Deeper underground

SCENARIO ONE

You are playing in a live £1,000 no-limit hold’em tournament and have lost around 2,000 from your starting stack, putting you on 7,900 chips at the 100/200 blind level. You hold 9?-9? in mid-position and after an early-position (EP) player limps you raise it up to 800. The blinds both fold and the EP limper calls. The flop comes Q?-10?-4?. The EP player thinks for a short while and checks. You bet 1,000 and the EP player again thinks for a short while before calling. The turn is a J?, giving you additional straight outs, so when the EP player checks, you elect to check behind. On the 7? river the EP player glances over to you and quietly bets 2,000 into the 3,900 pot. What should you do?

PRE-FLOP

In this spot with one early-position limper, I would mix it up between raising some of the time and calling some of the time. The main consideration would be whether or not I thought my opponent was trapping me with a big hand or whether he just likes to limp a lot. I think raising around the size of the pot is fine, as we have position. I think 9?-9? at this 100/200 level can play well multi-way or heads-up. So you raise to 800 and the early- position limper just calls. In general against most players, I would put him on a fairly wide range here which would include small/mid pairs, Broadway cards, suited Aces and most suited connectors.

FLOP

The flop comes down Q?-10?-4?, which is not great for your pair of nines and connects well with a lot of hands you could be up against. Most people’s natural inclination here would be to bet the flop, as by checking they are somehow showing weakness and may be bluffed on a later street. However, I would mix it up between betting around half the pot and checking. Betting won’t really serve any purpose except to narrow your opponent’s range to hands that already beat you and hands with a lot of equity against you, and will make your hand too difficult to play on later streets. Your hand still has some potential showdown value, so why inflate the pot with a hand that you’re not sure is best? However, since you did bet the flop and got called, we can start to narrow the villain’s range down somewhat. I would now describe his range as follows: hands that beat us (Queens, tens, overpairs, all sets and some two-pair hands), hands that have a lot of equity against us (hands like A?-X? and Q?-J?), hands with decent equity against us (straight draws with overcards) and a few hands that we beat (underpairs and all fours). So, we have managed to narrow his range somewhat. Again, however, I like checking against strong opponents in situations like this, as many of these ‘drawing’ hands may check-raise us and possibly force us to lay down the ‘best’ hand. The last point I would make is this: would he really just call a bet with a very strong hand on such a draw-heavy board?

TURN

The turn brings the J?, so the board reads Q?-10?– 4?-J?. The pot now contains 3,900. Our effective stack is 6,100. Any reasonable bet here commits us to this pot. Much of the range that we assigned the villain on the flop is completed by this J? (overcards and straight draws). We must also realise that the Jack brings us a straight draw which may win us the pot if we are currently behind. As such, checking the turn for pot control and the free river card is the best play.

RIVER

In my opinion the 7? on the river is basically a blank. Our opponent’s bet size is important too. The 2,000 seems to be a bet that wants value, but it may be a weak bluff attempt with a missed draw. I do not feel on the river that he has a very strong hand, as he would usually have check-raised the flop or led the turn. But on the river he is not value-betting any hands worse than ours. Even though you only have to be right 25% of the time to call profitably, against most of his range you should fold. Also, many of the hands that he may be betting as a ‘bluff ’ in his mind (some Jacks, some tens) actually have us beaten. If he is a tough opponent this bluff on the river is too obvious, which would lead me again to think level three with him and fold. Against a weaker player I might think differently.

CONCLUSION

I wouldn’t have played the hand as we did here by betting the flop. I would have used the same number of chips (1,000) to call (bluff-catch) on the turn. I would then have used my position to re-evaluate the river. Without wanting to sound too passive, it is sometimes okay to fold in spots like these (if a really bad turn card appears). This isn’t really a good board for 9-9.

SCENARIO TWO

You are playing in a £100 no-limit hold’em freezeout and it’s the second level with blinds at 50/100. You have just under your starting stack with 4,800 chips. It’s folded to you in the cut-off and you open-raise to 300 with 9?-9;. The button and the small blind both fold. The big blind calls with a stack of 8,400. The flop comes 3?-5?-7;. The big blind checks and you continuation-bet 400. The big blind quickly raises to 1,200. You call. The turn is the J? and you both check. The river is a K? and the big blind quickly bets enough to put you all-in. Can you call?

PRE-FLOP

Something that will underpin my thoughts regarding our play here is ‘hand distribution’. How often do we get dealt good hands? What is an average/good hand on a nine-handed table? Our experience tells us that we have a strong (top 5%) hand here in good position. This is a good opportunity for us to raise and 300 seems like a nice amount to build the pot and thin the field. Do not be mistaken that we are ‘stealing’ the blinds here. We are attempting to accumulate chips to be competitive later in the tournament and raising a good hand from a solid position. It’s good that he has called!

FLOP

The flop of 3?-5?-7? is about as good as it gets for pocket nines. The pot contains 700 chips and we have 4,500 remaining. The concept of stack-to-pot ratios (SPR) is crucial in our decision-making process here. Some poker geeks (much cleverer than me) have worked out that we want to avoid situations where we can go broke with one pair with a high SPR (above 13). Even with an SPR of 10, we should be cautious of an opponent that wants to get all-in with us. However, with a low SPR (in this case just over six), folding at some point becomes unprofitable as we would be folding the best hand too often. Two nines here are nearly the nuts, and if we have been out-flopped it is just a cold deck. So, now we have decided to go with the hand, how do we best proceed? I like our bet of 400 into 700 – just over half the size of the pot, which is very standard. It allows us to extract value, and allows our opponent to make a mistake by calling with a worse hand/draw. The situation develops when he check-raises our 400 bet to 1,200. I would now be thinking of his range as follows: hands that have us beaten (sets, unlikely overpairs or two-pair hands or a very unlikely straight), and hands that we beat (any weaker pair, combo draws, gutshots with overcards, overcards and total air). I think the combo draws with maybe a pair and a straight draw make up a good part of his range here.

Overall I think we are in good shape. My play now would be to go all-in. I feel that 9-9 isn’t quite strong enough to slow-play, as some of his range may well be high cards. To balance the argument, I think my opponent here is bluffing a lot of the time. Will he bluff the turn/river? This may be an incentive just to call on the flop if we think that pushing allows him to play his hand perfectly by folding (if indeed he is outright bluffing).

TURN

Given that we have just called his raise on the flop, the pot contains 3,100 and we have 3,500 remaining. We should never be folding here. The turn is the J?, which seems somewhat of a blank (what hand check-raised the flop with a Jack in it?) and a backdoor spade flush draw starts to appear. The initiative is with our opponent. In many ways he is expected to bet but in fact checks to us. What on earth does his check mean? Can he really check very strong hands to us here? Maybe he ‘info-raised’ top pair on the flop and thinks he’s beaten. Will he bluff the river if we check behind? Perhaps, but even so I don’t like our check here. It looks to me as if he has given up, if he is indeed running a bluff. I’d move to end the hand now as there are still a number of combo draws (and even spades) that we don’t want getting there for free.

RIVER

The river brings the seemingly harmless K?. For the reason I mentioned above, hands that check-raise the flop don’t often contain a King. He puts us all-in, so we have to call 3,500 into a pot of 6,600, which is just under 2/1. So we have to be right about 35% of the time for our call to be profitable. If we think it through, all possible combo draws have missed, we have severely under-represented our hand given that we didn’t go all-in on the flop and checked behind on the turn, and he has us covered in chips and cannot go out if his ‘desperate’ bluff fails. Some opponents who don’t fully think through their hands will think the Jack and King are scare cards for us and may well turn an 8-7 type hand into a bluff. If we have indeed run into a set on the flop, ask yourself how our 9-9 is different from Aces or Kings (given that he didn’t re-raise pre-flop). Call!