Eric Rizen Lynch

A key hand I actually played well from last night

In my previous post I spent a lot of time talking about a couple of hands I played very poorly, but I had one key hand last night I played very well last night that I thought I might share here. I had 99 in the BB with around 7k in chips with 100/200 blinds (no antes) in the 100+9 on Stars last night. I was a top 5 stack and villian in this hand was MP3 with ~5k and was a top 10 stack in the tournament with around 130 players left.

Villian raised to 600 and I flat called the 400 from the BB when it was folded to me, and the flop came down AQ9 with two clubs. Now, everyone's first impulse when the flop a set is to check/call flop, check/raise turn or otherwise slow play it. This is one of those flops though where if you look at his raising range he either has a very strong hand (something like AK or AQ, to a lesser extent AJ/AT) or he's cursing the flop with something like TT/JJ/KK. There is always a possibility he has AA or QQ, but if he's got you set over set, it's just not your night and I'm going broke here anyways.

So let's look at this for a second. In the case of TT/JJ/KK checking here will probably get a cont. bet out of him. It's doubtful once you call his flop bet though that he'll bet the turn, so you'll be forced to make a weak value bet on the river into a smallish pot or worse yet, you could see running cards that scare you away from extracting much here. However, if he just hit with AK/AQ or another big Ace and you check/call you'll likely get the CR in on the turn, but he'll read you for a monster hand and may not call off as many of his chips as you'd like here.

This is why I love betting my monster hands into these kinds of flops. Sure, I'm going to lose some value from KK/JJ/TT when they fold the flop when they might have bet, but those times when they have big Aces you're going to take their entire stack. I bet out ~900 making it look like I had some sort of weak Ace that I hit. I got exactly what I wanted when he raised me to ~2500. At this point he had put over half his stack in the middle, and I decided he had committed himself enough he probably wouldn't fold if I came over the top, so I put him all in. He called and flipped over AK with no club and my hand held up. That vaulted me WELL into 1st in chips barely into the second hour.

I guess my point of this post is, pay attention to your opponent's actions and flop texture when deciding if the time is right for a slowplay or if playing fast will serve you better. People like to assume you should always slowplay your big hands, but the truth is all you need to put someone to the felt is for them to have a good second best hand. There are flops when it's appropriate to try and let them hit the 2nd best hand (and thus, slowplay) and there are times they already have the second best hand. It's during those times you can play fast and actually gain a lot of value because no one puts you on a set if you're willing to put all your chips in the middle on the flop.

-Rizen