I’ve written before about the importance of playing draws aggressively. While popular, the strategy of check-calling with a hand that can’t win unless it improves, in the hopes of making a huge payoff when your hole card hits, is a poor strategy. Practitioners of this strategy tend to underestimate the value of betting and raising with draws and overestimate how much they can win when they do improve their hand. The problem is that your opponent can see when there’s a straight or flush draw on the board, making it unlikely that they’ll call with lesser hands.
That said, I recently encountered a situation where I deliberately played a draw passively, even though I believed I could win the hand immediately with a bluff. The purpose of this article is not to encourage you to play draws passively in general, but to emphasize how the stars need to align for this type of play to be profitable.
I was playing at a deep stack table with blinds $5/$10 No-limit Hold'em, most players had at least $3000 in chips at the table. The player in first position raised to $50, I was next to act with :9d :7d .
You shouldn't make a habit of calling big raises from early position with suited one-gappers, especially when you're also in early position. In this case, I believed three things that, when put together, led me to think that calling could be profitable:
- The raiser was making big preflop raises frequently, without worrying about his position. Plus, I didn't have to worry about running into overpairs, which would be the only hands where my equity would be woefully bad.
- The rest of the table was quite passive, especially when it came to 3-BETs, so I could count on seeing the flop without having to call any more money.
- I expected my opponents to make big mistakes postflop. Putting money into the pot with a weak hand from a weak position is usually a losing strategy. Such an action requires a high potential for improvement in the hand to be worthwhile. Even if the average stack at the table had been $2000 instead of $3000 I would have folded the hand.
I ended up getting lucky with the preflop result, only the blinds called the bet, which meant playing in position after the flop.
The flop came :4c :5h :6s . The blinds checked and the preflop aggressor bet $100 into the pot of $200
I believed, based on the size and timing of his bet, that he had nothing stronger than a pair. This made raising tempting. Despite all this, I only had 8 clean outs (although a 7 or a 9 would also improve my hand, I don't think I would win with such a low pair), meaning that if I didn't bluff I would be losing money in the long run.
If I had been holding a slightly different draw, like A7, I would have raised. Even if I had made a straight with that hand, I couldn't expect someone with a lower hand to put money in the pot with the board showing 4568 or 3456. It takes more than a big hand to win a pot. You also need an opponent to have a hand just slightly worse than you to get into the big pot, and an obvious straight draw doesn't make that possible.
The great thing about my 97 was that if I hit an 8 on the turn I would have the nuts in a situation where someone else could easily have the second nut. In a heads-up against an early position aggressor it would be a lot to ask for him to have a 7, but with 2 other players in the hand there was a reasonable chance. Plus, these other players had a lot of money and I suspected they wouldn't hesitate to go all-in if I coolered them. I decided it was worth a shot.
I called, and to my delight, both blinds called as well. This strongly suggested that someone else had a 7.
To my delight, the turn was a :8h , giving me the nuts. Everyone checked, and I bet $300 into a pot of $600. This seems small considering that over $2500 were still behind in the effective stacks, but I suspected that the players in the blinds would raise with just a 7 and also call with some drawing hands. Check-raising with just a 7 would be a big mistake with that much money behind, but this was the kind of mistake I expected from these players from the beginning.
The player in the small blind raised to $1000. The other two players folded, I moved all-in and she happily called. The river didn't change the hand and I won over 300 big blinds. My opponent willingly showed :Jh :7h , which meant she had a flush draw and her check-raise was defensive, since she was in position to beat a possible pocket 7 from another player.
There's no denying that I was very lucky in this hand, both in hitting the joker on the turn and in having someone else call me in this situation. Almost every time you win a pot there's a bit of luck involved. Good poker is all about putting yourself in a good position to take full advantage of luck when the cards come your way.
Passive draw play often means placing too much trust in the luck of the draw to hit, but when it does, it doesn't pay off in a satisfactory way. Therefore, having a well-hidden draw along with a lot of money leads to the path of making the most of passive play, especially when your opponents are inclined to overvalue their bad hands.
Written by: Andrew Brokos
Translated and adapted from: When to Chase
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