Playing Premium Pairs in Cash Games part one

I think that much of the trouble that online poker players especially get themselves into these days is caused by overplaying these two hands and especially from the flop onwards although we will just be looking at pre-flop.

Early Position

If I am in an early position in a full ring game and it has been folded to me then I will raise with the cowboys and the pocket rockets. I know people who try to get cute by limping in when they know that an aggressive player to their left will raise but I do not like that play at all. I suppose that it all comes down to how you want to play poker. Because I am a very aggressive player by nature then I am constantly trying to pick up whatever pot that I can. This means that I am frequently betting with mediocre and poor hands as well as trash.

So checking good hands does not fit in with my online poker strategy although I can see merit in limping in and letting other players come into the pot that may not have come in had you raised. But a limp re-raise defines what type of hand that you are holding but another downside is that you may not get the chance to limp re-raise at all as the pot may not get raised. Then you would have to play your hand very carefully as the pot would be multi-way and you would be out of position with a hand that has just been massively weakened by the arrival of three community cards.

What I find happens a lot is that although a raise signals that I have a strong hand, it still has not signalled how strong as yet as I could just as easily be raising with AK,AQ,JJ,TT,99 etc. What happens in some of the tougher poker games that I play in is that my raise pre-flop gets called quite frequently by some dude who thinks that he can outplay me after the flop after I have missed with my AQ all because they have position….or at least this is what he thinks.

They could also try to put the squeeze on by re-potting me with a marginal hand although this happens more in six handed play than full ring Texas Hold’em poker games. If there has been a limper before I have acted then I will still raise as before and also if there has been a raiser before it gets to me. Poker is a highly situational game which has been said numerous times so it is impossible to recreate every possible scenario here and give you a strategy to combat it.

For instance, pocket kings are very difficult to get away from pre-flop if your opponent just happens to be holding pocket rockets. You may have heard numerous stories of top tournament players laying down cowboys in big tournaments and been correct to do so and then be shown aces but a low limit cash game is something else. I have lost count of the number of times that someone has called me in an all in situation with weak hands.

They have called with hands like JJ and TT hoping that I had AK or 99 and with AK and AQ because they probably read in some poker book about how strong those hands are. I always find that most of the time, straight forward solid poker is the most effective way to play. Many people get too hung up trying their hardest to come up with fancy plays and in fact there is a name for that and it is called FPS or “fancy play syndrome”.

There are times in poker where there is a need for complexity and there are times in poker where there is a need for deception and to do something different but you have to learn the difference between being deceptive and over doing it and being unnecessarily fancy.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

Popularity: 1% [?]