Q&A #20: Playing an Overpair against a Check-Raise

There’s a few ways to address the problem:

1. Raise more preflop
2. Refuse to pay off sometimes
3. Accept it

I advocate (with vehement disagreement from some camps) that you should vary your raise size preflop according to what you want to accomplish with the hand. You tend to raise a little more with your “value” hands than with your “blind steal” hands. But you mix it up enough so that it’s not easy to tell. And you also mix it up based on the stack sizes.

For instance, the stacks were 1640, so maybe you raise to 200 this time with JJ instead of 150. But if the stacks were 1140 or 3740, you might go back to the 150 raise with JJ. And you raise 150 or 200 also with Q9s (or whatever) sometimes.

If you play that way, no one’s going to know you have JJ just because you raised X amount and Q9s just because you raised Y amount. The number of variables are too many for 99.9% of players to reverse engineer at the table.

If you do that, you play more hands more often with the raise size best for you, rather than the “standard” one-size-fits-all size.

As for refusing to pay off… well, as I said above, that’s a very dangerous “default” play in this situation. But if someone is set-mining, then it’s not so dangerous. Basically, your opponent has to make a choice: if they want you to pay off their sets, they will have to play some non-pocket pairs and sometimes pay off your overpair. If they refuse to do that, you refuse to pay off the sets.

And with some good players, you just have to accept it that they’ll make money with their pocket pairs in some circumstances. You can’t fool all of the people all of the time, as it were. There’s no way to hermetically seal yourself against good players. Sometimes you’ll profit off them, and sometimes they’ll profit off you. You just seek to minimize, adjust, and stay one step ahead whenever possible.