Poker Cash Port

www.paddypowerpoker.com – In a game of Five Card Draw, we find ourselves dealt (7,7,6,6,3). This is a reasonable hand to be dealt, and I feel a call is the right choice if you are in late position and are facing an average sized raise. Despite this hand being relatively strong to start with, it is still vulnerable, and if our opponent swaps two cards on their first draw, I would be concerned that they have Three of a Kind.

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Allow your judgement be led by the size of this preliminary bet, as they could also be keeping a pair with an Ace too.
When a player leads out with a reasonable sized bet in Five Card, often they will have a large pair, but sometimes, they may have a two pair or a set already. I would probably fold to a very strong bet after the draw if my opponent held three cards, and may even fold to a big bet if they held four, but either way, we should be cautious with a medium to small Two Pair. We know in Five Card that an opponent swapping one after a reasonable preflop raise is very likely to also have Two Pair. The chances are strong that their two pair will beat yours, and so you would probably need to make your Full House to win in this scenario. However, consider whether your opponent is loose enough to make the big raise preflop with a stright or flush draw.

Ideally, we want to see our opponent swap three in this situation to confirm our feeling that we are up against a single strong pair. We still have a possibility of their hand improving to beat ours, so perhaps if we still don’t want to commmit more chips to this hand than we have to, we could do something interesting here such as standing pat when it is our turn to draw. The effect of this is that our opponent will immediately feel they may well be up against a straight or flush, and will be far more likely to check to us even if they improve to a two pair or three of a kind. Showing such strength by not swapping any cards costs us nothing, but if our opponent has us beaten, it saves chips.Paddypowerpoker.com

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 16th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under UK Poker. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.