Overthinking It

I was recently playing in a game that was pretty crazy. It was often four or more ways to the flop for a raise and sometimes it was that many for a reraise as well. Pots were big and the players weren’t really trying that hard to win them. Instead, they were relying mostly on their cards. This sounds like a great situation for me and I did well in the game. Something came up though that struck me as odd.

In this particular game, like I said, players weren’t particularly interested in playing anything other than their hand strength. They weren’t raising to punish the limpers or because they were trying to set up bluffs on further streets, they were raising because they had a good hand. So, on this particular hand, it was five ways to the flop for the minimum. I don’t remember all of the details, because there were so many ridiculous hands that night this one didn’t strike me as unusual until I saw the result. I do remember there was minimal action on the flop getting it to heads up and the two checked the turn and river. The first limper showed down two aces and won the pot. I scratched my head a bit, wondering why he did that and then, without provocation, he explained. He said that all of the pots had been so crazy that he figured he would let someone else do the raising. This strikes me as overthinking it, and I’ll explain why.

First of all, the pots had been going to the flop many ways for a raise and sometimes for a reraise but none of the raisers showed poor hands when they were the aggressor. This means that people were happy to limp along if they had mediocre hands, but were aggressive with their good hands. Our hero in this hand surely would have played a four or five-way pot for a raise instead of a five-way pot for a limp, thus winning himself a bigger pot at the end if he had raised instead of limped.

Secondly, you’re holding two aces, the most likely card to be in the hand of someone who raises. If you’re holding two of them, your opponents are less likely to be holding any themselves. Therefore, you would be more likely to get more money into the pot by raising than by hoping for a limp-reraise.

Another thing that our hero overlooked is his poor position. When you’re out of position with pocket aces, your goal should be to get as much money into the pot as early as your opponents will let you. If you can somehow get large chunks of your stack into the pot preflop, you should try to do so. This was a table that would let you do that if you wanted to so why not take advantage instead of risking playing a 5-8-way pot with almost no money in it against something very close to the same ranges as if you had raised?

Finally, people who had good hands in this game were happy to three-bet and others were more than happy to call those three-bets with a wide variety of hands. This gives us even greater reason to raise. What sounds better, you limp, two people limp after you, someone raises, someone else calls, you three-bet, and they all call or you raise, two people call, someone three-bets, a couple people call, and you four-bet, then getting it heads up with the three-bettor with dead money or perhaps multi-way with a shallow stack-to-pot ratio (SPR)? I’d argue for whatever option gets the most money in the pot pre which sounds to me like the one where I can get a four-bet into the pot.

I remember another example from a previous column of mine where I raised under the gun and a hotshot tourney player flatted kings next to act because there had been some three-betting at the table. No three-bet came and he ended up winning a small pot when he could have three-bet and got it in ahead of my stacking range there and doubled up. It would have been a bad spot for him since I had aces, but that’s not that critical considering he would have been ahead of my range.

Let’s be clear, I’m not advocating taking your brain out and setting it aside when you go play poker. You should still be making decisions based on logic and math. However, sometimes a straightforward line is more profitable than one that may look cooler and there’s nothing wrong with that. Don’t get fooled by the crazy stuff you see on TV or the lure of looking like a genius. Often it’s the basic fundamentals that get you paid in poker, especially when you’re playing out of position. ♠

Gavin Griffin was the first poker player to capture a World Series of Poker, European Poker Tour and World Poker Tour title and has amassed nearly $5 million in lifetime tournament winnings. Griffin is sponsored by HeroPoker.com. You can follow him on Twitter @NHGG