06-28-05, LearnTexasHoldem:

Two Pair Hands

Question: I have a hole in my game that I am having a hard time figuring out. I play limit and no limit. I do well when I have strong hands, or top pair good kicker, and I do a good job at trapping people.

However, I always freeze when I have top pair, but see the board pair, especially in no limit. What strategies do you use when this happens? For example:

Hand- QJ

Flop J-7-7 rainbow

Top 3 Beginner Rooms

This hand was particularly scary. It was a loose-passive table with 5 people in on the flop. I had raised one off the button. It was limit. Someone bets into me. I have the top pair with a decent kicker, in fact I have TWO pair. I ended up playing this hand very passively. I ended up calling down, not raising. I won the hand (the beator had a J-T), but think I could have extracted more money along the way than I did.

My problem playing two pair is that unless I have both cards (Hand AQ, Flop A-Q-6), I have a hard time considering it "two pair". Part of the reason is that I have successfully trapped people when I had trips in a similar situation, and I fear getting trapped myself.

Do you have any advice on how I could handle this situation better? I feel that I am giving up an edge when I have two pair, but only one in my hand, but I am too inexperienced to exploit it properly.

Thanks,

Jeromy

Answer: You are exactly right. When there is a pair on the board, you don't really have a two pair like you do when you have AQ and the board is A-Q-4. There are three considerations that affect my play: how many people are in, who they are, and how much it will cost me. Let's get the easy stuff out of the way. When you are in a multi-way pot, like the one you are in, and there is a raise before you, you can be pretty much sure your hand isn't good. (The vast majority of the time the person will have the trips and it isn't worth paying to find out.)

What is the hardest to play in is when you have a pot with maybe three people in and you have the QJ on the J-7-7 flop. I think most of the time, I would just call down. What if I had AA here instead? I might raise the flop and then go from there if it were limit holdem. If the person check raised me on the turn, I would have to muck though. See in limit holdem, when I'm going to lose, I'm not going to lose a ton on the hand (especially if I just call down).

What makes no limit holdem harder, and why you need to give it more caution, is because one false move could mean your entire stack. If I had the QJ on the J-7-7 flop, I wouldn't value it very much in no limit holdem. My course of action would be to bet the flop. If I get called, that has to mean something. Now I think about who called me. I'm obviously more happy if a bad player called me than a tight player, since the tight player only will call me with something like I have or better. But the problem with the bad player's call is still that since he plays so many hands, this could have hit him.

Also, one caller on the flop versus two is a big difference in no limit holdem. Notice there aren't a lot of draws on the this flop either. My action on the turn in no limit against two callers would be to check and see what they did. Against one opponent I would be faced with the toughest decision. In another question here I just talked about the flop with regards to gaining information for later in the hand. In no limit holdem, I might bet something larger than the pot on the flop here just to see what happened. Notice the info I get back in return -- much purer.

If I get raised, that settles that. Even a call means a lot more then. A weak bet on the flop gives me no useful info, a check gives me even less. When I write answers here, my goal is to show you the kinds of things I think about when I'm playing, not set rules. There are no rules written in stone that you can go by and win. You need to understand the underlying concepts and then you'll be able to adapt to each scenario.

Lastly, and maybe most importantly, I want to draw your attention to what you are fundamentally asking. You are asking, "how can I make more money in marginal situations?" And I think that isn't correct. Marginal situations are marginal because they are risky. My guess is that you could beat the stakes you are playing at right now without having to incur too much extra risk.

Remember, the key to beating easy games is just playing straightforwardly and showing down the best hand. If you have a marginal hand, you don't want to pump the pot; instead, you want to survive and take on as little added risk as possible. Beat them for a lot of chips in a stronger hand, be content with winning a small pot here or just losing a little. Not every pot where you think you might have the best hand should be played as aggressive as others.

Compare poker to business. Would you recommend making the same size investments in skeptical opportunities as sound ones? To put this in a wider context, what makes higher stakes harder to beat is because the players won't allow you to beat them by just waiting there all day for solid hands -- you'll get no action. To get action you have to start playing more hands and being more aggressive with them to add deception. This is why bigger games are harder to beat, you have more marginal hands.

Your rating:

Click on the clover of your choice

User Rating: (0 Votes)

  • Share on Facebook
  • Print
  • Digg
  • Del.icio.us