Effective stack $300

Four players limp. Hero makes it $15 from CO with KQ and three people call.

Pot $78 Flop QT7
Checks to hero, who bets $70 and two people call

Pot $288 turn 2
Checks to hero, and Miller recommends jamming for $215

His logic is that people play too many hands and this move is good most of the time. Do you agree with how he played each street?


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First, I think his math is wrong. $3 in blinds and four limps = $11 plus $15 from hero and 3 callers = $66 assuming blinds fold. But whatever.

Preflop, I probably would have raised bigger to $20.

Flop, I probably would have bet smaller, half to 2/3 pot would likely accomplish the same thing. After I get called by two players I’d be extra cautious.

Turn, when the flush completes, I’m not happy, but my hand is still strong. I definitely think jamming is the worst option as it makes our opponent’s decision very easy and I think we’re only getting called by better. Seems like playing with scared money. I think checking for pot control is fine, as well as another small bet, but doing so probably commits us to calling a river bet which I’m not in love with.

How would you play this hand?

What page does this hand appear on?

Don’t have it in front of me at the moment, but I think it is hand 6 at the end of the 1/2NL section.

Can't figure the pot exactly without knowing who called because the button is a possible caller also. I don't see how they get to $78 either though.

Preflop is a matter of how tight the table is. $15 is about the smallest I would consider typical after 4 limps. I probably go $20 more often. Flop I probably go $60 but I don't mind $70. That is a very wet flop and I would be happy to take this down on the flop.

I don't much like a turn shove either. Particularly if opponents are the sort to play any two suited you will be getting called by flushes and folding everything else. I would rather check and try to take advantage of 1/2 opponents being excessively passive. I could see the shove as being highest EV at some wild game.

Yeah, the reasoning in the book for this hand is super weird. Miller advocates raising because we beat a lot of crap like Tx in opponents range, but, he fails to recognize that Tx isn’t calling our river jam and we don’t need protection from smaller paired hands. Jamming is basically just providing protection against straight draws and rarely if ever gets called by worse.
Not the approach I’d take. I also agree flop size is too large.

The reason the pot doesn't add up is that Miller has the BB cold calling the raise. So there are 5 people seeing the flop according to Miller, not 4 as in the OP (5*15 plus the SB and one limper folding).

The main point he is trying to make in this example is that it is difficult for someone to make a flush. You shouldn't assume that just because a FD came in, the villain automatically has the flush. However, there are a couple of things going on in this hand that most players today don't do for the most part.

The first is that he makes a PSB on the flop. This drives a lot of FDs out of the hand. At this point of his career, he was making sure everyone knew that chasing against him was going to be very expensive. The situation would be different today if he made a 1/3 PSB on the flop, like so many posters do. The FD is being given direct odds to call.

The second is that he is Ed Miller. He's one of the very few authors that continued to play 2/5 a lot. At least one player at the table would recognize him and the word would spread quickly. He was writing articles for the free magazines in the poker room that were given out. So a lot of players would give him a wide berth. He would get more folds than that average player would get.

So what he describes would work if you played all your hands like him and had the same reputation of playing like he did. It is a whole package, though. You can't just one aspect of it and hope you'll get the same results.

You’re right about the pot, great catch!

The meat of it was the flop/turn play. I think betting 1/3 on that flop would also be incorrect - because like you said, it’s giving direct odds.

He argues that even if opponents play every suited hand, only 45 out of 1,035 possible hands make a flush. He assumes opponents are calling both PF and on the flop with a very wide range and says the strategy to beat these opponents at 1-2 is to keep betting.

Also at the beginning he makes it clear that this particular table is very loose.

I’m not really thrilled with checking or betting small on the turn because the pot is large and your hand is pretty vulnerable here. Hands with one club, straight draws and even one pair have several outs to beat you, and against two opponents you will get outdrawn quite a bit if they both make it to the river.

Fortunately you’re unlikely to face AA-QQ or sets here as they likely raise PF or on the flop (or both). Sometimes the flush draws will raise the flop. Low stakes players might have a flush draw with an A, and think “I have a flush draw with an overcard,” and decide to go with it on the flop.

No, I like smaller sizings. $10 pre and 1/3rd on the flop.

If Ed Miller's name wasn't attached to this hand, I think a lot of people here would be calling this line a punt.

I think this is somewhat of an extreme hand that Ed's using to make a point, but I will say I've read a lot of NL Cash poker books, and Ed Miller's imo are by far and away the best for low stakes, and The Course remains an excellent first book to read.

That would mean that people are being lazier with their responses though. It is true that Ed Miller being mentioned will cause people to stop and think more if they are surprised by what he says, but that’s a good thing.

And this is all irrelevant anyway; what’s important is why the turn shove is good or bad, not what the usual responses would be or who says we should shove the turn.

OP you could have posted the hand as a “line check” as if you’d played it yourself. Would have been an interesting experiment to test biases of 2+2 and their deference to experts.

I do think the turn decision is a bit spewy because of the multi-way nature of the hand.

I also don’t buy arguments that flush draws are folding to the flop bet. Anyway, this ain’t what Miller is saying in that HH review.. If flush draws are folding to flop bet then so is KJ/98, which is what Miller claims he is trying to extract value from with his PSB on flop. Also a relevant point not made in that HH review is that the second player who over called the flop bet cannot ever have Tx given he wouldn’t call Tx after the other player called.

This line would be pretty spewy in a Vegas afternoon game. Less bad in Texas, but I still don’t like it.

I looked and hand #7 is almost exactly the same except he has a villain shoving into you. He goes on to say that villains checking to you in hand #6 weakens their ranges some.

It does seem weak to check IMO if you think villains ranges are weak and they could even have a pair of 7’s. Shoving and getting folds does keep villains from realizing their equity. But I’d be tempted to bet smaller to get more calls from weaker hands (this contradicts what I said earlier but I guess I’m not excited about any option here).

It’s not clear to me how often Miller thinks villains call the shove. I think he assumes they at least call with weaker queens. Maybe he thinks they call with straight draws if they also have a club.

I think we probably see a good amount of bias in several threads already. If an experienced, well respected poster contributes to a thread, that can bias the remaining responses. That’s why I liked it when people used to respond in some threads without reading any of the replies first.