Using a Scare Card to Your Advantage

Regardless of the level of game you are playing when playing poker, bluffing is a skill that will get you chips if you’re good at it or cost you chips if you are bad at it. In fact, some of the most successful poker players like Sammy Farha using bluffing extensively in their play. Some bluffs are harder to accomplish than others but one of the easiest and most successful type of bluffs is bluffing when a scare card hits the board. In order to illustrate how easy the bluff is to accomplish and how well it works, I will share an example of a hand where I put it to good use.

I am sitting in a middle position with a pair of fives with five other players in the pot in a $1/$2 no limit game. I have a very healthy sized stack so I am not worried about being short stacked or running into chip problems. An opponent who is second to act makes a raise and I decide to make a quick call hoping that I can hit my set on the flop and get paid. A wrench is thrown in my plans when the small blind reraises to $18 and that leaves myself with a choice to make.

Because he is playing from the small blind, I have to make an assumption that he probably has something good. Making a raise from a small blind leaves you out of position for the rest of the hand so raising from that position usually only happens when that player is holding something spicy. There isn’t much that he can be holding to make such a raise from the small blind so I make the safe assumption that he is holding a large pocket pair.

In this situation, most players would probably fold knowing that they are, almost certainly, dominated by a bigger pair. I, however, decide to make the call for a number of different reasons. The raise was not large enough to make it a bad decision to call, the person who put in the first raise makes the call, if I hit my set chances are good that he will probably get stacked, and getting away from a large pocket pair in a 6-max game is really hard. I put my chips in the middle as well and hope to see some magic on the flop.

The flop is A♥ – T♠ – 6♣. Obviously, I did not hit my set which makes things less exciting for me.

The guy sitting in the small blind makes a bet which is to be expected considering he was the major aggressor pre-flop but what is certainly not expected in this situation is the size of his bet. He makes it $8 to go in a pot that is already $50. Relative to the size of the pot, this bet is extremely small. The first thing that comes to mind after seeing his bet is that he probably does have a big pocket pair, but that it isn’t a pair of aces which makes this flop really ugly for him.

There is a possibility that he could have pocket aces and flopped a set but the chances of this are fairly slim for a number of reasons. That small bet could be an attempt to lure me into a trap but if he was trying to trap with a top set, it would almost certainly be better to check and try and give up a free card. Additionally, you cannot really assume that every time someone plays like they have a big hand that they have rockets. It is unlikely that he had ace king as reraising from the small blind with ace king is not really a great idea. Also, pocket tens is too small a hand to justify such a large pre-flop raise from the small blind. Chances are good that he is holding either pocket kings or pocket queens. Obviously, with either of those hands that ace is the worst card he could possibly see on the flop which would make sense considering his small bet.

Now I have to make a decision of whether or not I want to call or raise. Due to the madness that was the pre-flop and considering the fact that I have a position advantage, I decide to go ahead and make a call and see what drops in the turn. An 8♦ is flipped over on the turn which is great. Also great is the fact that he checks. Now the fun really begins.

The fact that he checks means that he has pretty much given up on the hand due to the ace sitting out there. There is a remote possibility that he is playing pocket aces like a genius and this is all part of some master plan to lure me in but if you look at every situation and see the extremely improbable as the most likely answer, you are only going to hurt yourself. I decide to take the information that he has presented to me at face value and I bet the pot. He insta-folds which means that my suspicions were right all along. I pick up a decent sized pot that could have easily gotten away from me had I thrown away my hand after I missed my set on the flop. Especially when playing a 6-max game, you need to pick up every little pot that you can possibly get in order to keep ahead of the blinds and the rake. If you do not take advantage of every possibly situation, you can easily end up underwater and trying to figure out where you went wrong.

Posted by Joel on Jun 3 2010. Filed under Poker Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry