Daily Hand Quiz

When playing in the deep stack games online (I personally prefer Sky Poker; you can read a sky poker review if you’d like to learn more about the room) and live, it makes the proposition of playing drawing hands a much more lucrative and perilous proposition than it would be when short stacked or in a tournament, where busting out means being unable to reload and come back to the game. If you have a 54/46 shot in a tournament, it may be wrong to take the shot if it’s a WSOP event and your equity over the rest of the field is supremely higher (learn more about these concepts at www.onlinepoker.net). In a cash game? You take the 54% side every time and hope for the best, as that’s an 8 percent swing in EV.

What does this mean as far as a cash game goes? The simple version is this; when you have the big mega draws, you should be less hesitant to play them fast on the flop; many players like to peel a card, whiff, and give up on their draw, when in a deep stacked game, you have the power to three bet/four bet your way into getting your opponent to lay down a monster hand; if the flop comes 45Jdd, and you have 67d, you can feasibly get an opponent off of a hand like AJ, Axd, or even overpairs if played fast; think of the hand like this from your opponent’s perspective.

Example: Playing at one of the no download poker sites you open to $7 at $1/$2 with a $700 stack with AA, and a tight, smart, and aggressive opponent (you) calls on the button. The flop comes 45Jdd, and you bet out $12 into the $17 pot. Your opponent pops it to $35, and after a brief tank, your opponent comes out of the tank with a three bet to $100. You tank for a moment, then elect to call the $100. The turn is the queen of clubs, and you check to your opponent, who then contemplates and fires $200 into the pot. If you’re the guy with aces, what can you beat? You have two aces, which makes AJ unlikely. KJ would probably not be this aggressive with a one pair hand, and QJ just made two pair against you. Sets also make sense. At this point, you can beat KK, AJ, and combo draws. Otherwise, you’re drawing at somewhere between 2 and 8 outs against the big hands (two pair, sets) that have you completely crushed. And even if AA is the best hand, hands like KJ still have 5 outs, and a hand like the 67 of diamonds that your opponent actually holds has a whopping 15 outs against you!

You grumble and finally release your aces, and your opponent skillfully takes a $107 chunk out of your stack. And if you call? He shuts down a lot on the river when he misses 70% of the time, and shoves the river when he hits the other 30% for your last $400 or so. Can you fold then? That’s why drawing hands in deep stacked play have so much power; they allow you to press people into difficult decisions while having no worries if they do call you down, especially on the flop; you’re always drawing live with hands like the one talked about here.