The Most Commonly Misplayed Hands in MTTs

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I frequently find myself discussing with my students the idea of ‘problem hands’ – hands that are often stumbling blocks for players looking to push their game forwards. In the name of (somewhat) scientific investigation, I decided to do a bit of digging into which types of hands are most likely to fall into these categories, and cause problems even for winning players. Take a look at the conclusions I came to, and consider how these might relate to your own game.

How I arrived at these conclusions

Over the course of my five years as a pro, I’ve played over five million hands of online poker. In that time, I’ve amassed multiple large databases on my Holdem Manager 2 client. While my current laptop is unable to handle all my databases being combined into one, I do have large enough samples to build up a lot of information on various opponents.

For the purposes of this investigation, I took a database of over half a million hands, played over the past two years at various stakes and on various sites, and created a new player alias. This alias excluded myself, but included every player in that database for whom I had 500 hands or more of data, resulting in a sample of over 220,000 hands. Note that this doesn’t constitute datamining in any sense of the word – these are all hands for which I was directly present at the table. However, since not every hand went to showdown, we only had hole card data for maybe 30-40% of these hands.

If you’re thinking to yourself “that must have taken ages to put together”, it did! It took me multiple hours of painstakingly adding each player. Of course, most of these players are putting in decent volume at the same stakes as me, so most of them are regulars or low-to-midstakes pros. Most of them are also winning players. The results were surprising in several ways, but what was the most intriguing was that when I looked at the hole card grid to analyze how much profit or loss the group made with each hand, there were several trends that emerged.

Multiple groups of hands were significantly less profitable for the group than the hands right next to them in the grid, and of course two hands right next to each other are virtually identical in strength in the grand scheme of things. The only possible conclusion, therefore, is that this sample of winning players was playing certain types of hands differently to others – after all, if one hand is winning lots of money and the one directly below it in strength is losing money, there’s no other conclusion that can be drawn.

Thus, the groups of hands that follow are the most commonly misplayed or over-played hands in poker, based on the sample of winning players that I analyzed. It stands to reason that whatever is true for this group of mostly winning players is especially true for losing or breakeven players, so if you’re in that category, there’s a very strong chance these hands are a problem for you too.

NB: Since our access to hole card information in this sample is restricted, all this data comes from instances where the hand got to showdown. There is some argument to suggest that certain hands would change in profitability if we could include non-showdown hands, but since postflop ability and style varies from player to player, I don’t imagine we’d see any one group of hands change significantly.

AKo, AQo, AJo and ATo

I was very surprised to see how poorly the group was playing these hands. In fact, AKo and AQo were actually significant losing hands over the sample to which I had access, which suggests the group was massively over-playing them. This probably relates to all-in situations, in which players significantly over-estimate the profitability of getting it all-in versus tight ranges with these hands.

There’s also a good chance it’s correlated to postflop situations, where players tend to play these hands extremely face-up, particularly in 3-bet pots. In the case of AJo and ATo, these hands were slightly profitable – indicating they were at least being played reasonably well – but they were less profitable than the Ace-x hands below them in the list, suggesting there’s a lot more profit that could be made. These mistakes were mostly coming from opening too wide in early position, or from flatting too wide in late position versus early position opens.

A9s, A8s, A7s and A6s

It’s not a huge shock to see that these hands are worse than both the ATs+ hands and the suited wheel hands (A2s-A5s), but I was surprised to see how unprofitable they were for the group. I would have expected them to fare a little better considering their capacity for winning big pots.

In general the reason for this is likely to be players giving up too much money with weak top pairs out of position from the big blind, and failing to play them aggressively enough when opening with them preflop. I imagine folding them more frequently in early and middle position would work well for the group.

KQo, KJo and KTo

I think a lot of people are aware that offsuit broadways can pose a problem, but the interesting thing here was that it was mostly the King-high offsuit broadways that were the issue. QJo, QTo and JTo weren’t doing too badly.

I suspect the majority of this is coming from the same types of spots as the losses with AJo and ATo – opening too wide preflop and flatting too wide versus opens. It’s also very likely that there are some weaknesses in how these players are playing postflop, since many low-stakes regs tend to play the turn and river quite badly in some spots.

87s, 76s and 65s

People massively over-estimate the value of these hands. At some point in poker’s history, the myth emerged that middle suited connectors were great hands to open preflop because they’re ‘disguised’, and great hands to flat preflop because they can flop big. This is true to an extent, but people wildly overestimate that factor.

In reality, the fact that these hands can’t flop top pairs very often make them a lot more difficult to play, and they also have ‘reverse blockers’ in that when you have two cards eight or below, your opponents are slightly more likely to have two cards higher than an eight, which makes them less likely to fold. The group also played them a little too passively postflop and didn’t fire enough barrels in spots where they had limited showdown value.

55, 44, 33 and 22

Finally, the small pairs are hands that are easily misplayed. The group was mostly flat-calling them too much versus open-raises in spots where they weren’t deep-stacked enough or didn’t have enough of a chance to get paid if they hit a set – players are better these days than they used to be, and the chances of getting someone’s whole stack if you flop a set and they have AA aren’t what they were in 2010 or 2011.

66, 77 and 88 were doing a lot better, which suggests a significant gap in how they were played – obviously they’re stronger hands, but they don’t play so much better postflop that we should expect to make two or three times as much money. I would suggest that people fold these small pair hands preflop much more often overall, especially when considering a preflop open-raise.

The root cause of misplayed hands

Most of the time that a hand is misplayed, it’s for one of three reasons. An over-estimation of the profitability of flat-calling preflop, an over-estimation of the profitability of opening preflop, or an overly passive approach to postflop play. I’d say these three are inter-connected and contribute about equally to all these weaknesses.

If we want to avoid falling into the trap of misplaying these hands, it would make sense to fold them more often preflop in some of these situations I’ve mentioned above. However, we also need to maintain a focus on gaining a better understanding of our opponents’ ranges, and a greater inclination to play aggressively postflop, since this route will eventually allow us to continue playing these hands, but to make them an asset to us, rather than a hindrance. Keep working on your preflop and postflop range analysis, and these hands will become less of a problem for you over time.