Suited Connectors In No-Limit Hold’em Revisited

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A few months back I wrote an article about playing suited connectors titled “How Suited Connectors Are Costing You Money.” The basic premise of the article was that a lot of people play suited connectors in the wrong situations and with the wrong expectations. If you’re limping in and calling raises preflop, you’re picking the wrong situations. You should be opening the pot and playing in position. And if you’re playing suited connectors with the sole goal of making a hand and winning a big pot, you have the wrong expectations. For suited connectors to show a profit, you can’t just lie back and wait for a hand. You have to attack and steal pots with them. If you play suited connectors in the wrong situations and with the wrong expectations, you’re costing yourself money.

But suited connectors aren’t all bad. Indeed, they can be quite nice no-limit hands if you play them well. Shortly after the original article was published, one of my readers alerted me to the discussion of a hand posted on the forums at InternetTexasHoldem.com and asked me for my thoughts.

Here’s a summary of the hand in question.

It’s a full ring online $0.50-$1 game played with $100 effective stacks. A player opens from three off the button for $3.50. The next player calls. The cutoff folds, and the action is to me on the button with 8 6 .

I’ve played with the open raiser before, so I know that his range to open from this seat is approximately any pair fives or better, A-T or better, A-8 suited or better, K-J or better, or Q-J.

I call the $3.50, and the blinds fold. So the pot is about $10.50 on the flop, there’s $96.50 behind, and the flop comes:

A 9 7

Everyone checks to me on the button, and I bet $8 into the $10.50 pot. The preflop raiser checkraises to $25, and the middle player folds. What now?

Here are my thoughts about the hand.

Preflop, I reraise (rather than call) in this situation with a good frequency. The opener’s range is wide, and the pot is sweetened with a call from a likely weak hand. I would expect to pick up the pot immediately often enough that the reraise will likely come close to paying for itself.

When you get called, you have a hand that is disguised and tends to flop a lot of draws. Flopping a draw will give you the maximum ability to put the final screws of pressure on postflop. This is what I mean when I recommend playing suited connectors with position and looking for chances to steal the pot. You don’t want to sit around and wait for your hand to connect with a flop. It won’t happen often enough, and you won’t get paid off frequently enough to compensate you for all your misses. Instead, you want to seize the initiative and force your opponents to hit the flop or fold.

Furthermore, reraising with 8-6 suited in this situation balances your reraises with big hands. If you reraise small card hands with some regularity, you’ll find that otherwise sane players will start to call your reraises with hands like A-T when they’re out of position. As a result you’ll tend to make a lot more profit on average with your big pocket pair hands.

As long as you don’t go crazy with these in position suited connector reraises, they can be really difficult for an open raiser to counter.

Calling is also a reasonable option, but again you can’t rely on implied odds alone to make the hand profitable. You must plan to steal quite a bit. For instance, you might bet nearly any flop that gets checked to you. And if the preflop raiser is the kamikaze type who will fire a continuation bet nearly 100 percent of the time even out of position into two players, then you can’t just give up whenever you miss the flop. Sometimes you have to call or raise that flop bet with air, trying to take the pot away. Again, if you fold every time you miss, you’ll be folding on the majority of flops, and you won’t win enough on the remainder of the flops to make up for it.

When you flop a monster draw, as in the example hand, you want to get the money in. I think the opener’s checkraising line is suspicious. It’s a really strange flop to try to checkraise, but perhaps this player is a little loopy. Or maybe he thinks that someone behind him is very aggressive and is almost certain to bet.

In general, in no-limit, when there’s a confrontation between a made hand and a big draw that both have roughly 50 percent equity on the flop, the big draws like to get all the money in on the flop, and the made hands like to get it in in installments over a few streets. Because your equity is so strong against most made hands, I would argue for simply shoving all-in over the flop checkraise.

The only possible exception to that conclusion would be if, for some reason, you think this peculiar checkraise line heavily weights your opponent’s range toward big flush draws. If you shove immediately, a hand like K Q will call you, and you’ll be a solid underdog. If you flat call the checkraise and shove the turn if a flush card doesn’t come, however, you may get folds you wouldn’t have gotten on the flop.

But big flush draws are quite a small part of his overall range on the flop (before he takes any action), so your read on the checkraise would have to be very precise to even consider any line other than shoving the flop.

Overall, I think the preflop call can be justified, but if I called I’d do so thinking about how I could steal the pot postflop. A preflop reraise would have been a strong option well worth considering. And once you call preflop and flop a monster draw, I think the best play in the vast majority of cases is to shove all-in on the flop and hope to win the hand.

[This article appeared in the October 8, 2008 issue (Vol. 21, No. 20) of Card Player.]

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