Alas, an Overcard

One common scenario confounds nearly every beginning hold’em player. People ask me about it time and time again. If they hold a big pocket pair and an overcard comes on the flop, they are lost. They are doubly lost if they have to navigate the minefield of an overcard from out of position.

People dread a flopped overcard for good reason. When you hold a pocket pair, it seems like that overcard is always bound to come, and when it does, it is a big favorite to stir up some trouble.

One Card Player reader recently asked about a hand that he played in which an overcard flopped, and then another overcard came on the turn.
Here’s how it went: It was a 25¢-50¢ online shorthanded no-limit hold’em game. The reader had about $50, and so did everyone else except the button, who had about $20.

The reader was first to act with the J J and raised to $1.50. The next player called, and so did the button. The blinds folded.

The flop came K 10 5. He checked, and the next player bet $2.50 into the $5.25 pot. The button folded, and he called.
The turn was the Q. The reader checked, his opponent bet $2 into the $10.25 pot, and he called.

The river was the 5. The reader checked again, and his opponent bet $6 into the $14.25 pot. The reader was wondering what to do at this point.
Starting on the flop, this is a tricky situation, any way you slice it. There are merits to starting off aggressively, and there are merits to the passive approach that the reader took.

The upsides of leading the flop and going from there, an aggressive approach, are:

• Less likely to lose the pot to a weaker hand by getting bluffed out
• Reasonable chance to get value for your hand from a draw or weaker made hand

The downsides of being aggressive are:

• Little chance to get a better hand to fold
• Vulnerable to an aggressive player floating or bluff-raising
• Limited information coming to you due to being out of position and driving the betting

Most of these points should be fairly straightforward. The last point, that betting out limits the information that comes to you, is a fairly universal aspect of being aggressive from out of position. When you bet, a wide range of hands will call you: draws, floats, top pair, weaker pairs, and some monster hands. Getting called doesn’t really narrow your opponents’ ranges much. So, being aggressive from out of position often comes at the expense of defining your opponents’ ranges better.

The upsides and downsides of a passive approach roughly mirror those of the aggressive approach.

The upsides:
• Put less money at risk with a marginal hand
• Gather more information about your opponents’ hands from their betting decisions and bet sizes

And some downsides:
• Get no value from your still decently strong hand, and give free cards to weak draws to beat you
• Give good hand readers an accurate picture of your holding, enabling them to play almost perfectly against you (including squeezing value from you sometimes and pushing you off the hand at other times)

Let’s discuss how some of these advantages and disadvantages of the passive line played out this time around.

A main advantage of playing passively is that you get more information. In this hand, you definitely get plenty of information about your opponents’ hands. This betting line — half of the pot on the flop, one-fifth of the pot on the turn, and roughly two-fifths of the pot on the river — is a weak one. That turn bet, especially, reeks of weakness. This hand comes from a microstakes game, in which it would be rare for an opponent to make a small bet with a strong hand, hoping that you’ll raise. So, you can be fairly sure that this guy is futzing around with nothing too wonderful. (Against a tough opponent, that small turn bet could be designed to elicit action. But that’s not what’s going on here.)

But what is “nothing too wonderful”? Well, it could be a busted flush draw. It possibly could be a 5 that spiked on the river, and now our adversary is going for a fairly wimpy value-bet. It could be a king, almost certainly with no kicker. It could be a hand like 10-9. Or, it could be a hand like Q-9 that spiked on the turn.

The bottom line is that I think the reader is ahead a decent percentage of the time here, and I think he’s behind something like a king or a queen, or even possibly a 5, fairly often, also. That river bet is just small enough, and the opponent has shown just enough weakness (and a propensity to make peculiar plays), that I don’t like folding the river.

If you call, you’re going to be shown a better hand a lot, but you need to win only about 30 percent of the time. In my experience, these flaky, small-time betting patterns are pure bluffs quite frequently, and busted draws somewhat more than that.

But when an opponent shows weakness like this one did on the turn, I tend to attack it. To attack in this hand, I like a turn check-raise, followed by a river barrel. The turn check-raise is partly a bluff and partly for value. It’s a weird two-way bet that will be called sometimes by weaker hands (mostly draws) and will sometimes bluff better hands out. The bluff aspect will be especially effective after you fire the river barrel.

This show of force will work quite often against someone who bets one-fifth of the pot on the turn, like the opponent did in this hand. That bet is a sign of a weak range in this game, and getting to see that weakness is one of the upsides of using the passive line right out of the gate.

Having said all of that, I tend to bet the flop in hands like this one. Even with the dreaded overcard on the board, the jacks are generally strong enough to bet for value. Sometimes you’ll end up betting your opponent’s top pair for him, but if you look at all of the possible outcomes, betting often makes the best of a tricky situation.

Ed is a featured coach at StoxPoker.com. Also check out his online poker advice column, NotedPokerAuthority.com. He has authored four books on poker, most recently, Professional No-Limit Hold’em: Volume 1.