Playing the flop when your Big Slick misses in LHE

Common situation: Early position raises, all fold to you in mid-to-late position, you call (should you reraise?), rest fold. Flop comes rainbow babies or maybe one ten or nine. Early position bets, what do you do? It seems like when I fold, EP shows me AQ, and when I call or raise I end up facing a pocket pair of some sort. The last time I raised on this kind of flop (3-3-4), I got shown a flopped full house.

rgeare,


First off this post should not be in this forum, unless LHE doesn't mean 'limit hold em'. Second you are looking for a recipie for action. If there is one thing anyone knows about poker it's that there is never one right way to do things all the time. In fact if you do that your game will suffer. Finally to give some answer to your question play your strong hands hard, re-raise with AK and position and always play your position like you have the best hand till shown (by action or tells) otherwise. When you are betting and raising with position you have an unlimited hand as far as your opponent is concearned, you should be able to know when you are beat and get away. Also if you get action on a 3-3-4 flop and you don't even have a pair it's very likely you are beat. Good luck at the tables.

My apologies, I guess this isn't a Pot-Limit/No-limit forum only. It has just seemed that way for the last two months.

As you indicate, I took this forum to be "high stakes" as well as pot and no-limt.

Back to the subject, this means, I assume, that you would raise EP's bet on the flop? Then what if I get re-raised? Is that what you mean by "always play your position like you have the best hand till shown (by action or tells)"? Is that the time to flee?

What about when you are in early position and your AK misses the flop? Do you bet out anyway and then fold if someone raises you?

most often I just muck and wait for the hand to hit another time.

you should 3-bet pre-flop. AKo likes to be heads up. don't give the BB 5-1 on a call.


when you are heads up you can't fold AK on a rag flop. You should play it like it is Aces until you are shown otherwise by the EP. I probably wouldn't raise the flop. Just smooth call and if another rag hits on the turn, raise the turn with the intention of checking behind on the river if you don't hit. if you get 3 bet on the turn you can let it go. If it gets checked to you on the turn you should bet for value.


As for how to play it out of position. i have no idea.


rob

AKo likes to be heads up? Since when exactly? AK is a drawing hand that many people play very poorly, especially at nolimit, but also at limit.


Many times at limit the worst thing you can do is raise preflop from early position. Not only are you in bad position, with a hand that only gets there 1 out of 3, and then loses a fair amount of the time. In early position the best play in my humble opinion is to just call (not to limp reraise), and try and get a volume pot.The advantage of this is that the hands you really want playing are AJ, AT, KQ, KJ and the like. Most decent players know to muck these hands to an early position raise, so why not trap them? If you miss you have an easy fold and are not caught up in the common AK trap of "trying to salvage something on the deal". Leave your preflop raises for when you are first to enter the pot in middle or late position.

Certain hands prefer being heads up rather than multiway. You can usually determine which hands prefer which way by the strength of the hands they can make. for example, suited connectors need to make straights and flushes to win, these are strong hands and you want to have a lot of opponents. they are not as good heads up. other hands like AKo will generally only make top pair and this is a vulnerable hand against many opponents. against 4-5 players 1 pair is no good generally.


Some hands work both ways, an example would be AA, KK, or QQ. they can stand up on their own in a heads up situation, but they also like lots of opponents because they have the potential to make a very big hand when they make a set.


AKo is the kind of hand that wants to be 1 on 1. These concepts are discussed in a lot of poker literature.


Rob