How (Not) To Get Stacked

I watched a hand recently that was played about as badly as a no-limit hold’em hand can be played. Both players in the hand made, at one point or another, expensive mistakes. In all, I counted three separate plays that were mistakes. (The initial preflop raise — including its sizing — is arguably an additional mistake, but I’m not going to talk about that.)

These mistakes were all whoppers. They were the sort of mistakes that make it virtually impossible for you to win in the long term if your thought process permits you to make them.

The hand stuck out to me, as even though the mistakes are very large, I believe many no-limit players would be unable to identify at least one of them.

Here’s the hand. A loose player opens from three off the button to $25 in a $2-$5 game. The button calls. The small blind, a young visitor from France who hadn’t played many pots, reraises to $90. The initial raiser calls, and the button folds. The French reraiser has about $900 behind, and the other player covers. From my observation, I would expect the original raiser (who was opening many pots) to call the preflop reraise with nearly every hand. Two players see a flop, and there’s $210 in the pot.

The flop comes 9-9-3 with two hearts. The small blind bets $160. The other player calls fairly quickly.

The turn is an offsuit seven. The small blind shoves all-in for $740 into the $530 pot. The other player nearly beats him into the pot.

An offsuit king comes on the river. The small blind quickly shows K-K. The other player tables A-9 offsuit in disgust. The player with A-9 then spends the next ten minutes complaining about the beat, though he was reasonably good-natured about it.

Let’s talk about the mistakes. First, the A-9 offsuit. This is a primarily useless no-limit hold’em hand, particularly when stacks are deep. The deeper the stacks, the more important it is to play hands that have a chance to make the nuts. Completely unconnected offsuit hands virtually never make the nuts. The hand can’t flop a good draw. On the vast majority of boards it will have so-so equity, and when you hit your hand, typically an ace will be on board that will serve as an action-killer if your opponent can’t beat an ace.

Making trip nines is one of the only scenarios where this hand will have any serious no-limit value. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t happen very often.

Opening A-9 offsuit to steal the blinds is fairly reasonable (though I would be making it $15, not $25 to go), but it’s a terrible hand to call the preflop reraise with. You’re playing a big pot with deep money against someone marked with a strong, polarized range of hands. If you are going to defend against the reraise “light,” you should choose hands like J-9 suited to do it with, not A-9 offsuit.

I think most no-limit hold’em regular players would be able to identify this call as a major error. But in my opinion this is the smallest of the three errors.

The flop comes 9-9-3 with a suit. The preflop raiser bets $160 into $210 or about three-quarters pot.

In my opinion this bet is too large by quite a bit. I too likely would have bet, but probably something more like $90 instead of $160.

This relatively dry board is hard to hit. Most of the time, the preflop caller will have two unpaired cards such as Q-J, 10-8, A-10, or the like. When you bet $160, you almost guarantee he will fold all of these hands. The problem is, you don’t necessarily want him to fold these hands. They have very little equity against your kings. I’d rather bet a smaller amount that may tempt him to call the flop with a hand like A-Q, A-J, or even J-10.

The other problem with the large bet is that K-K is simply too weak on this flop to try to play for stacks when there’s so much money behind. What are you hoping for when you try to play this hand for stacks? You’re hoping to get called down by a slightly weaker pocket pair. If your opponent has Q-Q or J-J, you’re in business.

But there are too many nines in the preflop caller’s range. Since he’s a loose player who can be expected to call all of his hands, he can have easily A-9 offsuit, K-9 suited, Q-9 suited, J-9 suited, 10-9 offsuit, 9-8 offsuit, 9-7 suited, and 9-6 suited. He can also have 3-3 or 9-9. Altogether, if you count up hand combinations, this represents 37 total possible hands. If you think A-A is also a possibility, that’s another 6 combos.

Hands that K-K has beat that are candidates to stack off are fewer. Q-Q and J-J make only 12 combos. You have to go down all the way down to 5-5 to find more combos of pocket pairs than of hands with nines in them. And no one these days will blindly call off $900 on a 9-9-3 flop holding just a pair of fives.

What’s the bottom line? If you try to put stacks in with K-K in this situation, when the money goes in you will find yourself behind the great majority of the time. Too many trip nine hands are possible and not enough weaker pairs are available to counterbalance.

What about the flush draw? Unfortunately, if you’re holding a hand as weak as K-K on this board with these stacks, you have to allow flush draws to draw against you. Again, your hand simply isn’t strong enough just to shovel money into the pot. You have to split the difference, charge flush draws a smaller amount, and hope the third card doesn’t come.

So I’d have bet about $90 on the flop into the $210 pot, and I would likely have made this size bet with nearly every hand I could have reraised preflop (including hands such as 4-4 and K-7 suited).

The turn bet is, however, the doozy here. It’s a monstrously terrible bet. When called, K-K will be behind the overwhelming majority of the time. The turn seven only adds more combinations to the mix of hands that have K-K beaten.

I think the K-K player should check the turn. This offers good balance because you will frequently be checking and folding the turn with hands such as 4-4 and K-8 suited. You’d like to have some calling range after you check. K-K is a good option to fill this role.

What’s the takeaway? One of the biggest mistakes I see inexperienced no-limit players make is that they are far too willing to play one pair hands for stacks. If you are thinking of playing for stacks, consider how many worse hands versus better hands will play with you.

And if in the heat of the moment you forget this article and happen to make a terrible overbet shove on the turn, remember to spike your two-outer on the river. ♠

Ed’s newest 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.