[W. Deranged]

Jake,

This is very interesting, in my opinion.

I was having a hard time realizing why it wasn't correct to lead this flop, until I realized:

1. If I lead and get raised by the UTG player (who might have AK or something like that), many opponent with hands I want to stay in (88, A4, K9 maybe, even random one-A hands and so forth) may well drop on the flop. These opponents are all drawing to runners against me and by the fund. thm. of poker I really want them seeing the turn as they are not getting odds to do so.

1a. Betting and getting raised on the flop will mean that a much higher proportion of players calling are those who actually have the odds to do so: the flush draws. Many K's will come along anyway, but since many kings will bet/raise this flop anyway we can get value from their hands passively by checking here.

2. If we bet out and don't get raised we may get a bunch of callers and a lot of flop value but we may be able to get a similar number of bets in by checking and we don't lessen our ability to check-raise the turn and/or protect our hand on future streets.

Once the bet comes from late position I think a call becomes right for the above reasons as well.

It seems that the key driver for a slowplay here is that the pot is in an intermediate state where it is not yet big enough to merit attacking with guns blazing but it is still big enough that aggressive flop play will only encourage your opponents to "back into" correct theoretical play. If it were tiny and we could get the small flush draws to make bad flop calls or big enough to merit fighting for completely I would think a different line would be merited.

I think that if it were 4.5 Sb or smaller pre-flop we could get bad calls from flush draws (if we check to a late position bettor who bets and we check-raise, flush draws will be wrong to call two cold given we have a set).

I think that we are close to the upper bound for this range. At 15-16 BB (this is simply an instinctual number) I would have to think we need to start attacking.

This is interesting [censored].

It's strange to me that when I first started playing this game this seemed like an auto slowplay. Then, as I learned more I began to instinctively hate slowplays like this. Now, as I learn even more, I can understand why the positional/pot size subtleties of this hand push it back toward the direction of a slowplay.

P.S. I haven't read Ed's link yet so I may sound totally clueless and/or (hopefully) repetitive.