In this post, we have picked out hands from a $2/$5 session played on 888Poker. There were a few interesting scenarios that popped up which we thought would be very useful to share with our readers to give them some insight on what it takes to be a winning player at these stakes.
Practice careful hand selection in 3-way spots
Look to call off in some 3-way all-in spots, but not all of them. With this hand as an example, we are getting a decent price and if we were playing against 2 maniacs with huge ranges that we could have crushed we could sometimes make the call here with our small pair, however against a normal players we are going to have a hard time winning this pot, first of all, we can sometimes we crushed and even if we are not we need to avoid our opponents hitting all five cards when they have 4 cards between them, which is an almost impossible task.
We would prefer to have a hand like JTo, 89s, even hands like A4o here rather than a small pair. We end up making the fold and would have lost to our opponents KJo
Avoid close spots against solid players
We will want to play pretty aggressive with the top part of our range like A9s+ AT0+ KQo+ 77+ there are going to be times when we pump the breaks, if this hand was folded to us we would have happily moved all our money into the middle with our AJo.
However, the UTG player who has been playing fairly solidly moves all in for near 14BBs. Against some players, we could still have decent equity here, but we opted to make a fairly tight laydown.
We were proved right when the Big Blind opted to flick in their short stack with 98o and the UTG player shows pocket Kings.
Strange that they just move all-in with that holding and don’t look to move that into one of the hands which they would raise call with but it might be that they are just playing an all-in or fold kind of strategy where they are only willing to add chips to the pot if they are going with their hand.
For tighter players only moving all-in with monster hands can be a solid strategy as if they do that with hands like ATo but all of a sudden they are min raising off a small stack, it can be easy to read this bet size for strength if they are not balancing it with hands they will be raise folding.
Defend in the Big Blind with suited connectors and high card hands
These hands will play well in a single raised pot and can pick off some C-bet bluffs nicely, as many players will raise and stab at the pot once with anything and then give up.
It’s important to protect our checking range, we don’t want to do anything silly on boards we hit like lead out as we will stop our opponents from betting all their worse hands, we will want to check call on good flops for our hands that will be balanced with draws and other hands like bottom or middle pairs along with some overcard and gutshot floats.
We opted for the check call on this huge board for our hand, with a lesser hand like a weak top pair we might look to raise for protection but with top two pair here we don’t need to protect from many hands and we want our opponent to keep bluffing.
We get the gin turn card for our hand and now we are really looking for our opponent to bluff, we check it over to them again and they put in all the money with just Ace high, drawing dead.
Be careful not to get check-raised off equity
We will want to raise the button with a tonne of hands because we can profitably play in position so easily. Here we raise QJo and see a board of T 7 6 rainbow, now whilst we will be typically doing a lot of C-betting in position looking to take down the pot as soon as we can, we have to be wary of boards that are going to hit our opponent much harder than us.
Ten high boards will hit the Big Blinds defensive hands much harder than us with them having hands like T8o, T9o, T7o, 67o, 89o, JTo, QTo, KTo and sometimes showing up with ATo and 66. So on boards like this where they can have so many hands which can look to check-raise with this kind of stack depth we will be looking to check back very often.
Bluff on good cards for our Ranges
When the Ace hits on the turn and our opponent in the Big Blind checks to us, this is where we need to start bluffing, we can get so many hands that have us beat right now to fold, hands that have a 6 or 7 in them will have a tough time even calling one bet now and whilst some hands with a Ten in them will probably call this bet they will have a hard time calling two bets.
So we fire out with a large sizing, this is because we will either want to protect our hand here for a big size and get value from draws and worse hands when we do have this Ace and for the times we are bluffing we want to put our opponent in a tough spot and not allow them to call easier against a small sizing.
We end up rivering a Jack in this pot, so whilst our plan was to nearly always fire two streets as a bluff or for value if we hit our straight draw we now decide to check back on this card, we have hit just enough showdown value against our opponents expected range to be able to check and win a vast majority of the time.
Our opponent did have the Ten, so we played the hand pretty good, checking back the flop when we probably would have seen an all-in from them and then putting the pressure on when the perfect bluff card hit, then finally checking back once we hit a pair.
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