Q&A #114: Two Big Pocket Pair Hands From Live No-Limit Games

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Recently on the message board I fielded two questions about big pocket pair hands played in live no-limit games. I want to share these two hands with all my readers.

The first question comes from Slam. You can read the entire discussion on the message board. Slam asks:

I’m holding my own with all of my $100 buy-in…pretty loose game. I’m dealt K K in middle position. Two players in front of me limp in for $4 min bet. I make it $12. Two players after me and two behind me all call the $12 ( $60 in the pot )

Flop comes out 9-4-4 rainbow. Two players check to me, I push my $85 all-in. Everyone folds, one guy behind me (who checked) calls my bet with roughly same chip stack. He turns over 4-6 offsuit, two lumps of coal hit the turn and river, he politely rakes the pot.

I give him the stink eye and say “You call $12 with 4-6 offsuit ?!?!” He says “You bet $12 with Kings ?!? A couple other players snicker, I get up and leave (politely I think).

Statement: I have no problem dropping $100 in that situation, but wonder if that was a dumb play

Question #1: Did he infer my $12 pre-flop was too much or not enough ?

Question 2: Do you think I made the correct play, or was there a better way to play my kings ?

I would have played the hand differently in two ways:

1. I would have raised more preflop. Not because $12 with $100 stacks isn’t “enough” to make the hand profitable… it is. But I think you can squeeze more money out of the hand by raising bigger. I probably would have made it $20 to go. The guy with 6-4 offsuit probably still would have called, and that’s just fine. The vast majority of the time you just got $8 more out of him, while the occasional times he outflops you you end up losing the same amount. Win more when you win, lose the same when you lose. That means more profit long-term.
2. I would have bet less on the flop. That’s a fairly good flop for your hand, but you want people to be able to pay you off with lesser hands. You want anyone with a 9 or a smaller pocket pair to go to the felt with you. They may do that even in the face of your all-in push, but I probably would have bet about $20 or $25 into the $60 pot. You don’t need to protect your hand because the chance of getting outdrawn is small. I’d try to take the weaker pairs for a ride by betting $20 now, maybe $30 on the turn, and then the rest on the river. Know how they sell worthless crap on TV by splitting it into 3 low payments of just $19.99? Well, you can sell a crap deal to anyone with a 9 by putting them on the installment plan also.

Either way, you’re going broke to the guy that flopped trips. No way to avoid that at all.

The bottom line is that if you’re playing a 50BB stack and you have an opportunity to 3-bet preflop with a big pocket pair, you will be committing your entire stack postflop the vast majority of the time. Sometimes you’ll lose, but usually you’ll win. And either way, your main concern should be how to get your opponents with weaker hands to put as much money in the pot as possible.

One final point: In my opinion it’s impossible to “hold your own” with a 50BB stack. That stack could easily be doubled up in one hand or lost in one hand, and either way you could have played just fine. Your stack is a tool to help you acquire more chips, and when you think in terms of “holding your own” you often sink into the trap of seeking to conserve or nurse what you have rather than aggressively going after what the other guys have. More on this later.

The second question comes from vb_rounder. Again, you can read the entire discussion on the message board. Vb_rounder asks:

EP raises to around $12.00 preflop. I re-raise in LP w/ JJ to $35.00 . BB (loose, forty-something, touristy-looking fellow) raises all in for $261.00 total. EP player folds. I asked him “why so much?” BB says something to the effect of “I just don’t want you to suckout”. I folded JJ faceup on the table. I recently doubled my starting stack to break even for the session, and didn’t feel like flipping for stacks. He later stated that “he had KK”, but never showed.

Bad laydown?

I think it’s a good fold. For the vast majority of live games, your opponent has no less than K-K to make this reraise. The fact that he’s touristy-looking makes me like the fold more.

I agree with a poster in the thread about not folding face-up. It’s unlikely to hurt you much, but you never know who might see it and decide to take a shot at you later. Since it’s a live game and you’re assuming (correctly) that people aren’t making a lot of big bluffs, you don’t want to encourage it at all because if the same situation comes up again, you should be folding then also. It’s not in your interest to encourage bluffing if you plan to fold.

I did want to point out your stack psychology. You just recently doubled up and got even and now you didn’t want to flip for stacks. This kind of thinking will just cripple you in no-limit. It really, really will. Honestly, I make a lot of money in live no-limit games by stealing pot after pot from guys who think just like you did here. It couldn’t be simpler. I just shove the big bets out there and watch them fold everything they don’t consider a near lock. They grumble and complain and say, “One of these days I’m going to stand up to you.” And they never do.

To win serious money at no limit you have to use your stack as a weapon, and that means being 100% willing to lose it at any moment. I really can’t stress this point enough as it’s extremely important. When I play live, I always play stakes where I can lose stack after stack and just shrug it off, replacing it as needed. That allows me to be more aggressive than the players who are nursing their stacks, and basically it allows me to rob them blind, $20 or $25 at a time.

If you don’t have enough money to replace stack after stack at the stakes you’re playing, move down. If you’re already playing the smallest game in the room, buy-in for less. If you’re playing the smallest game in the room and you can’t buy-in for less because the minimum buy-in is $40 and you have less than, say, $400 to play with… unfortunately, you’re kind of pretty much underrolled to play no-limit. You can play, but expect not to play that well because you’ll be too worried about what you can lose to play as aggressively as you should.

Overall I think that many players question their play with big pairs often because they are overly concerned about losing one buy-in. Getting stacked happens, and the best players have little to no fear of losing it all.

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