Playing Limit Before The Flop part two

All pocket pairs increase in value the fewer players are on your table even hands like 2-2. If it has been raised before me and I have a hand like a medium pocket pair in a limit Texas Holdem game and upwards and by medium I mean 6-6 and above then I will definitely three bet the original raiser. These types of hands do well whenever you can reduce the field although there are certain technical problems involved with small pocket pairs.

With the small pocket pairs, what tends to happen is that you don’t tend to know quite where you are on many flops. Let us say that you three bet a raiser with 4-4 and the flop comes A-K-9 and the raiser bets. Unless you know the player very well then you cannot continue in this hand. There are just too many overcards to small pocket pairs that leave it very difficult for you to correctly play your hand from the flop onwards.

It is different with the higher pairs because they tend to dominate many hands that players open raise with in a short handed poker game. A hand like 7-7 for instance dominates a player who has raised with A-5 or a suited K-6. The other factor with pocket pairs is that like big aces, they also can win the pot without any further help from the board.

You must remember that open limping or calling raises is really not the way to go with these hands simply because of the fact that you will not be receiving the correct odds to hit your set and a set is what you will likely have to hit should you allow more players into the pot after you by either only limping in or by calling a raise. You will be constantly placing yourself into marginal situations when you play my style but that is fine as this is really where the profit is. Another problem with the smaller pocket pairs and especially in the middle limit games that I play is that the games on average are much more aggressive.

This means that players will be bluffing and pressure betting more often and using different poker strategy and putting you to the test and when this happens then some of your decisions on folding and continuing will be wrong and when you make wrong decisions in poker then this costs you money. The playing of pocket pairs will be vital to your success as a limit player and many players overplay them simply because they are holding a pair in their hand.

Playing small and even medium pocket pairs will not be as vital as other types of hands simply through their frequency in which you will get dealt them. But if you think that small pairs each have six combinations and twos, threes, fours fives and sixes represent thirty combinations then it is little surprise that you will have to play these hands so often. In the next part of this series I will be looking at aces and how to play those types of hands.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson
Author – “Winning Cash Game Poker

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