Stupid Connectors

There’s a saying where I come from (the land, that is, of sayings I make up): “If you’re not slowly getting better, you’re slowly getting worse.” I was thinking about that saying the other day when I stumbled across a poker column I wrote almost exactly ten years ago. Here’s what I had to say back then on the subject of suited connectors in hold’em.

SUITED CONNECTORS NEED MANY OPPONENTS. If you are drawing to a straight or a flush, your chances of getting this result are sufficiently remote that you need a large field of opponents to justify your draw. For example, if you flop an open-ended straight draw, your odds of making your straight (with two cards to come) are roughly 5-to-1 against. If you’re only getting paid off by one other player, and thus getting only a 1-to-1 return on your investment, you’re losing money even when you hit your hand. Try to play straight and flush draws against the largest possible fields.

Ignoring the absolute hash-job I made of the odds (I may have been in a rush that day, or possibly on drugs) that advice made sense to me then. It still makes sense to a whole lot of poker players today. It may even make sense to you, and it may even still make sense for the games in which you typically play. After all, if everyone is just calling along and passively seeing flops – and doing absolutely nothing else to win – then playing multiway pots with draws has a kind of enduring, seductive logic.

Trouble is, that logic is wrong.

Or at least it’s wrong for most of the games we play in these days: games where almost every pot is opened for a raise; games where three-betting is common and four-betting light is not unheard-of; games where players will pounce on post-flop weakness; and, crucially, games where no one will give you the right price to draw.

In such games, playing suited connectors, especially small ones, in multiway pots no longer makes sense for the simple reason that the only way you can win is to make your hand. And as we know, making a hand in hold’em is a hard thing to do. As we know, making even so much as a pair happens only one-third of the time. (Which means that your likeliest outcome – two-thirds of the time – is flopping absolutely nothing. Hey, even I can do that math.) So when you flop a straight draw or a flush draw, you’re already swimming against a certain tide. And don’t forget that at this point, your hand isn’t made. You still have to improve, and you’re about a 2-to-1 underdog to do that if you get to see the turn and the river. Great odds if you can get them; however, in most games these days, you don’t get to see the turn and the river for just the price of a flop bet. You pay on the flop, when your odds against are about 4-to-1, and pay again on the turn when the odds are roughly the same.

This is where the seductive logic of multiway pots starts to creep in. Knowing that you need 4-to-1 pot odds to match your 4-to-1 card odds, you start looking around for a gang of callers, enough to give you the right calling odds, or maybe even an overlay. Did you spot the problem word there? It’s callers. The whole logic of volume pots in multiway hands breaks down the instant someone says, “raise.” Then you’re not getting the right price once, you’re paying the wrong price twice! Or even more.

There you sit with your suited connectors (I lovingly call them stupid connectors) in early position, and let’s say that your sense of this table is so sharp that you know you can call from under the gun with 8-7 suited and be assured of getting five other callers and no raise. (Such games do exist, of course, and you can beat them much more handily by waiting for big cards than by playing speculative holdings – but that’s a discussion for another time.) So you get to see a flop, and it comes, let’s say, A-9-2, with two of your suit. Good times, right? You hit your draw.

But guess what? You can’t bet. You can’t bet because the only way your bet gets the right price is if everyone calls and no one raises. No one holding A-K. No one holding A-9. No one holding a set of deuces. No one holding the nut-flush draw. Are all of these hands out against you? Probably not. But with so many callers in your happy multiway pot, at least one of them is bound to have a made hand or a better draw than you, and you’re stuck in first position, so you check. And then someone bets and someone raises, and your calling odds go out the window, and your suited connectors go in the muck.

Know how suited connectors win? By betting the flop and having nobody call. That’s pretty unlikely in a multiway pot, but much more likely when the pot is shorthanded or, in the best case, heads up. Then your 8-7 suited wins without a fight. You don’t have to make a hand to win. You could have 8-7, 2-7, a pair of chickens, whatever. Here it is in a nutshell, folks: Since it’s hard to make a hand in hold’em, your best outcome is not making your hand. Your best outcome is winning without a hand.

That’s why today’s hold’em games play so fast, and that’s why my thinking of ten years ago was so wrong. Strong players have figured out that the best strategy is to be aggressive preflop, narrow the field, then keep betting and keep narrowing the field until there’s no one left, and nothing left to do but collect the chips. Of course it’s not as simple as that – you will definitely get in trouble if you routinely raise with 8-7 in early position – but the concept is sound. At least it’s sound for today’s games. And those happen to be the ones we’re playing in now.

So forget the concept of playing multiway pots with suited connectors. That notion has no currency now; it simply won’t work. But don’t forget the underlying principle of constantly improving your game. If you’re not slowly getting better you’re slowly getting worse, because the game around you is getting better all the time.
Me, I have to get better with math. Definitely have to work on that. ♠

John Vorhaus is author of the Killer Poker series and co-author of Decide to Play Great Poker, plus many mystery novels including World Series of Murder, available exclusively on Kindle. He tweets for no apparent reason @TrueFactBarFact and secretly controls the world from johnvorhaus.com.