718More on Basic versus Improv
posted on January 15th, 2010
It’s common thought by even mediocre poker players that you want to maximize profit on your big hands and minimize loss on your losers. I think anyone who has played poker for even the slightest amount of time and has began thinking about the economics of that knows this truth. The trick comes when you have to read what’s happening and either a) build a pot when you have an opponent who will pay you off with a worse hand, or b) control the pot so you minimize your loss when you have the second best hand. In this article we’re going to talk about the former, building a pot with a monster hand. Consider this example (This is a real hand by the way that happened at the Bellagio for the WPT championship. Ok so while a normal strategy would be to check the stone cold nuts and let your opponent do the betting for you. What happened this hand was that the blinds were the five playing. One had JQ diamonds and the flop comes K-10-9 all diamonds. Now let’s think about this. The royal flush is blocked, so even in the event that your opponent has the supposed nut flush, he couldn’t even try to draw to royal since you have blockers. The initial bettor was in the hijack chair (just before the button) and raised to 6x the big blind. After the flop, the table checked around to the initial bettor and he raised again to about pot sized. The action was on the man with the straight flush. Here’s where the improv comes in. The normal action here would be to call, and your opponent being competent would check behind you. And then you’d be put in a situation to try to get some money in on the river with a smallish value bet. However, there are ways to make this poker hand more profitable. What you’re wanting to do here is analyze first. With a flop like that, the bettor has to have something fairly strong to bet into four people. Two fold, and it’s on the straight flush in the big blind. Now knowing that the hand has to be pretty strong to make that bet, the straight flush guy can deviate a bit form standard play and make a bet here. After all, a 3 bet here can be seen as a steal, or can be seen as a second best hand if the player has the nut flush, or the nut flush draw with top pair. So to maximize value here, you can make that bet and put the pressure on your opponent. What actually happened in the hand was that the straight flush guy ended up betting 8000, just over the pot and the other player decided to stack off with him. Of course he was drawing to the ace high flush, it hit, but it didn’t matter at that point.
