Broadway - The Street of Death

It is common knowledge that “Broadway” is a major street in the city of Chicago. But the term “Broadway” also has a huge significance in poker as well and is a term given for any two starting cards in texas hold’em that are ten or above. Actually the term is used for the ace high straight of A-K-Q-J-10, so the knock on from this is that any two starting cards that could go to make that ace to ten top straight are called “Broadway hands”.

So typical starting hands in hold ‘em that qualify as “Broadway” hands are AK, AQ, AJ, AT, KQ, KJ, KT, QJ, QT, JT. Obviously these hands qualify if they are suited or not. With regards to novice and even intermediate players I have a term for these hands and I call them “The Street of Death Hands”.

This is because they cause more trouble (along with the big pairs) than all of the other starting hands put together. Why is this? Well before we progress, it needs to be mentioned that I am talking about no-limit play here and not limit hold’em. The limit variation is essentially a big card game so these are all decent hands in that form of hold’em.

So when I refer to these hands as being “The Street of Death”….I am of course referring to no-limit hold ‘em! There are many reasons for why these hands give players so much trouble. In fact if you went through the hand histories of most players then you would probably see huge amounts of money lost with these hands. This obviously does not imply that these hands are money losers….not at all.

It is just that they end up costing players far more money in the pots that they lose than they really should do. There are lots of reasons for this, one of those reasons is that many players cannot differentiate between good hands at limit hold ‘em and its no limit and pot limit cousins. Also the way that Broadway hands are played in cash games differs from that of tournaments.

I think the underlying problem for novice players is that these starting hands often flop hands like top pair with top kicker or top pair with decent kicker or even two pair. These are all hands that may seem strong on the surface but yet have deceptive weaknesses that novices often fail to pick up on until it’s too late and they have lost their money.

Also the sheer nature of no-limit play means that pots from the flop onwards can grow out of all proportion to what they actually started out as. What this tends to mean is that novices end up giving too much action for the type of hand that they have and the only time that they get good action is when they are beat.

So this means that our hero ends up winning a few small pots with these hands but then loses one large pot that then offsets all the smaller wins. I am not saying that you should not play Broadway cards, what I am saying is that these hands in no-limit play require a lot of experience to be able to play them well after the flop.

It is the same with the big pairs AA,KK,QQ,JJ,TT or what I refer to as “Broadway Pairs”. These are also hands that tend to cripple novices and the act of multi-tabling can make this worse as players have less thinking time per table. So be warned when I say that Broadway really can be the “Street of Death” in no-limit hold ‘em.

This article was written by Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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