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In the late stages of a tournament, big pairs are generally
pretty easy to play. When you
have 20, 30 or 40 big blinds
in your stack, and you find a
pair of Queens or Kings, you
usually just want to play
aggressively, force a fold, or
play a big all-in pot and hope
things work out in the end.
But early on in a tournament, when the stacks can be very deep
relative to the blinds, I
don’t think it’s always a
great idea to play big pairs
quite as aggressively. A hand
I played this year at the WSOP
Main Event demonstrates the
point pretty well.
At the start of the hand, the blinds were 100/200 and most of the
stacks at the table were right
around the starting amount of
20,000 chips. One player
raised and another called from
late position. I looked down
and saw two Queens.
The instinct for many in this situation is to re-raise. But I
didn’t like that option.
What would happen if one of
the other players in the hand
re-popped me? I’d hate to
fold the Queens, but I
wasn’t ready to risk going
broke with Queens so early in
the tournament.
My re-raise could have also prompted one or both players to just
call. In that case, I would
have been playing out of
position without having a
great idea of what my
opponents held. After the
calls, the pot would be quite
large. It could have cost me
most or even all of my stack
before I figured out whether I
was ahead or behind.
I decided to play a smaller pot and put fewer of my chips at
risk, so I just called.
The flop came Jack-high. I checked, the original raiser bet and
it was folded to me. I called
– again trying to keep the
pot relatively small. The turn
was a blank, and I checked. My
opponent checked behind. This
check made me pretty confident
that I was ahead. When the
river paired the board, I was
happy to put out a value bet,
hoping that I could get paid
off by, perhaps, a medium
pocket pair.
As it turned out, my opponent didn’t have enough to call me and
I took down the pot right
there.
All-in-all, I was happy with the way I played the hand. I put
myself in a position to win a
moderate sized pot without
incurring any risk of going
broke. Next time you see a big
pair early in a tournament,
consider trying to control the
size of the pot rather than
playing as aggressively as you
can.
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