Re: Three SSH Principles I See Misapplied - Waiting for the Turn
 

Whenever a good but vulnerable hand is flopped (TPTK, overpair, etc.) you should probably ascertain if there is a good way to protect your hand. But most of the time there isn't, but some newer players try to devise fancy-ways to protect their hands by misusing some of these principles. They go for the flop check-raise when they don't know who they're going to raise, they wait for the turn when action on the flop and turn probably dictates protection isn't going to happen there. In going for these protection-plays, they in fact sometimes leave themselves even wider open and miss out on value at the same time.

I'll let you on a secret. For most pots and hands, when we say "protection", we really mean "making 4-5 outers face 2 bets cold". That's it really. 2-3 outers can't call a single bet usually and OESD/flush draws are usually right to go all the way to the river. So protection usually means trying to force out those in the middle by making them face two cold.

I'll open up another secret. Who's most likely to bet the flop? The person with the last say pre-flop. The person who 3-betted or capped pre-flop or raised pre-flop. If no one raised, you can't say who will bet so you can raise against them. But if you can ascertain who is likely the pre-flop aggressor, you can then determine who you can raise and therefore protect yourself against.

Re: Three SSH Principles I See Misapplied - Waiting for the Turn
 

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Re: Three SSH Principles I See Misapplied - Waiting for the Turn
 

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Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

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Ha, believe me it wouldn't be worth the bandwidth it's written on [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

Re: Three SSH Principles I See Misapplied
 

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Re: #3

Agreed! Whenever you're checkraising the flop, ask yourself, WHO am I checkraising? i.e. Which particular player will bet this flop and why? If you can answer this question, you can checkraise.

If not, then don't do it unless the board is nice enough and the table is aggressive enough that you know SOMEONE will bet it.

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Whoops. I'd just like to add that if you're checkraising on the flop and you don't know who your target is (it's one of the exceptions that I was talking about), you must be checkraising for value, not for protection (since you're not predicting where the bet will come from). In such a case, this may be a good board to bet and go for the re-raise for value.

--Dave.