Quote:
Originally Posted by Chicagodude
I'm not trying to be argumentative. I honestly don't understand.
Well then let me educate you grasshopper.
First, make SPR your new religion. Learn it. Live it. Love it. Here the SPR is low. That means that subsequent betting is going to be large relative to remaining stacks driving commitment decisions very early on in the hand. Your 9-high simply can't stand that kind of pressure.
Yes you win some big pots when you hit, and that probably feels like the payoff for all the money you leaked when you missed. But you're going to miss ALOT, and the calls you make will most definitely outweigh the pots you win when you only start the hand with 180. Do the math...you'll see.
When you play passively, the only way you can make money is by realizing your equity. Here, you are most certainly an equity underdog. So in order to profit, you need to over-realize your equity. You can do that two ways:
1) Be way better at value-betting than everyone else. So when you hit, you get max value more often. In this particular hand, this is impossible because you started with so little money.
2) Win without showdown. That means make the other guys fold. Here you're out of position, against 3 other players. To get folds, you are going to have to seriously ratchet up the aggression, and flatting pre-flop is not a good start.
To summarize, suited connectors make money when they over-realize their equity. That means play them when you're DEEP, so you can make lots when you hit. It also means you play them in position, so you control the size of the pot. It also means that you play them aggressively, to maximize your fold equity (this also helps build a big pot for when you hit on later streets).
Really the play with SC's is to make an aggressive move pre (including 3-bets) to narrow the field. Then c-bet favorable flops and exploit your opponents post-flop folding mistakes (their biggest leak). Then barrel turns/rivers when you have strong equity (which should be fairly often with SC's). And you do all this when you're deep enough to do all this betting without committing your stack, and doing so in position so you can decide whether or not you want to commit your stack.
The moral of the story here is that SC's and other drawing hands (gappers and such) are total garbage when your stack is under 150BB's. You don't hit often enough, and the low SPR forces you to commit too many chips as an underdog.