Big pairs and big laydowns

If raising preflop in hold’em is usually a kind of semibluff, doing it with AA is surely an exception. The best possible starting hand, the idea is to keep it in front. How do you best do that? Raise, to shorten the field. It seems obvious that the more live cards out there, the more chance that a connection with the unavoidable flop will be made to either crack your Aces or give some cracking possibilities to your opponents, if you’ll pardon the pun. The dangers of slowplaying preflop are well known – but don’t take my word for it. Everyone at some point gets burnt limping with a monster while the big blind happily checks his way into two little pair which then scoop maximum reward with minimum risk. Having said that, making a huge raise in no-limit is very likely to simply pick up the blinds, turning a potentially very profitable hand into a little winner. The problems presented by big pocket pairs, while more pleasant than those presented by, say, running card dead for weeks, are still problems.

The Big Three (AA KK and QQ) with their sidekicks JJ and AK tend to have a blinkering effect on their recipients. If hold’em as a game involved simply betting on your dealt hand and then turning it over to see if it wins, firstly it would not be as fun or popular as it is, and secondly, people’s faith in their big starting hands would be entirely justified. But those communal cards get in the way, and when the flop comes it can change a huge preflop favourite into a big ugly dog, but one which still looks beautiful to its loving owner.

The best example of this comes from cash games. Flopping, say, a small set is often an extremely lucrative thing to do, if there has been a raise and a few callers and you’ve decided to have a look with a small pair, in case this exact eventuality occurs. So often the third re-raise won’t be enough to set the alarm bells ringing loud enough in the ears of the big-pair-holder. They might be heard to say, “I can’t be winning. Call,” or, “I bet you’ve cracked my (insert large hand). Call.” This is where the laydown part comes into play.

In no-limit tournaments, you always have the option to re-raise preflop to get rid of a raiser or get it heads up with the biggest advantage possible. In limit or pot limit cash games, where the blinds are fixed and everyone is sat deep, getting away from big pairs which are big dogs is a very handy skill to develop. You won’t (usually) get it all-in preflop, so gauging where you are after the flop is important. Sitting on $500 in a pot-limit game, with a pre-flop bet of $25 in there, it is perfectly possible to avoid doing the rest of a big stack if the situation warrants it. The best (or worst) example, holding KK, with the A flopping. Sometimes you’ll still be winning, sometimes you won’t. It is certain that if you just go nuts betting whatever happens, you’ll be losing overall. Betting to find out where you are is often advisable, followed by reacting accordingly. As ever, the number and type of people in the pot and how the preflop action went are the all-important variables.

Especially in limit hold’em of the low limit variety, it is nearly impossible to drive out much of the table preflop. Dubbed ‘no-fold’em,’ this game presents the patience-challenged out there with plenty of opportunity to play any two and see what happens. A losing strategy in the long term, this can make for plenty of frustration for the selective player in the short term. When six people have called your big-pair raise to see the 7h 7c 8h flop, and half of them have called your flop bet, the other half are getting odds to draw to their flushes. They’ll probably draw for their straights. They’ll probably call with other pairs. Say you hold two black Aces on the flop just mentioned, and you’re up against 8d Kd, Ah 3h and 9s 10s (these are all hands which I’ve seen call two pre-flop raises in $2/$4 limit). Here are the odds for the hands pre and post flop:

Preflop:
Ac As 50.3%
8d Kd 16.7%
Ah 3h 13.1%
9s 10s 19.9%

On the flop:
Ac As 38.6%
8d Kd 9.8%
Ah 3h 33.7%
9s 10s 17.9%

While still ahead, the Aces are in a much tighter spot, having to dodge hearts, eights, Kings, Jacks and sixes. If one opponent actually has a 7, making trips, then the Aces weigh in at about 5%. If that flush/straight card comes, it is likely that henceforward you will effectively be calling for (hopefully, if there’s no seven lurking in someone’s hand) four outs (any Ace or any seven, for a full house). This is a relatively extreme example from a loose game, but if you play online for any length of time, this kind of situation will come up again and again, and saving a bet when your hand is an almost certain loser makes good sense. It’s been said before but it’s worth saying again: avoid falling permanently in love with attractive hands on the basis of their preflop value.

Back to tournaments, and a story from this year’s World Series Main Event. Neil ‘Bad Beat’ Channing made what is in anyone’s vocabulary a tight fold, passing KK preflop to an all-in raise early in the tournament. The gentleman who raised showed him an Ace, and there was a rumour that the other card was a King. There was a lot of badgering going on about whether this particular big pair shouldn’t have warranted a call here, but he’d clearly thought it through and his decision was made along these lines. The blinds are tiny, the stacks huge, and even if he didn’t have the Aces, a player happy to whack his whole stack in on AK once will probably do it again. There are better situations to pick off players, and there’s no need to get involved over the relative little in the middle when as he notes, “I’m either 4/1 or 4/11.”

What was especially interesting about this hand was the limp-reraise move his opponent made. The guy limped for 50, and when he was raised to 275 (with a caller in the middle) pushed for the full 10,000. Normally this is a signal that a strong hand has snuck in early hoping that someone will take a stab at the pot and the raise can be absorbed along with the blinds/calls with a hefty reraise. Of course, I know that you know that I know etc. so it’s quite a good move if you haven’t got the hand to back it up, but have the balls to stick your chips in.

But back to the big pairs. What qualifies as big? Not just Aces, surely, or Aces and Kings. Where does the confidence in a preflop hand start to become unjustified? It all depends, as usual, on whom you are playing, what kind of game it is and how other people have been betting. This sounds like a wishy-washy cover-up for a lack of direct advice, but hold’em is a strange mixture of maths and psychology, aggression and patience. Short handed, short stacked and deep in a no-limit tournament, moving all-in in late position with pocket Jacks seems like a good idea, but making the same move early in the same tournament with a lot of chips after there’s been a raise and a re-raise in front of you is not so great. Similarly, pocket 8s are just a middle-of-the-road pair until you flop a set or you guess your AK-holding opponent has missed a raggy flop.

Pocket pairs, and big pocket pairs in particular are stronger hands in no-limit and pot limit than in limit (especially as you can manipulate the odds your opponent is receiving to draw), but they aren’t invincible. About one in five times heads up, if all the cards are seen AA will lose to a smaller pocket pair. Hundreds of emails a week are written to online sites concerning this very matter. People’s memories are truly remarkable when it comes to recounting pots lost with big pairs, and notoriously leaky when asked about their winning experiences. I have heard “I can’t win with Aces” more times than I can remember. If you truly think that, consider offering to swap them for a random hand – I wouldn’t.