ITH Poker Forum

[Neilis]

I'm having some troubles with my game at the moment and I'm basically breaking even over a pretty extended stretch which is annoying.. I do know I'm down from where I should be in an EV sense of things though, so I guess it's not all bad.

I pretty much exclusively play NL100 6-max at the moment although in the past I've been reasonably successful up to NL400.

There's one specific part of my game that's giving me some grief however and that's playing hands like AQ or KQ and to a lesser extent AK against a specific type of player. I'm playing at party for the moment, and the number of people playing more than half their hands and playing them very passively is amazing.. and naturally I'm chasing those players around.

Problem is I'm getting killed with those hands. People limp and call raises, I seem to struggle to flop a pair and my continuation bets get check-called far more often than I've ever remembered in the past. It's getting to the point where I'm wondering if I should even be raising this type of hand at all.

Obviously I think that limping AQo is ridiculously passive.. but when it's my biggest losing hand over a something like 30k hand sample I obviously have a problem somewhere.

I'd like some advice on dealing with hands like that in situations where a large percentage of the time I'm going to get at least 2 callers to a preflop raise.

[Ed Miller]

First of all, I don't think that "limping AQo is ridiculously passive." Whether you limp or raise it depends on your opponents, the stack sizes, and how you expect the rest of the hand to play out. I'd say that I usually raise it, but not always.

Calling a play "passive" is never a reason not to do it.

If your opponents are loose and passive as you suggest, then you beat them with value bets. Unless the stack sizes are wacky, I'd tend to raise all of these hands that you mention preflop. If I flop top pair, my plan is to bet-bet-bet until all the money is in. At least I do that if these players are loose-passive enough to call 3 bets with a weaker hand.

As for c-bets... sometimes you can c-bet when you miss, expecting to get called. The point is to set up an even bigger bluff on the turn when they'll "give up" unless they have something. Now that works against some players, but if they are calling you down with bottom and middle pair, then that's probably not the best strategy. Instead, just don't c-bet so much, and VALUE bet when you flop top pair.

As always, another key is not to sweat getting stacked. Sometimes you're going to bet-bet-bet only to lose to two pair or trips. That's ok... at least it's ok as long as they'd also call you down with a number of worse hands too.