[DcifrThs]

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in a 3 handed game, yes i would play this hand from any position for this price. you guys clearly have it figured out tho so keep on keepin on. the reason i play them is cuz i figure im not up against them so keep on foldign those suited connectors please! [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

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now you can realize that suited connectors lose value shorthanded as big cards are almost always better.

for an example. if you had $5 on a table and can only put in that $5 and there is $1 and $2 blinds and one person in early position raises to $5, would you rather have AK or 87s? obviously the all in equity of 87s does not justify a call whereas the hot and cold equity for AK does justify a call.

now expand it to relative stack sizes. if you have $10 behind and call a $5 raise you can only win $5 more dollars. so calling $1 w/ 87s and then calling another 4 is a mistake because you are virtually all in or committed to it and you will lose way more than the necessary # of times to call given the odds you're getting.

keep going and you will see that it makes sense to call w/ suited connectors if you can

a) push the raiser around post flop. how can you do this if by the time you get to the flop the pot is 1/5 or 1/4 or 1/2 of your entire stack? its just not a big enough threat to him.

now if you both have 20 or 30x the pot size on the flop then it starts to mean something because any bet is really the quesiton of "are you prepared to risk your stack here?" to some extent. with smaller stacks, the answer is almost always yes. with large stacks, it gets diced down to, "well, how much of my stack?" "you want me to call all in 30x the pot with my 1 pair?? nah i'll pass...but i would have called all in for 5x the pot w/ my one pair....too bad we have such deep stacks."

b) earn much more money later on in the hand than you put in. this is implied odds. if you have a hand that will make a big hand, like 87s, some of the time and you can stack your opponent then its worth it to put 1/20 of your stack in preflop. but its not worth it if your total stack is only a few times more than the bet you're putting in.

or

c) induce your oopponent to give you free cards and / or cheap cards by using your position and hand reading skills to adjust your bet to the pot size and yoru read of yoru opopnent. now you get to see more cards for cheaper than you would have...but this doesn't work if you have a small stack. you are almost forced to go all in on the flop whereas if you both had $10k stacks and there's $500 in the pot you can raise to $1000 and still have another 9k to win if you check behind the turn...but if you both only had 2k stacks raising that same $1k would likely get you all in as a dog on the flop, which is now what you want to do. you want to earn the rest of your opponents 9k or get him to fold a better hand.

if you cant see this, then nobody here can help you. its about as simple a concept as it gets.

and if i didn't meantion it before, shorthanded means big cards are more valuable

-Barron