Build Pots With Your Big Hands
As a regular reader of a number of poker forums, magazines and such like, it amazes me how often I see people posting or writing in complaining that they continually fail to extract value from their big hands.
Hands such as sets, straights, flushes and better do not come around all that often; this fact alone means you should try to maximise their value. Often, the best way to extract value is to build a pot by betting and playing your hand fast, yet many players seem to love to slow play their big hands and then wonder why they did not get paid off as much as they thought they should have.
Say you are playing in a $0.50/$1 six-max cash game and a player from early position opens to $3. You call in the cutoff with 6d-6s and the flop comes down Ac-6c-9h, which you should see is a pretty spectacular flop for you. Your opponent fires a continuation bet of $4 and you opt to call, slow-playing your set. The turn is the 3s and our opponent bets again, making it $10 to play. You call. The river brings the 4c into play and now the villain checks. You bet $25 and after a while your opponent calls, shows Ad-Kd, and you win the $84 pot and congratulate yourself on being amazing at poker.
While slow-playing hands is sometimes the best way to extract value - think about a very aggressive player who will continue to bet until you play back at him - in a scenario similar to our example, playing fast would almost certainly reap greater rewards.
Let's go through the same hands as above but let's play our hand fast instead. Villain opens to $3 from early position, we call in the cutoff with 6d-6s and share a flop reading Ac-6c-9h. Villain makes a continuation bet of $4 and instead of calling we raise the action to $10. If villain has a hand such as ace-king or ace-jack then he probably won't be getting away from his hand here, plus he's likely to put in a raise of his own to scare of potential flush draws. Villain raises to $28 and we jam all in for $100. He calls with his Ad-Kd and when the turn and river fall 3s and 4c we scoop a $200 pot. Now which scenario would you prefer?
Of course, some villains may have folded to our shove on the flop and we would have won a smaller pot than check-calling our way to the river would have netted us. That is a hazard of playing a hand fast. But by slow playing we run the risk of being outdrawn - unlikely when we have a set admittedly - or a scare card coming on later streets, such as the third club landing on the river in our example, that sees villain shut down in the hand.
If you want to win more chips and more cash at poker then you have to maximise your value with big, made hands. Sometimes this is done by slowplaying, although often enough playing the hand fast will yield better results and make you much more difficult to play against to boot.
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