how to play small pairs

How to Play Small Pairs

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In this article, we are going to run through some advice on how to play all our small pairs… for this post, we will use 22-77 as our example hands.

These are hands that aren’t going to flop too well a great deal of the time but when they do we can look to have a stranglehold on the equity and hopefully win a big pot!

Should we always raise with any pair?

A big mistake a lot of players make is raising with their lowest pocket pairs from the earliest positions on the table, for instance, raising UTG with 2♠ 2is going to cause us a few problems, we will get 3-Bet a fair amount as we are raising into a full table of players and also when we play with the lowest pairs we will often get people calling behind with higher pairs and then even if we do flop a set we can be against a higher set.

So as a general rule we can look to fold our smallest pairs from early positions and look to widen our ranges and include hands like 22-33 in our opening range from later positions on the table.
33 from the coIt’s surprising how much of a difference this will make to your game, not losing chips to 3-Bets and then being tempted to call to hit a set and missing in a few pots gets very costly in the long run.

Are the stacks deep enough to profitably set mine?

We will want to be winning big pots in the times we do hit our sets with our small pairs to counteract the times we just miss and lose chips.

We will flop a set or better around 12% of the time

So, a good rule of thumb is that we are looking to win around 25 times the amount of the raise we are going to have to call, so let’s say we are playing a cash game at the local casino and someone raises to $10 in a $2/$4 game… we will want to have at least $250 not only in our stack but in our opponent’s stack to be able to make it worth our while calling.

Picking our spots

You’d think that playing our small pairs against looser players would be more valuable, in fact, the opposite is true, we want to play against players with a tight opening range so they will have good hands to continue with for the times that we hit a set.

If we play against looser players they won’t have enough good hands to pay us off when we hit our flop, so playing these players is less profitable.

Position is important

We will want to play more pairs when we have position on our opponents in the pot because this way we will be able to stab at pots where our opponents are weak and look to win pots we probably wouldn’t win when we are out of position.

It’s also hard for us to win big pots when we are out of position because our opponent can just play some pot control, so it’s harder for us to make the pot larger against this type of player.

Opponents behind us…

What does our table look like is an important thing to have in mind when trying to profitably flop sets.

Are our opponents behind just calling with wide ranges, if so this is a good spot for us as they will get in some tough spots pre-flop and barely ever squeeze 3-Bet and give us the wrong odds to flop our set.

Or are our opponents behind us still left to act pretty aggressive and have they been making 3-Bets a decent amount pre-flop. If so then these spots are going to be less advantageous for us as we may get pushed out of the pot.

What can we do if we can’t call profitably?

In these cases our only other options are fold or 3-Bet, quite often folding is going to be the best of those two remaining options because playing small pairs in 3-Bet pots is not a great prospect, it’s hard to make a good hand with these holdings, they have limited playability post-flop and we don’t block any of our opponents good hands that they will continue with.

Some exceptions to the rule can be playing some of our highest ranking small pairs aggressively against our widest opening opponents, this way we can get value from them when they will call us with a wide range pre-flop but fold to a bet when they miss the flop.

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