A Tale of Two Pair

It was the best of hands, it turned into the worst of hands.
On the button with 6s-7s, 3 limpers ahead of you, you figure
its a good idea to call and see what you can flop.

Flop comes - 6h - 7d - Kc

Nice flop, two pair, with one over card to get someone with
a King to pay you off. UTG bets half pot, all fold to you, you
just call to keep the fish around. Blinds fold.

Turn is the 2s

Villain checks. You bet, villain calls.

River is 3d

Villain leads out for half pot. Your sure you have the best hand
and raise, villain shoves, you call and he flips over 4c-5h

What happened ? How could the donk bet on the flop ?

What alot of players forget when playing connected cards,
is that when they hit, they also bring straight draws
with them.

The trick is to give you opponent the incorrect odds to
chase his draw, but keep the pot small enough that you can
get away from your hand if he appears to have hit.

Using the above example with blinds of .10 / .25 - the pot
starts with $1.50 (Assuming the SB completes and the BB checks)
That means the bet of UTG is $.75, and one call the pot is now
$2.25 when it gets to you.

Now what should you do?

Let's check the odds: For an open ended straight to hit by the
river, villain has 8 outs or 32% chance to hit. We'll forget
about implied odds for this discussion.

In order for you to make villain make a mistake by calling,
you need to raise it to $5.00, giving him about 2-1 odds
but he has less than 3-1 to make his straight.

Now the turn bricks and there is $7.75 in the pot. Villain has
8 outs, or a 17% chance of hitting so you have to give him
worse odd to call. A bet of only $2.25 does that.

Giving him 22.5% to call but only a 17% chance of hitting.
The river was unfortunate, to say the least but why would this
player, who has played pretty passive up to now, lead out ?

Instead of raising here, just call the $6.50.

Now you have given him the incorrect odds all the way along
to chase his straight. And you only lost half your stack.

Some may say, we should bet more to try and push villain off
his hand. Why would we want to do that ? He only hits his
hand less than 1 in 3 times, for the other 2/3 of the time, we
want him to chase and pay us off, while still maintaining some
pot control.

So next time you flop two pair with your connectors, beware
of the straight draws lurking. But make them pay to chase.

math fail?

so your raise is $4.25, making the total pot $7.25, giving him quite a bit less than 2-1 if you meant 4 instead of 5, then okay.

- 1.50+5+5 = 11.50 pot, no idea how it shrunk to under 8. changing the above to 4 would result in a 9.50 pot, which is slightly closer and would require a... $2.50 bet at least, although it is close and you should probably pick a bet of at least $3 to make his mistake actually noticeable.
- 18+%, if you ask poker stove, but that is just nitpicking

river - if we have bet 3 on the turn, pot is 15.50, so another 7.75 to call means we lost... .25 + 4 + 3 + 7.75 = $15, or 60% of our stack.

otherwise, nice article