimes you should play your hand straightforwardly. On the flop, slow-playing was a bad play. The combination of my position, an action board, and the styles of my opponents meant that I would likely get action if I bet, and the purpose of slow-playing is to acquire action. There is no point in slow-playing and losing bets when the likelihood of your opponents giving you action anyway is high.

On the turn, the situation was different. When Mr. Lead-The-Turn wagered, there were two players yet to act behind me. They were players who had both a high propensity to call and a high propensity to make or hold a second-best hand that would give me additional action. One concept to keep in mind in these types of situations is, if you think your opponents will call a raise anyway, go ahead and hit it.

Another concept here is that paired boards are hard to play if you don't have a big piece of them. Many players know that paired boards can present rich bluffing situations. Also, players who have a piece of a paired board or a draw on a paired board tend to play it in a wide variety of ways. Thus, it can be very hard to read situations on paired boards, especially when facing tricky opponents and the boards are coordinated, as this one was.

Roy Cooke has played more than 60,000 hours of pro poker and has been part of the I-poker industry since its beginnings. His longtime collaborator, John Bond, is a freelance writer in South Florida. Their newest book, How to Think Like a Poker Pro, is available at www.conjelco.com. Bond's poker mystery T-Bird is in Best American Mystery Stories of 2007.