Good Hands Bad Boards
There are times in a game of poker where you’ll get dealt a monster. You’ll get AKs in the hole and the board will come out A-A-K giving you a huge monster of a boat. This is good, in that your hand dominates nearly everything that could possibly come out, even on later streets. But this is also a very bad situation to be in as far as maximizing your profits from the hand.
See, the fact that your hand is a monster and matches up with the board very nicely means, most likely, your opponents didn’t make any hand at all. As such, you should expect very little action on the hand and will most likely be forced to slowplay it in hopes that the turn or river give your online poker opponents a second best hand that they’ll bet into you with.
Of course there will be the occasional bluffer who will bluff just about any A-A-x board, but that’s the rarity, not the norm. So how do you get value out of this “crippling” hand?
The answer lies in your table image. If you’ve been spewing chips all over the place all night, you may be able to entice a willing victim to come along for the ride as you drive to value town. But if you’re a tight player, and you start to show some aggression, chances are, you’re almost stuck settling for a minimal profit.
Some good moves here are the check-raise, and the cold-call, as it shows just enough weakness that you may get one more bet out of your online poker opponent before he or she concedes that you have them dominated. A more extreme tactic here is to shove all in right after the flop and challenge the table to bet at you to see if you’re bluffing. A maniac will most likely want to call you here just because of his predisposition to always want to “be the bluffer but not be the bluffed.”
In any event, if you keep working at it, you’ll find a way to play these monster hands and make a profit, but always remember, not every monster is what will bring in the big money. Besides, there’s nothing wrong with small-balling your way up to a bigger stack.
