To Slowplay or Not to Slowplay

[davelin]

Hello my fellow ML'ers,

There has been a disturbing number of "slowplay monster hands" posts going around here. I'm seeing flopped flushes, sets and even quads getting checked on the flop (and sometimes even on the turn!). It seems like newer players greatly look forward for these opportunities to slowplay hands (probably from watching too much poker on TV) but I honestly believe that the burden of proof is on why to slowplay, not on why to fastplay. In other words, my default line is to fastplay and look for slowplaying opportunities as a minority of cases.

To show this, let’s say that there are two ways to play these hands – fastplay or slowplay and one of them is the correct play for each of these situations. Let’s say that slowplaying is the right move 15% of the time. The exact number isn’t important here, but I think looking at a lot of these sample hands should show that slowplaying is the minority, not the majority of cases.

Let’s say you fastplay every single hand. What is your error rate then? It’s 15% because that represents the percentage of cases you incorrectly fastplayed instead of slowplayed.

Let’s say you attempt to slowplay exactly 15% of the time. What’s your error rate here? Anywhere from 0% to 30%. If you identify the exact right times to slowplay, your error rate will be 0%. But if you mis-identify each situation, not only are you wrong when you do choose to slowplay, but you also miss the times you’re supposed to do it. So your error rate then is 30%. So on average you error rate is the same as if you fastplayed every hand.

Now comes the case where you try to slowplay too many times (the majority of cases for the newer player I believe), say around 25% of the time. What’s your error rate then? Between 10% and 40% for an average of 25%.

This I believe shows how your errors compound when you look for too many cases to slowplay which is I firmly believe a minority proposition. Instead lean toward fastplaying the high majority of the time, and then get your percentage of times you slowplay slowly up.