A Memorable Hand

Sometimes after a poker session lasting several hours and containing thousands of hands, I will be hard-pressed to remember a single memorable hand. But there are some hands in which I remember every detail, even after years have gone past. This is one of those hands. It is also one of the hands I often recount to my students, as I think there are several lessons to be learned from it.

It was played in the Fitzwilliam Casino in Dublin. The game was €1/€2 pot-limit hold’em. I had bought in for €400 and had built my stack up to around €1000. The worst player at the table was conveniently to my immediate right. He had about €800 in front of him, having gotten lucky a couple of times when he had the worst of it. The rest of the table contained one or two tight good players and then a mixture of bad to very bad people with varying stacks.

I got dealt pocket fours under the gun. I limped for €2. Ordinarily I would raise here, but in the context of a loose nine-handed game with plenty of short stacks, I don’t think limping is terrible. The advantage to raising is that you can build the pot in case you hit your set. The disadvantage is you may be three-bet off your hand, (and most stacks are only 100 big blinds or less, so you can’t profitably call). Almost every other player at the table limped as well. The big blind, who is the villain of this piece, checked his option.

The flop came up 8-2-2 rainbow. Not the worst flop, but when seven people have seen the flop, including some players whose “voluntarily put into pot” (VPIP) statistic would be somewhere approaching 100 percent, it’s safe to assume someone has at least an eight, if not a two.

Both blinds checked, as did I. It was checked to the cutoff who bet €10. When he bet here I thought that there was about a 50 percent chance he was bluffing, using his position to make a cheap stab at the flop, and about a 50 percent chance he actually had something, most likely a weak eight like 9-8.

The big blind then called the bet. This all of a sudden got me very interested. He was the player that I was wasting my Saturday night in order to bust! When he called, I immediately thought he probably had a two. It’s not often you have the implied odds to try and hit a two outer, but in my mind I did here.

The rough calculation that I performed at the time is thus:  I have two outs and one card to come. (It’s very unlikely that I will see two cards for the price of one). There are 47 unknown cards, so I have a one in 23.5 chance of hitting a four (around 4 percent). So to make it profitable to call I need to win more than 23 times the size of the bet. 23 times 10 is 230, so I could profitably call given how deep myself and the villain were. Note that even using this optimistic and rough equation, it wouldn’t be profitable to call against a 100 big blind stack. So I called.

You should be able to guess what the turn was. Had it been any card but a four, I’m very sure I would never think about this hand again. So I had gotten lucky and made my house. The villain in the big blind checked. I called the flop because I was pretty sure the big blind had a two, so there was no need to slow play my hand. I somehow needed to get about €800 into a pot with €44 in it. So I bet €40. The player in the cutoff thought for a long time then folded. The villain in the BB then check-raised to €180. Again, I saw no reason to slow play my hand so raised again, and we both raised until we were all in. The river was a meaningless king. I was pretty happy with myself, everything had gone according to plan. I had correctly seen a spot where I could profitably make a very long shot play, and it had come off. I was less happy when the villain tabled 8-8, for a flopped better house.

The mistake I made in my calculations was one I see made again, again, and again. For some reason people view implied odds as a one-way street. Whereas, in fact, to truly work out your implied odds you need to think about the possibility of improving your hand, yet still not having the best hand. In hold’em a common situation would be where you have a medium or small flush draw. Unless you are drawing to the nut flush there is always the possibility that your opponent has a higher flush draw..
There is another, subtler lesson here as well. In a deep stacked game, sets are extremely important. When you are deciding on whether to slow play a hand or not, you need to think about who is more likely to go broke.

In the hand above, the villain played it perfectly. It was almost impossible for me to have an over pair, so unless I had a two I was drawing dead. Checking the flop made him €800. (Of course it was unlikely, but he was never going to lose his stack because of his check). However, slow playing sets is not always such a good idea. This is a common scenario I see happen online. Player A raises pre-flop with 3-3. B & C call him. The flop comes up K-7-3. They all check. The turn is an 8 and Player A and B get all in. Player A is disgusted to see player B with 8-8. Checking the flop here was terrible by B, because the only way player B would put any money into the pot was if he hit his two-outer. By checking, player A created a reverse freeroll for himself, which is never a good spot to be in!

Daragh Thomas has made a living from poker over the last three years. He also coaches other players and writes extensively on the boards.ie poker forum, under the name hectorjelly.