Digging into my Poker Office poker software database this week to find some material to write about, I discovered the following interesting poker hand that should prove instructive to many novices. The game was played at NL200 full-ring  and the game had temporarily gone down to eight players. I prefer these games over six handed games as they suit my style far better.

Better poker players

At this level of play the players are substantially better than they are at NL50 and this comes across with an awful lot of things and thus online poker strategy differs sometimes. In this hand one of the early players had limped in as they had done quite often. It was folded around to me and I had the 10c-8c. Now with these types of hands in these types of situations I like to raise in online hold’em. My stack was around $240 and my opponent had about $190 on the table.

So I had 120BB while they had 95BB, I was in the cut-off but the big blind also called the raise as did the original limper. The big blind had around $180 (90BB) and my pot sized raise to $9 now made the pot around $28 before the flop. In this situation then it is instructive to see what my goals were in the hand.

Using position as a weapon

I was looking to pressure the limper and use my position coupled with the deceptive value of my hand to give me an advantage. In situations like these then another player calling the raise interferes somewhat with my plan. This means that bluffing has less value as the chances of me getting away with it are reduced. But this is offset by the fact that my chances of a big potential payoff are increased because there is more than one player to potentially pay me off.

But there is absolutely no way that I will be bullish after the flop and look to force a laydown here against two players. I have position and the betting lead and now is the time to make that work in my favour. The flop came Jh-7c-6d giving me a gutshot straight draw and both opponents checked to me.

Betting out here does have some value but so does checking. The big blind had shown some aggressive moves and I didn’t want to semi-bluff this and face a check-raise from one of the other players. I was confident now that the limper didn’t have a premium pair because they surely would have re-raised pre-flop after a raiser and a caller had entered the fray.

Other poker factors

There are other factors at work as well and this is that my raise (depending on my table image) could be with high cards and this is what it represents.

So I decide to check and take the free card and the turn card is a useless 2s and now the big blind leads out with a two thirds pot size bet. The limper folded and now the action is on me. There is no way that I am getting pot odds or implied odds to continue but I have a feeling that this player is smart enough to know that I have slowed down due to being up against two opponents.

He suspects that I didn’t connect with the flop and was reticent to bet against two players on a somewhat connected board. The turn card didn’t really change the situation and I felt that my opponent was smart enough to know that. So in this instance he either had a flopped monster, a mediocre hand or fresh air. I made the percentage play and knew that only a very tiny percentage of his range could stand a raise……I raised the pot…..he tanked and then folded.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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