As a poker coach, I often notice the same concepts coming up over and over again during my coaching sessions. The recurring refrain from this past month was the idea that small pairs beat strength whereas suited connectors beat weakness.
Small Pairs
Most of us are familiar with the idea of calling with a small pair in order to try and hit a set. The problem comes when we don’t understand when this is a good idea and when it is not. When you are calling with a small pair, you will flop a set roughly 1 in 8.5 times. This is not very often, so when you do hit, you need to be able to make up for all the times you miss.
Let’s say you call a bet of 100 in an attempt to hit a set. If you make this call 9 times, you will have spent 900 chips in order to hit a set roughly one time. When you hit, you need to make back at least the 900 you spent in order to breakeven. Your implied odds are determined by the effective stack size. When the effective stack is less than 900, this is impossible, ignoring any dead money from blinds and antes. When the effective stack is a lot more than that, this becomes much easier to do. Things get tricky when the effective stack is not much more than this breakeven point. In this case, you essentially need your opponent to put in the vast majority, if not all, of the effective stack in order to make this play profitable. Only two types of opponents are likely to do this — tight players and overly aggressive players.
Tight players with strong ranges are your primary target. They have so few bluffs in their range that they will often be strong enough to pay you off for stacks when you hit your set and go all-in with it. Overly aggressive players make good secondary targets. They have lots of bluffs in their range, so when you make a set, you can’t just go all-in and expect them to call. Instead, you have to just call with your set and expect them to go all-in themselves with a worse hand or a bluff.
The problem comes when you try to make a set in a close spot against a loose player who isn’t overly aggressive post flop or a good player who is capable of hand reading. These players will often raise and c-bet wide, but they do not go too far beyond that point too often without a good reason to do so. If all you get from them post flop is a c-bet, you won’t get enough value from your set to make up for all the times you miss.
So this leads me to believe the absolute best time to call with a small pair is when you open from early position and get three-bet by a tight player in the blinds. These players take this line with the extremely strong ranges we’re looking for. Plus, you are in position and are closing the action. When the spot is this perfect, I think you can call with the minimum effective stack size, or implied odds, we discussed above.
When the spot isn’t this perfect because you are out of position and are not closing the action, you need a bit more than the minimum to call in order to make up for all the times the flop is checked back or you don’t even get to see the flop because a player left to act raises you out of the hand. To give myself a bit of an edge and make the math easier, I round the chances of hitting a set to 1 in 10 tries instead of the actual 1 in 8.5. This means I’ll call if I stand to win a minimum of 10 times the amount I invest if the spot is good, but if it has a lot of these negative factors, I bump that up to as much as 20 times the amount I invest.
Suited Connectors
Suited Connectors can be played in the same way, but instead of flopping a big hand 1 time in 10, they flop two pair or better about 1 time in 20. This means that in a perfect spot, like calling a three-bet from a tight player in the blinds, you can only call with these hands if you can win 20 times the amount you invested. If the spot is worse, you may need to be able to win more like 40 times this amount. In practice, you rarely get those kinds of odds outside of the first level or two of the tournament. This makes suited connectors bad hands to call against strong ranges in the middle and late stages of the tournament when the average stack is much shorter than that.
Instead, these hands play better as calls against players with weak ranges because even though they rarely flop a hand strong enough to beat a preflop monster, they often flop draws that are excellent for bluffing players off of weak ranges. Suited connectors flop a playable draw about 1 in 5 times. This means you can call with these hands getting much less than the 20 or 40 to 1 implied odds mentioned above as long as you’re up against a weak range and are able to successfully bluff when you flop a draw. For these reasons, the best players to target with these hands are those who open wide ranges and are not too sticky post flop.
For example, let’s say a loose player opens from the button and you call in the big blind with a suited connector. You can expect this player to c-bet most flops when checked to whether he hit his hand or not. If you flop a draw or even a backdoor draw, you should often check raise this player as a bluff if you can credibly rep some value hands. On the other hand, raising with a backdoor draw is a bad idea in the case where you open from the button and call a three-bet from a tight player in the big blind who doesn’t have a big stack behind. This player often has a hand that he will not fold to this bluff, so calling the three-bet with a suited connector hoping to make this play is futile. Instead, you should fold to the three-bet and only call if you have a pair that is suitable to stand up to this type of strength.
Conversely, if a loose player opens for a minraise from the CO, you’re on the button with a small pair, and all four players left to act have around 20 bbs, calling to try and flop a set is a mistake. The opener is likely too weak to pay off your set if you hit and you will not even see the flop if one of the blinds decides to squeeze all-in after you call. Instead, you should often just go all-in preflop with this hand depending on the stage of the tournament.
Small pairs and suited connectors are both great hands to call with in many scenarios. However, many players tend to call and play them similarly in spite of the math that suggests that they tend to be good for near polar opposite situations when stacks become more shallow. If you do a better job of choosing the right time to call with these hands, you should find yourself in more profitable spots postflop and increase your expectation.
