This is one of the biggest lessons to be learnt in Poker, when to protect your hand and when to look to get to showdown…
There is a fine line between protection and overplaying your hand, hands where we are merged in strength, meaning we could have a bluff, we could have a strong hand or we could just be trying to protect a one pair hand.
We will take a look at a hand today which Eli Elezra played against Barry Greenstein on High Stakes Poker
UTG+1 Barry Greenstein raises to $3500 with 6♦ 5♦
Cut off: Eli Elezra calls in the with A♥ 2♠
Button: Sahamies calls with J♥ T♥
SB: Negreanu Folds
BB: Eastgate calls with 3♣ 2♣
Pot: $16,100
Flop: J♦ K♣ A♦
Eastgate: Checks
Greenstein: Bets $7,000
Elezra: Raises to $19,000
Sahamies: Folds
Eastgate: Folds
Pot: $54,100
Turn: 8♣
Greenstein: Checks
Elezra: Bets $45,000
Greenstein: Raises to $200,000
Elezra: Folds
Pot: $299,100
So what went wrong here…
We had the best hand and wanted to protect against draws, but we ended up losing the pot!
Well Eli Elezra got blown off his equity in this pot, as he almost turned his A♥ 2♠ into a bluff as he would not get three streets of value from anything worse than this and by raising the flop and betting the turn we are most certainly turning our value hand of top pair into a bluff.
It’s important to try and play pot control in position and pick off bluffs with these types of holdings, as when we try to play back at aggressive players we can make mistakes like this and end up losing pots we have a good chance at taking down with our equity.
A safer line in this pot would have been to simply call the $7,000 on the flop and look to continue on some blank turns in the way of bluff catching hands like flush draws and pair and straight draws, this is a perfectly fine way to play this type of holding.
There is a key whole in Eli Elezra’s story here against Barry Greenstein, he has nearly no value hands in his range from his action preflop, we call this having a capped range…
He cannot have AA, AK, KK, JJ and may well have even raised hands like AJs or AJo preflop, whereas Barry Greenstein can have all these combinations of hands in his range, so Barry has a huge range advantage here. The only feasible hand that Eli can have for value here is QT for the nut straight, however that’s why they call it gambling I guess and Barry’s years of live experience probably came into play when it came to making a read that we didn’t feel he was that strong and probably knew he was just trying to take down the pot with a one pair hand and end the pot on the turn.
If you missed the previous post that highlighted some actions on pouncing on capped ranges of our opponents check it out HERE