CoTW: Playing Mid Pocket Pairs:
Introduction:
For this week, I wanted to get the discussion running on playing small pocket pairs. As a definition we will look at the group of hands from 77-JJ and look at some HH’s as to ideal lines to take against certain villains from a few different positional situations. The problem with 77-JJ is that on a vast majority of board textures, it can be difficult to determine your showdown value against a competent villains range. For this CoTW I pretty much only looked at hands that showed down against full-ish stacked players and were total pots of ~100bb or less. Reason being I don’t want this to devolve into a discussion of how to play sets (which is what most of your 200bb total pots are going to be with these types of hands.) I will also discuss playing these types of hands from the blinds.
When I was preparing to do this CoTW I realized that a lot of the critical concepts that relate to my topic have already been covered, so I’ve included some prerequisite reading to further aid in the discussion.
Prerequisite reading:
Basic Cold Calling
Evaluating Board Textures
Let's Talk About Floating
Hand Reading
Thin Value
Reasons to Bet
Double Barreling
Turning Made Hands Into Bluffs
(See you in 4 hours
)
Pre flop you should be raising and profiting. You should be experiencing a super-healthy win rate with 77-JJ in unopened pots from all positions.
The flop is where things start to get a little tricky. With a hand like 77 the chances are good that you are not going to like a ton of flops that don’t contain a 7, but as we know- flopping sets is hard. This is where hand reading and being able to recognize how certain board textures match-up with our villains’ range is important. Playing mid pocket pairs is all about determining your showdown value vs. villains range on a given board texture, and while I’m not going to get into a treatise on SD value just keep in the back of your mind that all of these examples are very read, villain and board dependent and this is an impossible topic (as nearly all topics are) to discuss with absolutes or hard and fast rules.
Here is a HH:
Poker Stars $100.00 No Limit Hold'em - 9 players
2+2 Hand Converter
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UTG: $124.80
UTG+1: $100.00
UTG+2: $225.00
MP1: $162.05 17/15/3.5 annoying to play with winning reg. Owns my soul
MP2: $73.90
CO: $102.40
Hero (BTN): $152.50 Hero is running 22/18 and has been more active than usual as UTG+2 was a whale and I’ve been iso’ing wide and often.
SB: $100.00
BB: $107.90
Pre Flop: ($1.50) Hero is BTN with 7
7
3 folds,
MP1 raises to $3,
2 folds, Hero calls $3,
2 folds
Reg opens his standard 3x and I flat call in position with the 7’s.
Flop: ($7.50) 8
T
2
(2 players)
MP1 bets $4.50, Hero calls $4.50
Reviewing this hand I was surprised that I faced a cbet on this board. I have 3rd pair and vs an aggressive villain that cbets a lot so this was a pretty easy call. FWIW there have been a lot of hands posted in which people are doing things like raising flop like this because the board is so dry and villain is repping really narrowly, which is a little insane because you are trying to rep [88, TT, 22] and flopping sets is hard.
Also, at this point I am planning the remainder of the hand. I told myself that I was going to close my eyes and call down on any “good” barrel card but would fold to a barrel on a blank turn/river.
Turn: ($16.50) A
(2 players)
MP $9.00, Hero calls $9.00
Great barrel card and certainly a card that villain should expect to get a lot of folds by barreling, since there is much more Ax in villains range than mine. I stick to my plan and don’t fold. For those that have played with me, this is pretty much my standard line with my entire range (close eyes and mash “call” or “raise.”)
River: ($34.50) J
(2 players)
MP1 checks, Hero checks
FWIW, I was going to call any reasonable bet on the river. This particular villain had been owning me in non-SD pots and I really wanted to get the opportunity to show something down against him- even though this particular hand was close to the bottom of my range for this particular scenario. (His range here is super-elastic, but that’s for another day.)
I may have fist-pumped a little.
Another example, although in this hand we swap positions and swap the soul-owning reg to a super-drooler.
Poker Stars $100.00 No Limit Hold'em - 9 players
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Hero (UTG): $112.95
UTG+1: $100.00
MP1: $62.05 (72/23- Super drooler)
MP2: $73.90
CO: $102.40
BTN: $101.15
SB: $100.00
BB: $107.90
Pre Flop: ($1.50) Hero is UTG with 9
9
Hero raises to $3,
1 fold, MP1 calls $3,
5 folds
Standard open. Get called by a huge drooler.
Flop: ($7.50) 7
T
2
(2 players)
Hero bets $5.00, MP1 calls $5
Flop is bone dry and misses my perceived range. (Super drooler always “puts you on AK.”)
Against a villain like this there is no reason not to cbet pretty much anything with SD value. Since we have a pair and fish don’t fold, we can expect calls from a vast majority of his range.
Turn: ($17.50) 4
(2 players)
Hero bets $10.00, MP1 calls $10
The 4 changes nothing and the drooler will call anything he called the flop with. If I get raised at any point in this hand, it's probably a super-snap fold.
River: ($37.50) K
(2 players)
Hero checks, MP1 checks
After the scare card comes out I don’t think villain will put any money in with a worse hand so I check to reap my SD value and collect my equity. FWIW if I had air/ or 66 here I'd probably be fire-bombing the river as I'd have much less SD value than I do in this spot with the 9's.
From the blinds:
Again, as with everything else discussed your play in the blinds is going to be ultra dependent on who your late position villains are. Often with this range of hands I am going to be 3betting the bottom and the top of the range some of the time and flat-calling most other times. (Miles ahead of a stealing range, not that great against a 3bet continuation/4bet range vs. most villains.) Then again against some villains I am basically fine stacking TT blind vs BTN pre. Villain dependent, villain dependent, villain dependent.
Last Points:
Another thing to think about when we talk about these groups of pocket pairs (arbitrarily small 22-66; mid 77-JJ; big QQ-AA) is that there is a huge difference in relative and absolute hand strength between 77 and JJ. (LDO.) The bottom of this range of hands plays differently than the top, although they are still extraordinarily similar as you aren’t going to love showing down your hand on a ton of boards.
There has been a lot of talk OTF and in the CoTW thread about having a separate CoTW on playing JJ, which I really don’t think is necessary. Some months ago I was doing a database review with mpethybridge (for those of you that haven’t done it I don’t care if you are crushing 100NL you will still win more after, anyone else there is just no excuse not to do it) and we were going through my WR by starting hand. The conversation went something like this:
“AA, awesome. “
“KK, excellent”
“QQ, wow, that’s really good.”
“JJ, (chortle) lets look at some of these. God you spew with jacks.”
I would wager a buy-in or two that I am not the only person that has this problem. As the discussion went in the COTW thread, your play with JJ would most likely be vastly improved if you pretended you had 99/88/77.
Cliffs:
It’s all about show-down value.
Show-down value is determined based on the specific villain and board texture.
Understanding showdown value is really, really important.
Don’t spew with Jacks.
Fin.
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