Fooling A Pro

It used to be that you could sit in any $2-$5 or $5-$10 no-limit game in Vegas and expect a good game well worth playing. Nowadays, there are still plenty of good games, but it’s a little more hit-or-miss. Sometimes now when I sit in a game, there’s really only a single soft spot at a nine-handed table. If you’re playing live poker at the $2-$5 or $5-$10 level to make a living for yourself, these tables simply aren’t good enough. Fortunately, if you change tables or cardrooms, you will find greener pastures.

Recently I was playing in a bad $2-$5 game. Sometimes I table change away from these games, but this day I decided to play on. I personally place more emphasis on my writing and coaching than I do on maximizing my playing winrate (I would barely play $2-$5 at all if winrate were my top goal), so I’ll sit in these games if I think I might get something worth talking about out of the experience.

Here’s a hand I played in that game.

I raised to $15 from under-the-gun (UTG) with K 10. I had about $1,400, and most of my opponents were at least $700 deep.

A relatively tight and aggressive player called from three off the button, and a self-identified professional player called in the big blind.

The flop came K 9 2. The big blind checked, I checked, and the aggressive button player also checked.

The turn was the 3. The big blind checked again, and I bet $30 into the $47 pot. The button folded, but the big blind check-raised to $65.

I sat for a few seconds and called the $35 raise. There was $177 in the pot and about $800 behind.

The river was the 9. My opponent bet $75.

Before I tell you how the hand finished, I want to talk about why I approached the hand the way I did.

Both of my opponents in the hand were solid players who demonstrated hand reading skills. They also both were clearly familiar with standard lines in no-limit hold’em, the well-worn betting patterns that many players rely on as they play most of their hands.

When I raise from under the gun, I have a fairly tight range of hands. I’ll have pocket pairs, two big suited cards, two really big offsuit cards, and occasionally a suited ace or suited connector. This range is strong, but on a K-9-2 flop I will flop a king or better less than half the time.

Both of my opponents seemed to have enough experience to understand that.

When it’s checked to me, I can either bet or check. Some players handle this situation by betting with all of their hands. While this is a very effective strategy against weaker players – both tight and loose ones – who don’t have strong hand reading skills, it becomes a leak against good players. Since I’m a favorite to have less than top pair on a flop like this one, betting with all my hands, good and bad, makes me a target.

So I check sometimes on flops like this one against good players. I sometimes check my weak hands with showdown value – for example, J-J and A-Q – but it’s bad if I never have a king when I check. If I check only weak and vulnerable hands, I open myself to bluffs and thin value bets.

So I check top pair sometimes. Here I like checking K-T, as it is just about the weakest king that I might play from under the gun. If I bet the flop and then, if called, bet again on the turn, I may have already overplayed the strength of my hand against two solid players (with a better kicker, like A-K, betting twice makes more sense as I could get called by hands like K-Q and K-J).

Some players think, “I get checking top pair on a rainbow flop, but when there’s a flush draw out there, you’ve got to charge the draws.”

I think this logic makes good sense when you’re playing against weak players, but against better players you don’t have the luxury of just betting your good hands and checking your bad ones. Release too much information about your hands, and you’ll get picked apart. You have to give away some things – charging flush draws with K-T on a K-9-2 two-tone board in this case – in order to keep your hand ranges balanced and hard to read.

Some good things can happen when I check. My opponents will correctly assume that I have a weaker hand range when I check than when I bet. They may therefore try to bluff at me.

Seeing a preflop raiser check this flop would sometimes induce me to take a nearly identical betting line to my opponent (check min-raise the turn and bet the river) as a bluff. Why? Because with many opponents, the flop check indicates a sufficiently weak range of hands that raising the turn and betting the river will get a fold the vast majority of the time.

My opponent also might try for thin value against me with a weaker king. He might assume that my check indicates a hand such as J-J or A-Q rather than a king, and he may try to bet turn and bet river with a bad king.

Of course my flop check also could give a free card to a small pair, a gutshot, or a flush draw that might draw out on me. Again, I think this is an acceptable risk to take when the alternatives are either to be overaggressive with most of my weak hands or to be too straightforward by playing all my strong hands hard and most of my weak hands soft.

Back to the hand. The final board is K 9 2 3 9. The flush draw missed, gutshots missed, and middle pair got there. Overall, a fairly safe runout for my hand. I’ve been check min-raised (or close to the minimum) on the turn, and my opponent has bet $75 on the river into a $177 pot.

I called. He showed K 4, and my K 10 was the winner. Indeed, my pro opponent seemed to have interpreted my flop check to indicate primarily a range of showdown-worthy hands that couldn’t beat top pair. Since he held top pair, albeit without a kicker, he decided to go for thin value by raising the turn small and betting relatively small on the river.

Had my flop checking range included no top pair hands, I would have been very vulnerable to this particular play. But by checking a relatively weak top pair, I was able to fool the pro and win a nice pot. ♠

Ed’s brand new book, Playing The Player: Moving Beyond ABC Poker To Dominate Your Opponents, is on sale at notedpokerauthority.com. Find Ed on Facebook at facebook.com/edmillerauthor and on Twitter @EdMillerPoker.