Card Player Pro

Game: $2-$4 no-limit hold’em
Opponent: Unknown passive player
Stacks: Mine: $414; His: $425
My Position: Under the gun
My Cards: K J

Part of being a winning poker player is knowing when to get away from poor equity situations. In this column, I’m going to look at a fold that I’d bet most players reading this aren’t making — and explain why I think they should.

In a $2-$4, $400 buy-in cash game online, I raised with the K J to $14 from under the gun at a five-handed table. The player in the cutoff flat-called my raise, and the big blind called, as well.

The flop came down favorably for my hand: K Q 6.

The big blind checked, and I made a continuation-bet of $30 into a pot of $42.

This is a very standard value-bet. I want to protect my top pair against draws, and extract value from worse K-X, Q-X, and middle-pair hands.

The action moved to the cutoff, who, after a few moments, put in a big raise to $120. The big blind quickly folded, and the action was back on me.

I think most players would call the raise here, and try to “gain more information” or “make a decision” on a later street. However, without a better read on the cutoff (with whom I had no previous experience), I think this is a clear fold, and probably one that most people aren’t making.

Here’s why this is a pretty clear fold:

On a K Q 6 board, let’s break down what hands we expect our opponent to be raising us with. Remember, this is a three-way pot, so it’s less likely that our opponent is going to be completely bluffing with a hand like A-J, 5-5, or J-9.

He’ll almost certainly raise with all hands better than our K-J, including:

K-Q: 6 combos (2 remaining kings x 3 remaining queens)
A-K: 8 combos (2 kings x 4 aces)
6-6: 3 combos
Q-Q: 3 combos
A-A/K-K: 7 combos
Total: 6+8+3+3+7 = 27 combos

Now, he certainly won’t always have all 27 combos in his range (sometimes A-A/K-K/Q-Q/A-K will three-bet preflop, and sometimes sets will slow-play), but on average we can expect him to have about 15 combinations of hands that beat us.

He’ll also raise with draws on this flop some percentage of the time. The most likely draws for him to raise are:

Nut-flush draw: A 10, A 9, A 8 (3 combos); note that he can’t have the A J, as we have the J. (A passive player probably has only good suited aces in his preflop range.)

Combo draws: gutshot + flush draw, pair + flush draw, backdoor-straight draw + flush draw: 10 9, K 10, 8 7 (3 combos). (Again, a passive player probably doesn’t play a hand worse than the 8 7 against our under-the-gun raise.)

J-10 suited: We can also include J-10 suited, which is 3 combos (J 10, J 10, J 10).

Now, the same as with value hands, he won’t always raise all 9 combos of draws. Again, I’m going to estimate that he’ll raise them 50 percent of the time, leaving us 4.5 combos of draws. What does this mean?

It means that, on average, when our opponent raises us here, 15 out of 19.5 times, he’s going to have a hand that’s in very good shape against us (two pair, a set, a better top pair, an overpair), and only 4.5 out of 19.5 times will he have a draw.

Using a tool called PokerStove, we plug in our equity against this range of 19.5 hand combinations and see that K-J on this board has only 27 percent equity against his range. This is not good.

What’s worse? Even if we are ahead on the flop, there’s no guarantee that we’ll make good decisions by the river. If our opponent has a spade draw, for example, he can easily bluff us out of the pot later by representing K-Q, 6-6, J-10 (if the straight hits), or any other number of hands.

So, what looked like a strong hand on the flop has actually become a very difficult post-flop situation. What should we do?

I think your best solution, unless you have a better feel for how your opponent plays, is to fold on the flop. Yes, it may feel awkward to fold top pair after raising preflop, but this is a situation in which you need to recognize that it is going to be very difficult to play well on later streets.

Poker is all about picking your spots. Here, I recommend finding a better one.