Zero To Sixty

One of the key elements of poker is knowing your “outs,” which is to say how many cards can improve your hand. This is generally looked at in terms of calculating your own odds to win, but I hit a situation today where knowing the outs on the board would have prevented a mistake by myself.

The situation was that there was a flush draw and an open-ended straight draw in the flop. I had top pair and top kicker. Normally, this is enough to win, and with a big enough bet, this would be enough to weed out most draws. The problem is that with the flush/straight draw possibilities, even a big bet may not scare some people off. That was the case tonight.

I knew that the outs would create very positive pot odds unless I did something drastic, so I went all-in. The trouble is that there were just so many outs available that two other people went all-in with me. At that moment I knew I was lost. This was an important lesson–with so many outs on the board, risking an all-in is very unwise.

I generally use a reference of starting hands so that I don’t get too loose on my opening bets. I misplaced it and found myself just playing “off the cuff.” The result has been some pretty poor poker by me. I got very undisciplined and lazy. I was playing hands I never should be playing like Q8 and I was betting aggressively with middle pair in poor position.

The good news is that I quickly realized this was an issue and got back on track. I did break one of my rules and immediately got burned for it. I generally will never go all-in with unpaired cards unless one is an ace. A very loose player went all-in, and I had KQ. His range of hands could have gone everywhere from AA to T9. I put him on a mediocre hand and went all-in. He had A9, but it was the A that killed me… he won with A high, and my rule proved to be there for a reason: Ace high on all ins is a fairly common winning hand when pairs aren’t in the pockets.