Awkward spot in the big blind

Andyl1986

Hi all,

Not a specific hand, just a question on a situation I frequently find myself in in the lower stakes cash games which tend to be quite passive.

Say there's 3 limpers and you're in the big blind with a hand like 103o, the flop comes 10 high, what do you do?  I tend to take a stab but then get at least one caller and find myself having to give up on the turn out of position.  Would a check / fold be better rather than seemingly throwing away money here long term?

Cheers

BorinLoner

If you can't stand a call then don't bet the flop.

If you're betting it has to be because you think you're going to be called by weaker hands. If you're then check-folding on the turn, it suggests that you didn't think you were being called on the flop by weaker hands. You don't really want to be bluffing with top pair.

The best thing to do in that situation is generally to check and think about calling one bet. You don't want to be inflating the pot with such a marginal hand but there's a reasonable chance that you have the best hand so you don't want to just fold to a single bet. Perhaps on future streets, though, more aggression will be shown which we'll have to interpret as greater strength than our hand.

That's a very general response of course. You may think that the guy betting the flop only bets with big hands, so you can just fold to that one bet. There's no correct answer to how to play any given situation. You've just got to think about what your opponents are doing, what their ranges are and how your hand plays against their ranges.

Really you shouldn't be asking questions like this at all. "How to play top-pair no-kicker" isn't something you should be thinking about. You should be thinking about how to exploit your opponents' ranges.

percival09

bet flop for value most of the time. not a massive fan of c/c or c/f

BorinLoner

In light of percival's post, I've highlighted some portions of my first response to clarify its meaning.

To summarise: Bet if you think you can be called by worse. Check if you think you can't be called by worse. Think about your opponents' ranges.

percival09

we can nearly always get called by a worse hand when we have top pair even with no kicker. Of course we have to be careful on later streets, but by c/c we're just clueless about life and have to fold ott prob whereas by valuebetting we can get at least 1 street comfortably imo and it makes the hand easier to play

rancid

Bet

 

If called slow down unless oppo range is much wider than just 10x

For example a 10c5d2,h oppo range is going to be narrow

 

On a 10h8h4c, oppo range will be wider to include draws

 

2 streets of value is good enough