So we all love to see the pocket Kings land in our starting hand, but sometimes things can get a little bit tricky when we take our big pair further into the streets of action post-flop.
We have some good examples of the different ways we will want to play this strong hand…
Playing Kings with an Ace on Board
Blinds 100/200 Tournament with 10,000 starting stacks effective so 50BBs deep
Hero UTG: K♠ K♦ Raise to 600
BB: Calls
Flop: 2♣ 2♠ 7♥
BB: Checks
Hero: ?
We are at a slight nut disadvantage here because our opponent could have a tonne of suited 2x in their range, including hands like 32s, 42s, Q2s, K2s, A2s for example, whereas we have none of those holdings.
However, we cannot let this small part of our opponents range put us off our big hand here, we can do a few things on this board though, we could check back here and play deceptively, faining some weakness and thus being able to possibly catch some bluffs from our opponent or allow them to think there hand is better and we are just shutting down with high card hands.
Betting small here has a lot of merit too, we build the pot we can get calls from floats and pairs like 33–JJ
We do end up betting here, let’s pick up the action…
Hero: Bets 500
BB: Raises to 1,800
Hero: ?
Ok, so we have been raised here, but this isn’t all that surprising, our opponent can attack this board quite a bit because they have that nut advantage we talked about, they might check-raise here as a bluff to get us off hands that have missed this flop like all our broadway holdings.
Our opponent could be one of those players that will play their 7x or pairs like 88-JJ as a raise here to try and find out where they are at in the hand and gain a little information.
There is little to no point in us 3-Betting here, we will only ever build a pot against hands that have us crushed and we want to keep all our opponents worse hands in the pot.
Folding here is out of the question, so our only valid course of action is to continue with a call here…
Turn: A♥
BB: Checks
Hero: ?
The dreaded Ace! But hold on, let’s think about this, how bad is this card for us actually…
The only hand that could raise the flop with an Ace in that we had beat is a hand like A7, so this card isn’t really even a scare card for us. So should we just continue to bet our hand?
Well, we will likely only get 2 streets of value with this holding now with an Ace on the board, so there is a tonne of merit to checking back, this way we can call any bet on the River and we keep all our opponents bluffs in the pot that might fire out but will fold to a Turn bet.
So, we check and see the last card…
River: 4♣
BB: Checks
Hero: ?
So now our opponent checks to us once again on yet another blank with the final board reading:
2♣ 2♠ 7♥ A♥ 4♣
We don’t have to be scared of too much here and we can confidently go for some value with our Kings.
So we bet fairly small, hoping to get called by a two pair type hand that can’t pay too much because they don’t have an Ace, betting around 2,500 and getting called by 87o for two pair.
A strange raise for them on the flop, there is little point in them making, they don’t really get a better hand to fold ever and they blow all our bluffs off the pot, they can sometimes get a little bit of equity denial in protecting their hand, but they are just increasing the size of the pot to play a more bloated pot out of position.
Bigger pots are going to be harder to navigate, so it’s worth taking note of how the Villian played their hand here so we don’t make the same mistakes.
Another thing about their raise is it’s very hard to balance on this dry board texture unless they are using complete non-showdown hands to mix into this raising strategy with hands like Q9o and J8o added, when they raise here I have a suspicion their hand will always look a lot like what it actually is in this pot. That’s a bad way to play poker, we don’t want to turn our hands face up as we will be way too easy to play against.
Kings in a Deep stacked 3-Way Spot
Blinds 500/1000 Tournament with 300,000 stacks effective so 300BBs deep
Hero MP: K♦ K♥ Raise to 3,000
BTN: 3-Bets to 8,500
BB: Calls 8,500
Hero: ?
I don’t mind 4-Betting here, but the thing is we then risk turning our hand face up as super strong, in general, we want to keep in weaker hands so whilst it isn’t the best to take this pot 3-ways we might be able to win a big pot with our disguised huge pair this way.
So to mix up our play a little we smooth call this Button 3-Bet and take the flop.
Flop: 3♣ 7♣ 8♥
BB: Checks
Hero: Checks
BTN: Bets 15,000
BB: Calls 15,000
Hero: ?
So, we could just smooth call here and keep our hand strength under the radar, however, we have a pretty wet board with a flush draw here that we can easily get calls from a tonne of hands if we raise.
So I like raising here, we don’t need to go too big because then we can let good players get rid of some over-pairs on this board and we really want to keep all the over-pairs in this pot.
So we raise to 40,000
BTN: Folds
BB: Calls
Turn: 5♦
Normally this would be a pretty wet card that we should fear, it brings straights and two pairs, but we need to fear these combinations of hands way less in a 3-Bet pot like this because ranges become much tighter, the Big Blind is not going to cold call a 3-Bet out of position with a hand like 69s.
So it’s basically a blank, even though it doesn’t look like one.
The action is checked too us from the Big Blind and now we just need to decide how much we want to bet. There is now 122,000 in the middle, so this is a big pot!
We are going to want to bet an amount that gives flush draws a bad price but allows over-pairs to continue pretty easily too because we want to keep hands like TT-QQ in the pot at this point.
We choose a sizing of around 65% here…
Hero: Bets 80,000
BB: Calls
River: Q♣
The Final board reads: 3♣ 7♣ 8♥ 5♦ Q♣
This is one of the worst Rivers we could ask for, a huge part of our opponents range when they call twice here is a flush draw and another hand in their range in this spot when they cold call the 3-Bet from the Blinds is QQ.
With that in mind, I don’t think there is any hand we could get value from with a bet on the River here.
We opt to showdown our Kings and get shown a Rivered nut flush from a questionable preflop call with A♣ J♣ in our opponent’s hand.
Sum Up
Hopefully, that shows you that there are a tonne of ways to play pocket Kings, the thing to keep in mind is what your opponents’ range is going to look like as a whole and how to play your hand to get the maximum value in the long run with this big holding.
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