This is the first of a three-part series of 6Plus hand breakdowns, where we are looking into the strategy behind winning pots in this fun new game! All of the hands are real hands recorded whilst playing on Pokerstars 25NL.
Here we have the video of the full highlights from the session
Hand #1
A♥ J♠
This is quite a poor hand to play in 6 Plus hold’em however in this example, we are against an action player that has raised to $1 making the pot already $3, with us having only $11 in our stack, this is a nice amount to risk just to try and pick up the $3 in the middle.
Why this spot?
We are going to want to play the bottom of our jamming range like AJo against the widest of players and with fold equity, this way we have to ways of winning, our opponents folding or running our slight edge against their equity. The advantage of playing against players that are playing too many hands with AJo is that they will often call our jam with hands that we crush like AT, A9, A8, A7, A6, KJ, QJ.
In this case, our opponent calls us with a hand that plays fairly well to our hand with 8♥ 7♥ giving them a 43% chance of winning this pot in the long run. These are spots wherein 6plus hold’em no one is in the wrong, we are correct in pushing our edge and getting our money in as a slight favourite, however, once we push all in our opponent is getting more than the right price.
That being said, it’s obviously not a good idea to have the underdog hand in the long run even when you are getting the right price, so in general we want to be pushing wider and calling tighter, as we need less of a chance of winning the pot when we have fold equity, as the times we are simply not called and we win the money in the middle will make up for the times that our equity is less than our opponents.
Luckily enough for us in this spot, we do end up holding and taking down the $22.80 in the pot.
Another tactic that comes in very useful in these action packed games is buying into the game with a half stack, so for instance I bought into this 25NL game with just $12.50, this gives us some advantages:
#1 Our hands are easier to play with more of an all in or fold attitude as we are not deep enough to call $3 with J9 and T9 type hands
#2 We are more likely to get called when we move all in with this stack, whereas if we had $25 our opponents may make tighter folds.
#3 We are limiting our risk against coolers, so if we sit down and get stacked twice, it has only cost us $25 instead of $50.
In general, I think Short deck poker is much easier to play like this as an all in or fold game. So have a go at this at the beginning of your sessions, it’s a nice way to start before you build stacks and have to play deeper where decisions are more complex.
Hand #2
Q♣ 8♣
Whilst this is not a typically strong hand, this hand went down with us playing heads up in position on the button, our opponent raises the bet to $1.25 and with $0.75 already in the pot we are calling $1 into $3 giving us 3:1 odds, or needing roughly 33% equity, which with our hand we will always have in 6Plus hold’em even against huge hands like pocket Kings.
This makes this an easy call, so off to the flop we go…
Flush
The flop brings K♣ J♣ 6♣
Even though we have flopped a monster, with our opponent checking to us, we need to bet to get a large pot for us to win. We decide on betting 33% the size of the pot.
The Turn
9♣ Hits the on the turn, bringing a 4 card flush.
Our opponent can potentially have the Ace of clubs and have us beat now, however it is hard to make a flush in 6Plus so the chances of another club being out of the deck are fairly slim.
Should we bet?
There are merits to betting, however, we will probably only get 2 streets of value in this hand and this could be a good time to disguise our hand, as any bet here will be telling the story of a flush. Checking here limits our losses when we are occasionally against the nut flush and is deceptive in the story we are telling about our hand, therefore we are more likely to get a river bet called.
The River
K♥ Hits the end, making the final board K♣ J♣ 6♣ 9♣ K♥
This is a good river for our opponents to improve with full houses now possible, we may get a bet called here with our opponent not putting us on a flush and trying to buy the pot as a bluff.
We can size up here and bet large, as we can do this for value or as a bluff a good percentage as our opponent has checked all three streets of action to us their range is capped. What we mean by this is that they won’t ever turn over A♣ 6♣ or K♦ K♠ here, so we could easily bet large here as a bluff without having a flush, as it happens, this time we have a value hand, so we are looking for a call and thankfully our opponent is a non believer and pays us our river bet with K♠ T♠ for three of a kind.
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…Click here to view PART 2 and become a winning player today!