Slow-playing
The disadvantages of slow-playing - part 2/3
1) You´re potentially giving away free cards
Even when you hold a strong hand before or on the flop, chances are that it can be beat by adding one or two perfect cards to another player´s hand. In case you decide to play your hand slow, you have to carefully assess the pros and cons of exposing your hand to such a risk. By not betting you give your rivals the chance to improve their situation for free, without having to risk their chips, potentially turning a situation an advantageous into a losing situation.
2) You´re in danger of keeping the pot small
In order to get money into the pot, somebody has to bet. If you have a strong hand, you want to play a big pot. Those are easy rules in Poker and by slow-playing you´re not following them. That doesn´t mean that slow-playing is a tactic that needs to be avoided at all costs. Playing a hand slow might be a great move at times; however you have to consider that your opponents might hold a hand they would have no problem calling you with, but don´t necessarily want to bet, either. Let me give you a short example:
Over the last weeks I was involved in two or three situations where I was able to flop “4 of a kind”. Now that´s what I call a great hand, as there´s practically no chance that you´ll be beaten by somebody else. One situation occurred where the board showed three jacks and I had the fourth one. I had to go up against two opponents, was the first to act and decided to play the hand slow, hoping that I could trap somebody into betting. However, the problem was that nobody else felt to be in the mood to risk some of his chips, so everybody just checked. The turn showed an ace and I was hoping that somebody would have hit the ace and completed a full house or that one of my rivals would try to use this “scare-card” to start a bluff, so I checked again. Guess what, again I wasn´t getting any action. On the river I decided to bet half the pot and one guy called, meaning my profit during that hand only accumulated to around 3.5 big bets.
Now what I would like to express is that it might have been a better idea had I decided to bet on the flop. Perhaps one of my opponents had a hand like KT, hoping to have six outs and a percentage of close to 25 % in order to complete his full house. Maybe one was holding a small pocket-pair, giving them a reason to call my bet and thereby increasing the pot size.
3) You don´t get information out of your opponents
If you decide to bet, you´re not only able to squeeze money out of them, additionally you´re also able to get information from them. When you bet and somebody else just calls, there might be a lot of reasons for it. Maybe your opponent is on a draw; maybe he has a middle-pair with a great kicker or he´s sitting on a middle pocket-pair. By slow-playing, you totally miss these information, you simply don´t know whether or not your rival holds a hand that might be improvable or doesn´t have anything.
4) You might trick yourself
One thing about slow-playing is that your opposition probably doesn´t know that you´re only faking your weakness. Most of the times, they assume that you have absolutely nothing worth holding on to. If that happens, the other players might increase their aggressiveness with hands that don´t look so good at first, because they think that they might be ahead. Let me give you one brief example:
I once had AA and raised pre-flop and the BB called. The flop showed A 2 3 and the only hand that could beat me right now was 54 as this would have completed a straight. I decided to play the hand slow by checking and the BB checked, too. The turn showed a 4 and now I was getting a little nervous. Of course, I assumed that I´d still be ahead but I´ve seen much crazier things to not at least give a thought to the possibility that my lone opponent might hold a 5. I checked the turn and so did the BB. The river showed a 9, basically leaving only one question unanswered: Does the other guy in fact hold a 5? If so, which hand that includes a 5 might be good enough to call a raise pre-flop? Anyway, I figured that my hand is good and now I wanted to get some money into the pot, so I made a bet and the other guy raised me. I wasn´t sure what to think of that move, so I only called instead of going all-in and the BB showed K9o.
What I wanted to express with this illustration is that you not only don´t receive any kind of information about your opponent´s hand by slow-playing, you might even get caught up in situations where you trick yourself into believing that someone else is holding an incredibly strong hand. Take a look at it from the perspective of my opponent: I didn´t bet on the flop and the turn so he assumed that the ace wasn´t helping me in any way. I raised before the flop, so maybe my hand could have been something like KQ, KJ or even QJ. The river came up and showed the 9, essentially giving him the second best pair on the board (if you discount the ace, a pair of nines is the top-pair) with a top-kicker. Maybe he thought that I was only trying to steal the pot, thereby raising me. However, by slow-playing I tricked myself in such a way, that I was scared to go all-in denying myself the chance of taking his whole stack.
Read part 3/3
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