I came across a pretty simple, boring, yet vital hand when I was reviewing some of my play from January’s World Series of Poker Circuit main event in Morocco, where I finished 20th out of 1,523 runners for $11,505. In my early days of playing, this was the type of hand that regularly cost me at least two streets of value.
On day 1, we’re playing 40 big blinds effective and the under-the-gun player, who’s a decent Italian reg, opens to 2.3 big blinds. I’m in the big blind with Q♥9♦ and have an easy call, though it’s the worst offsuit queen I would defend with at this stack depth.
The flop comes A♠Q♠10♣ and my opponent continues for about half pot. They absolutely dominate this board and should be range-betting with two sizes of approximately 55% and 83% pot.
I make a quick fold.
An old poker adage stated that bottom pair is worth calling one street, second pair is worth calling two streets, and you can call all the way down with top pair. Though very simple, generally, this piece of advice will allow you to play relatively decent poker.
So why did I fold the flop with second pair?
Simply put, if I call one street, I’ll be dragged through the mud, likely forced into calling big bets on multiple streets, and certainly have to give up later unless I want to put my hero cape on.
When you compare the UTG range to the big blind range on this board, it’s not even close. The villain’s range has a whopping 68% equity. Their range advantage is so strong that the big blind will only have above 50% equity on the flop about 25% of the time. The big blind is generally cooked in this spot.
Since my opponent’s range advantage was so great, I actually need to overfold. The villain has all of the sets and many more combos of two pair in their range and, with my specific hand, I have no straight draw, no flush draw, no backdoors, and no blockers.
It sucks to have to fold second pair, especially on the flop, but we must respect the villain’s range. They’re going to be incentivized to double-barrel, at the very least, more often than not. Then what happens when they triple barrel? We usually are going to find the fold button after donating a whole bunch of chips to our opponent.
When we look at the GTO solution, calling [invalid notations] flop against a 55% c-bet is actually a horrible long-run decision, generating a massive -0.8 EV. If we faced an 83% c-bet sizing, our EV loss actually shoots up to -1.35, which indicates an incredibly big mistake.
Even if we had the 9♠ in our hand vs. a 55% pot bet to give ourselves a backdoor flush draw, it wouldn’t be as bad, but it would still be a fold as we lose between 0.14 and 0.19 in EV.
So how should we play against our opponent on this flop? For starters, we should simplify our strategy by never raising on high-high-high boards like this, as it will set off immediate alarm bells.
Even GTO strategy advocates for only raising 3% of the time, and those combos are value-heavy. If we make a big hand, we should let our opponent keep barreling, in case he has a bluff. The villain is incentivized to put a lot of chips in the middle, regardless of if they have a hand or not.
Second, we should have a bunch of equity. So we will continue with our flush draws, straight draws, pairs with gutshots (like J-19 or Q-J), most of our aces, of course, straights and two pair combos.
You may be asking, “Wait… MOST of our aces?” Yep, you heard right. We’re even supposed to fold some of our top pairs on the flop.
This may sound a bit crazy, but hands like A♣5♦ and A♣8♣ actually mix between calling and folding because they face most of the exact same issues as the Q♥9♦. In fact, hands like A♣4♦ and A♣5♦ should be folding a lot more than calling.
These are zero EV calls, meaning there’s no mathematical long-run edge between calling and folding, though the player population is often more aggressive on these flops, which will send your EV in the negative direction.
Against an 83% sizing, all our offsuit aces A-8 or worse (without a spade) become -EV calls, so they become snap-folds. Even our suited aces A-8 and below should fold unless we hold hearts for the backdoor flush draw.
The moral of the story? Play passively and conservatively on these boards from the big blind against an early position player. It’s much better to overfold and conserve your stack than to get blasted on multiple streets and face tough decisions.
Blaise Bourgeois a WSOP Circuit ring winner, poker journalist, and contributing columnist for Card Player. Find him on Twitter/X @BlaiseBourgeois.