Playing Small Pocket Pairs

Suited connectors are widely misunderstood hands. A while back I wrote an article called “How Suited Connectors Cost You Money.” In that article I talked about a common way that many people misplay suited connectors, and how it costs them money. This article is also about suited connectors, but here I’ll focus more on how to play them profitably.

A common misconception about suited connectors is that they are “multiway hands.” The idea is that if you hold a hand like 6 5 , you want nothing more than to have six people in the pot with you. Some people even take the idea so far as to say that they’d rather have 6-5 suited in a seven-handed pot than pocket aces.

The reality is that suited connectors are okay hands in multiway pots, and only okay. Their obvious upside is that they can make straights and flushes, hands strong enough to win big pots. But they have a few problems also:

1. Small suited connectors make small flushes. Getting beaten by a higher flush is extremely expensive, and in some circumstances you’ll be reluctant to play for stacks even if you make your flush.
2. Small suited connectors make small, vulnerable two pair hands. Two pair is an important hand in hold’em. If you make two pair with a hand like A-T, you often have a hand strong enough to play for stacks. But if you make two pair with 7-6 in a pot with many opponents, many times you will be too vulnerable to escalate the betting. Not being able to get good value for your two pair hands is a significant drawback.
3. Suited connectors usually flop draws, not made hands. If the flop betting gets big, the player with the suited connector may not be able to continue and may miss out on making his hand.

Compare the hand to a small pocket pair. Pocket pairs make sets which are also strong hands that can win big pots. But they are stronger multiway hands on all three counts. If the board pairs you usually won’t be worried about losing to a bigger hand. Instead, if someone makes trips you can win a lot with your full house. Also small cards don’t make pocket pairs particularly vulnerable. Even a set of deuces is a strong hand that you can usually play happily for stacks. Finally small pocket pairs flop made hands, not draws. Either you hit your set or you don’t.

Small pocket pairs are unquestionably good multiway hands. Suited connectors, on the other hand, often end up having to play scared when many players see a flop.

So what are the strengths of a suited connector?

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Everyone regular no-limit hold’em player wants to win money. Only a modest percentage of players, however, actually win over monthlong and yearlong timeframes. What factors determine who wins and who doesn’t? One could come up with thousands of little differences between winners and non-winners. I tend to be more big picture-oriented, so in this article I’ll present five broad traits that I see in winners that often are lacking in non-winners.

Experience

Experience is the most obvious trait, and it definitely matters a lot. I would never back a rank beginner in a no-limit game even if he had seven Ph.D. degrees from Stanford and had won the Nobel Prize in economics. There’s so much about no-limit you can learn only by putting in hands by the thousands.

But raw experience isn’t the key. Plenty of players who have been playing for ten years or more don’t win. And a lot of the recent big winners had been playing for only a year or less before they began raking in the money. Experience must be accompanied by the next trait to have value.

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The affordable poker e-book has just gotten more affordable. Today is the first anniversary of the release of Small Stakes No-Limit Hold’em, and to celebrate we are announcing two big changes:

1. We are now shipping a paperback edition of the book (unfortunately to United States residents only at the moment) in addition to the e-book versions.
2. We’ve dropped the price to $29.95 for the e-book versions and $34.95 for the paperback.

So if you’ve been waiting to buy for whatever reason, now’s your chance! Check out what one reader who was making his way up $0.10-$0.25 no-limit to $1-$2 no-limit had to say about Small Stakes No-Limit Hold’em:

I had read quite a few poker books and watched a lot of videos prior to purchasing the SSNLHE e-book. I don’t want to say they didn’t help because they definitely did, but something about the way the e-book was written just clicked with me. I’m a much better player because of it and wanted to thank all of you for writing such a clear, logical explanation of no-limit that can be applied quickly. I play full ring NLHE about 20 hours a week (anywhere from 25NL-200NL) and found the concepts very applicable to my games. I included a graph as its the best praise/review I can really give. I think you will notice a significant slope change around hand 186k/beginning of June.

Download the free excerpt to get a feel for the book. Then get your copy today!

How do you beat a guy who won’t fold? It’s a question I hear asked frequently at the no-limit hold’em table, usually after T-5 suited has made a flush on the river or a pair of fours has called a river bluff. Maybe you’ve even asked it once or twice. I have an answer. I can’t prevent the non-folders from frustrating you from time to time, but I can help you get the better of them over the long haul.

First, here’s a general tip: Be willing to gamble a little. Waiting for a sure thing is not the best plan. The guy who won’t fold is usually the most profitable opponent at the table. You’re going to miss out on the party if you snug up too much and wait to catch a big pair or flop a set. I mention this first because it’s my experience that tightening up is exactly how most players react to a non-folder. It’s ridiculous when the loosest guy at the table has trouble getting action, but I’ve seen it many times. You’re going to get the guy’s money by playing with him, not by waiting and waiting.

I’m not suggesting that you go crazy. But you have to be willing to put some money at risk. Guys who don’t fold create lots of big pots, and if things don’t go your way you could lose a few of them in a row. You should be okay with that possibility. If you’re not, you will struggle to be the winner at no-limit hold’em that you could be. Having said that, I have two specific tips for handling the guy who never folds.

Get Money In Preflop

Some people simply won’t fold preflop. They’ll limp in for $5 in a $2-$5 game and then, without much thought, call $100 more after a raise and reraise. They’ll do it with J-7 suited or 9-8 offsuit just as soon as they’ll do it with something better. How do you handle someone like that?

The answer is simple. With all your big aces and medium to big pocket pair hands, you make an enormous raise after he’s limped in. The more confident you are that you won’t run into aces or kings from someone else at the table, the bigger your raise can be.

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Small Stakes No-Limit Hold’em is the poker e-book that offers the most bang for your buck. For an affordable price, SSNLHE will show you in over 300 example-driven pages how to add that hard, killer edge to your game. Learn it well, and you’ll be playing bigger and better ...

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Protecting your hand is a well-known poker concept. If you think you likely have the best hand at the moment, you bet to force your opponents either to fold or to pay to draw out. In no-limit hold’em, however, many players tend to overprotect their hands.

Here’s a simple example. When I play live no-limit in Las Vegas, I see this particular play with regularity. A tight – some might say nitty – regular player is first to act before the flop in a $2-$5 game. This player rarely raises before the flop, and when he does he usually makes it $20 to go. But in this situation he raises to $60. Everyone folds, and he shows pocket queens.

Why did he do that? Why did a player who rarely raises preflop decide to make a monster raise this time? I don’t claim to have access to the thoughts of others, but I can guess at what he was thinking, “Pocket queens is a great hand, probably the best out there. If I make it $20, five people might call and then I could end up losing a big pot. It’s better to bomb the pot and get all the riff raff out.”

There’s a simple problem with this line of thought, however, and it gets to the heart of no-limit hold’em. He’s risking $60 to win just the $7 in blind money. With nine players left to act, there’s a roughly 9 percent chance one of the other players will have pocket aces or kings. Laying 8.5-to-1 with a 1-in-11 chance he’s behind, he’s potentially setting himself up for a quite thin margin for profit with a premium hand that should be, over time, one of his biggest money-makers.

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Most live $1-$2, $1-$3, and $2-$5 players focus on the big pots. They want to see flops, hit hands, and stack opponents holding second-best hands. This focus, unfortunately, does not promote long-term, consistent winning. The problem with it is obvious once you think about it. Everyone else is trying to do the same thing! For every time you win a big pot with a better kicker or a bigger flush, you’re likely to lose one to an opponent who has you pipped. Over time you’re taking two steps forward, two steps back, and not really getting anywhere.

The key to winning in live no-limit games is to focus on using position to build and steal medium-sized pots. Now before I get the “This won’t work in my game,” emails, know that I’m not talking about every live no-limit game on the planet. I’m not talking about your Thursday night game in the back of Jimmy’s bar in Billings, Montana where all seven of you put your $40 in blind every hand and see who wins. Obviously you’re not building or stealing any pots in that game. I am talking about many live games spread in card rooms across the United States from California and Nevada to Mississippi and Atlantic City.

With the disclaimer out of the way, here is a key observation about many live games: They are loose preflop. In a $2-$5 game, for instance, four or five players will gladly pay $25 to see a flop. And often one player will pay $50 or $60 without needing a particularly strong hand to do it. Here is another key observation: Most pots don’t go to showdown. Players are generally willing to give up on a pot in the face of strong betting unless they have an extraordinarily strong hand.

In other words, players are building nice-sized pots with weak hands, and then giving up on these pots because their hands are weak. This presents a terrific opportunity. You build the pot with a preflop raise, and then you steal it after the flop as long as no one hits the board too hard. Sometimes someone will hit the flop hard and you’ll lose a couple of bluff bets. But you can also hit a flop hard and be the one winning a big pot. In between big lossess and wins, you’ll be slurping up a steady diet of medium-sized pots that no one else is willing to fight for.

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Poker is a peculiar game. There’s no score. If you’re playing a cash game, there’s no winner. If you’re playing a tournament, there’s one winner and a zillion losers. Your opponents can play terribly and win a bundle. You can play great and crash and burn. All of this peculiarity has left more than one player completely frustrated, grovelling to the poker gods for a break. Clearly, if you’ve been reduced to begging for better luck, you probably haven’t succeeded. But what is success at poker?

This article is my attempt to convey what success means to me, personally, as a poker player.

First, I’ll tell you what it isn’t. It isn’t a winrate. If you poke around on the internet, you’re bound to find dozens of people who will gladly tell you that if you don’t win $20 on average for every 100 hands you play at game X, then you must suck. Or they’ll tell you that they win $20 for every 100 hands, but they don’t expect a lowly mortal such as yourself to win that much, so maybe you should win $10 for every 100 hands. Or you suck.

Please ignore all of these people. Most of them are full of it. They don’t win nearly as much as they say they do. In fact, you should take it for granted that any poker player telling you how much money they make is bending the truth at least a little bit. Most bend a lot. Don’t compare your real results to someone else’s fantasy. You can’t possibly live up.

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I play no-limit cash games regularly both live and online. I prefer to play live, and a major reason is because live players are for the most part much easier to read. It’s not that I can magically decode an opponent’s every twitch and tic. Physical tells are sometimes useful, but more important are betting patterns. Live players tend to routinely employ an assortment of plays that make them much easier to read. These plays are not all necessarily bad in and of themselves. They just have a tendency to make a player too predictable overall unless one takes special care to avoid this problem. Here are two of the common plays my opponents make that let me take advantage.

Flat-calling with A-K

Many live players, particularly in the small stakes games like $1-$2 and $2-$5, like to flat-call preflop raises rather than reraise when they hold A-K. Some players will call nearly every time they hold A-K, and some will mix it up, reraising and calling.

Flat-calling with A-K has some things going for it. First, by keeping the pot small, it allows you sometimes to play more profitably on flops such as Q-T-5. On these flops, A-K can leave you in a hand strength no-mans-land: too good to fold, but not good enough to play for stacks. You have more flexibility with the hand in a smaller pot. Additionally, flat-calling A-K can add some deception to your game. A preflop raiser with A-T, A-J, or A-Q will be much happier to play for stacks on an A-high flop against a preflop caller than against someone who reraised preflop.

Nevertheless, habitually flat-calling with A-K has one huge flaw. It completely unbalances your preflop reraising range. If you aren’t reraising with A-K (and presumably not with A-Q and weaker either), then an opponent can expect you to have a big pocket pair when you reraise preflop. This is far too much information to divulge about your hand. If I know a player is an A-K caller, and I also know that this player doesn’t often bluff reraise with a hand like 8-7 suited, I can play almost perfectly against his preflop reraises. I never have to give him action when he has A-A or K-K. This is a huge problem for him, since A-A and K-K are normally by leaps and bounds the most profitable hands.

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