We are going to look at a hand from High Stakes Poker Season 1 Episode 3, where Jennifer Harman, Eli Elezra, and Sammy Farha take a flop with some big hands. We pick up the action in the video here:
Preflop
With blinds at $300/$600 Jennifer Harman enters in the pot with a limp of $600 with 7♠ 7♣ in early position
Eli Elezra in the next position then raises to $4000 with T♣ T♥
Next to him is Sammy Farha who decides to flat call this raise with A♣ K♠
Action is then folded back to Harman who decides to take a flop with her pocket pair making the pot $13,700
Action Flop!
7♦ K♣ 4♠
A nightmare flop here for Sammy’s A♣ K♠ with the flop giving him top pair top kicker and Harman flopping middle set.
Jennifer starts with a check on this flop, Eli Bets $8500 with his middle pair of T♣ T♥ to spice things up and Sammy raises to $25,500 with his A♣ K♠…
Now to Jennifer, who has her opponents in jail with this holding, with 89% equity three ways, with Sammy only having a 2% chance of winning this pot by showdown, needing to hit running perfect cards.
In this type of situation, although it can be daunting to smooth call and even this may look strong, but 4Bet raising all in on this flop is extremely strong here and we will allow our opponents to fold even the strongest of holdings.
On such a dry board where the only draw is 56, which would be an open-ended straight draw, we don’t need to protect our hand from anything, so slow playing this type of board is fine.
On wetter boards such as K♠ Q♠ 7♦ where there are more combinations of hands that have a lot of equity such as straight and flush draws fast playing here is a good play, we can represent hands like A♠ T♠, J♠ T♠, A♠ J♠ that are semi-bluffing with our equity as well as shoving for value/protection with hands like sets and two pairs, making our all in less weighted only to nutted hands and allowing our opponents to make wider calls correctly.
However, on such a dry rainbow board pushing all in here protects against nothing and just weights our hand towards only super strong holdings. Like two pairs and sets. Letting our aggressive opponent Sammy Farha off the hook in this hand and winning only a fraction of the pot that could have been, it’s important to note that when we are at the extreme top end of our range to allow our opponents some maneuver to make moves and increase the pot themselves with little chance of improving.