Dodging bullets made easy

You did everything right with your premium pocket pair.

It was raised to you, and you re-raised it right back with your AA. Your opponent called, and when the flop came rags, you made a sizable bet. Suddenly, your opponent puts in an unexpected raise, and you're forced to make a decision for all your chips. You can't put him on any hand that beats you except for a set, so you go for it. All in.

Of course your opponent has the set, and you lose your stack.

This scenario happens over and over again at the poker tables. Every minute of every day, someone is crying out over the injustice of their high pocket pair getting cracked by some miniscule pocket pair.

It's why sets are gold. It's why people love no limit hold 'em. It's why people say, "That's poker."

How can this be? There must be a better way than to go home, bemoaning your bad luck about getting involved in a "setup hand" that you were fated to lose from the moment you peered down at those pocket rockets hugging the virtual felt.

This is what I was getting at in my last post. How is it possible that both the player with pocket Aces and the player with the low pocket pair are both playing correctly? Are we destined to forever trade off chips like this?

Let's take a look back at that last hand.

It was folded to me on the button, I raised pot ($21) with pocket sixes, and then the small blind re-raised pot back ($75).

At that point, I had a choice to make. I had about a 7:1 chance of flopping a set, and I felt confident that I could probably win a large pot if I hit.

This is where implied odds figure so importantly into the equation. Both my opponent and I had deeper stacks than our $600 buy-ins. I had $829, and my opponent had $1,952.

I needed to call $54 preflop, and with 7:1 odds against me, I had to figure I could make at least 7 times that amount ($378) for my call to be worthwhile.

Against a shorter stack, it would have been correct for me to fold. But I knew I had a chance to make more than double that amount if I hit well in what was developing to be a large pot already. So I made the call.

I flopped my set, and the rest of the hand was a foregone conclusion. My opponent bet out 80 percent of the pot size, I raised him more than 3 times that amount, and he had to either fold or go all-in because the pot was so large already. Thinking I might have a drawing hand or a weak overpair, my opponent went all-in, and that was all she wrote.

There are only two ways my opponent could have escaped this trap. The obvious answer is that he could have folded to my raise on the flop, but as my previous commenters mentioned, that's a very tough fold to make at any stakes.

I didn't see the less obvious solution until Daniel suggested a point made in "No Limit Hold 'em: Theory and Practice."

When stacks are deep, it may be necessary to make bigger raises preflop to force drawing hands to either make unprofitable calls or fold.

In this hand, that means my opponent should have made a larger-than-pot-sized re-raise to around $120 or more, which negates the implied odds of me hitting my set because I would have had to pay too much up-front. Then the correct move for me would have been to fold my pocket 6s, and my opponent would have won a small pot rather than losing a large one.

This kind of large preflop re-raise ensures victory for the pocket Aces in the long run. It becomes -EV for me to call with my small pocket pair because over time, I will lose more from the times I call and miss than the amount I win when I call and hit.

(A note on math: Estimating implied odds is a tricky proposition based on your read of your opponent and many other circumstances of the hand. In the hand example I used for this hand, I guessed I would need greater than 7:1 implied odds to justify my call with pocket 66s based on the assumptions that I could trap my opponent, that my pocket pair would make a set on the flop 12.5 percent of the time, and that my opponent did indeed have the very strong hand he was representing.)