Why You Need To Stop Slowplaying Big Hands So Often

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One of the most common themes that tends to come up when I work with low-stakes MTT players on a ‘Leakfinding’ basis is that almost everyone tends to slowplay big hands, often by default. It’s extremely common to hear a player explain their decision to flat-call the nuts on the flop with logic such as “I just wanted to give the villain a chance to fire a second barrel”, or “I don’t want to scare the villain away and make them fold”. This kind of logic is an example of allowing one aspect of a hand to dominate the analysis to a disproportionate degree – the villain might fire a second barrel, sure, but how often? On how many turn cards? They might be ‘scared away’ and fold fairly often, but what happens when they don’t?

These are all questions that need to be answered before we make the decision to slowplay a big hand. There are a myriad of factors that should be given due consideration in our thought process, and in many instances people slowplay hands simply because they like the feeling of ‘trapping’ their opponent, or they fear the frustration they will feel if they raise and their opponent folds, or even simply because slowplaying is what they usually do, so why not do it again this time? In general, people tend to massively overestimate the frequency with which big hands should be slowplayed, and often cost themselves some EV in the process. Let’s look at some of the arguments against slowplaying big hands too often.

Building the pot

Probably the most obvious thing about slowplaying is that just calling a raise creates a smaller pot than raising does. This makes it harder for us to win big pots with our big hands, especially when deeper-stacked, and if we’re not going to win big pots with our big hands, we’re not likely to be winning big hands at all. Let’s look at an example.

Say we find ourselves in a situation against a fairly predictable opponent, where we’ve flopped the absolute nuts in position. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll divide our opponent’s range into two categories, ‘value hands’ and ‘air hands’, and we’ll say that our opponent’s play is quite predictable – when they bet the flop and we call, they are betting again on the turn with all value hands and check-folding all their air hands. When they bet the flop and we raise, they are calling with all value hands and folding all their air. Then, on the turn, they are check-calling 100% of the time, since they have a value hand 100% of the time once they call. The proportions of value to air in their range don’t really matter in this case since villain is never putting in any extra money with the air hands.

Imagine our opponent bets $100 on the flop into a $200 pot. When we call, the pot becomes $400, and we go to the turn with our opponent betting again with value, and check-folding air. When they bet $200 with their value hands, the pot is guaranteed to be at least $800 if we don’t fold. Comparing that to the alternative scenario, if we raise their $100 flop bet to $300, then we do get them to fold all their air hands.

However, they weren’t betting those hands on the turn anyway, so there was no additional value to be gained there. The difference is that when they call the $300 raise, the pot is already $800, and then they’re check-calling our $400 turn bet 100% of the time, so the pot is guaranteed to be at least $1600, double what it was when we call. The key aspect of this situation is that there was no possibility to get value from villain’s air, so building the pot versus their value hands was what created the extra profit for us, even though they folded to the raise a certain portion of the time. Understanding this concept and how it relates to our play in deeper-stacked spots, particularly against weaker players who are easier to get value from, is pivotal to maximizing value from your strongest hands. In general, you’ll want to focus on how to get the most possible chips out of the stronger parts of your opponent’s range, rather than on how to get a few extra chips from the weaker parts.

Keeping your range wide and somewhat polarized

One major disadvantage of slowplaying big hands is that you often make it very difficult for yourself to look like you could be bluffing when you inevitably decide to raise on a future street. If you just call the flop or the turn, then in many instances (particularly when check-calling out of position) you make it very difficult for your opponent to ever assume that you might have total air hands or bluffs in your range.

What this means is that when you take a traditionally polarizing action on a later street, like making a big raise, it’s incredibly difficult for your opponent to pay you off, because they had already ruled out the total air hands in your range once you just called, leaving only a selection of strong hands with which you could be raising for value.

When you raise on an earlier street, especially if it’s the flop, then that’s a situation where bluffs are a lot more likely, because you haven’t defined your range so precisely yet by taking more actions. The more actions you take, the more you tell the story of what your range is, but on the flop, there are still multiple possible interpretations that the villain could read into your raise. They could think you’re raising with a draw, or with total air, or raising with a slightly wider range of value hands – after all, it’s one thing to raise an 8-4-4 rainbow flop, but it’s another to raise the river when the board reads 8-4-4-A-K. In addition to an increased likelihood of you having air hands, draw hands or other bluffs, your value-raising range is likely to be wider on the flop than it is on later streets, so raising with the top of that range becomes even more important.

Lots of people aren’t great at poker

Finally, one of the key reasons to avoid slowplaying in lower-stakes games, is simply that it’s important to give your opponents the chance to make as many mistakes as possible, in the biggest pots possible. Since many opponents at lower stakes will be erring on the side of playing too passively rather than too aggressively, it makes sense for our default exploitative lines versus such players to be more geared towards extracting value than inducing aggressive mistakes, maintaining balance in our range or playing GTO.

Thus, it’s crucial that we build big pots early on in hands versus these players in particular, because when we have limited information to work with besides the knowledge that the villain isn’t likely to be particularly good, we can’t be sure exactly how bad they might be, or how light they might stack off. By raising all of our strongest hands on the flop, we give ourselves the maximum possible likelihood of creating a favourable all-in pot against a player who will be making a lot of mistakes with their getting-it-in ranges. If you’re up against an unknown player in a low-stakes tournament, adopting this strategy by default will ensure you don’t miss out on opportunities to win huge pots against players who turn out to be unexpectedly weak, and versus slightly stronger players, it has the added bonus of giving you room to bluff-raise certain boards while maintaining reasonably well-balanced ranges.