Posted by Dr Fro 4:09 PM

I just made something of an a-hole post on hornfans.com to a guy that complained about getting drawn out on by flushes. I suggested that he bet his made hands rather than play them slow. That reminded me of a post I have had in my head…….

A lot people don’t fully understand why betting the goods (vs playing slow) is correct, even if they know that it is in fact correct.

People understand that big pre-flop raises:
- help you limit the # of possible hands you are up against, thus making it easier to put a player on a hand, and play fancier.
- Get value for your good hands
- Make draws pay the maximum price to draw out on you (and in PL and NL, often too big of a price that what they should be willing to play)

The benefit that that I believe most people would not name is that:
***You increase your chance of winning, without given (much, if) any increase to your callers.*******

What???

If you have red Aces and another guy has black KK, another (SB) has 7s6s, and another (BB) has 7c2h, then if all of you are in, the odds are:

(all rounded to the nearest 1%)
AA…58%
KK…18%
67….20%
27….5%

All players will likely stay in for the BB. Let’s say you raise it up and run off everyone but KK (the likely result). The pre-flop odds are:

AA…81%
KK…19%

Basically, of the 25% given up by the two other players, you just got 24% and he got 1%!!!!!!!!!!! Do you see how huge this is? What if I told you that 4 of us would play poker and as long as your hand was best, you get the pot. As long as any of the other 3 of us win, I get the pot – all to myself. This is effectively the situation I have created by knocking the other 2 guys out of the pot and taking (almost) all of their chance to win.

Now I carefully chose a situation to make my point, but the fact is that slowplaying big hands, especially AA is simply wrong. The only reason to EVER do it is for advertising, but the value of advertising is pretty low in most situations unless you play with the same group pretty regularly.

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