CardRunners" Taylor Caby responded to Bertie"s question as follows:Playing small to medium pairs can be deceptively tricky. On one hand, when you raise and completely miss the flop as you mentioned - kh qh ts flop holding
- it is very easy to get away from your hand.
When you hold
and the flop brings td
:
: rainbow, it is going to be easy to get as much money as you possibly can into the pot!
However, most of the time, the flop will be somewhere in between these examples. There are so many things to consider in these situations, so I"ll try to walk you through my thought process. These are the types of examples I go through in my videos at CardRunners.com.
So, let"s say I raise with a medium pair like
. If I get a couple of callers from the blinds, I"m usually thinking "okay, this isn"t so bad, let"s see a flop. The key here is to first look at your opponents. Before the flop comes, you can get a lot of valuable information from them just by paying attention to some of their tendencies. Are they playing a large amount of hands preflop? Do they often 3-bet (raise) a raiser when they have good cards? Are they the type of player that likes to bluff at all on the flop, or do they pretty much just play "straightforward." These are all questions that go into my decision as to whether or not I should bet on the flop.
Let"s say the flop comes
:
: with 2 spades. Two players in the blinds check, and it"s on you. Well, what did you decide about these players? Assume that you thought "Player 1 is playing over 50% of his hands, he is very loose, very passive, and generally quite bad." Player two is a solid player - he doesn"t play a lot of hands, but when he does play good cards, he usually plays them very aggressively, I"ve also seen him call with some suited connectors, and some small to medium pairs. He always seems to have a solid hand when he puts his money in after the flop"
Since the first player could be holding anything, you are what we call "ahead of his range," meaning, of all of his possible holdings on this flop, your
is on average "ahead of his range" of holdings. This is because he could have so many different hands - ac :
: - ac
- kd
- kh
- js
- js
-
tc - I just listed random hands he would probably call with preflop, note how you are ahead of most of them, you have to figure your hand is probably good.
Let"s look at player 2 - He is solid, doesn't play a lot of hands, but plays them aggressively when he has very good ones. We can rule out big pairs, hands like ac kh, etc. This means he probably is playing a small pair, suited connector, or something like ac jh or ac th. His "range" could be approximated as: :
: :
:-
, jc th, :
:
+, and a few other random holdings. What does this mean? You are also probably ahead of his range of holdings, but it is pretty close. However, if you take the pot down 40% of the time or so with a continuation bet, you will show an automatic profit. Also, it is worth considering that since he is a solid player, you are unlikely to worry about being bluffed out if he checkraises you on the flop, he will probably have you beaten. This will make it easy for you to get away from your hand if you are raised, or if he just calls you on the flop, you might want to slow down your betting.
I realize this became a somewhat complex discussion and I only went through one hand. However, NLHE is a complex game, and I try to go into as much detail as I can when explaining the game.
The general rule of thumb is "try to approximate the ranges of possible holdings of your opponents, and then decide how your holdings compare to them." This is a large oversimplification, because you must also consider the fact that you can bluff players, you can make a set on the turn, they can bluff you, etc.
I hope this look into my thought process in this hand helped!
InstructorTaylor "Green Plastic" Caby is a co-founder and instructor at CardRunners.com. He is twenty-four years old having graduated with a Finance degree from the University of Illinois. He plays poker and runs CardRunners full time now.
