Once you have the basics of poker mastered, you need to look at shifting your focus to developing and improving the strategies that will allow you to build and take down large pots.
The most successful players aren’t the ones that win the most hands; they are the ones that win the hands with the most chips in them.
While there will be occasions where pots will grow themselves due to several players adding lots of chips, those situations won’t happen as often as you want them to. It is your job then to become adept at building pots on your own, and there are few ways better to do this than by slow-playing big hands.
Act Weak to Coax Bets from your Opponents
Slow-playing is when you flip the switch from aggressive to methodical and play your hand like it is marginal/weak rather than strong. The goal with this strategy is to feign weakness and encourage bets from other players at the table in order to build a pot. This is one of the most effective ways of pot building as it is very easy to appear weak in a hand simply by checking and getting your opponents to bet into you as they attempt to win the pot themselves. It is also one of the three best ways to chip up fast in tournaments (Chip Up in Tournaments – Advanced).
Don’t Slow-play Pre-flop
A key part of slow-playing is determining whether or not your hand is strong enough for the tactic to work. One of the biggest factors will be the number of players that have stuck around at any given point in the hand. Slow-playing normally doesn’t take place until after the flop and that is where you should begin to implement it as a technique.
If you flop a moderately strong hand like trips and there are no straight or flush draws on the board, it is okay to slow-play in basically any position against one or two opponents.
With a straight, flush or a full house you can extend that number by one or two, but you never really want to have more than three or four opponents in a pot when you slow-play as it just leaves too many variables out in the open.
When to Switch Strategies
Ideally you want to slow-play against one, and maybe two opponents. This will enable you to keep a good idea of the strength of the opposition’s hands, as well as continue slow-playing in a way that will extract as many chips as possible from their stacks.
There will be many occasions as well where you can and should slow-play on the flop to get one extra bet out of your opponent, but then protect your hand on the turn by being the first to bet, such as when a scare card that adds to a potential straight/flush draw comes out. You never want to have your slow-play tactics put you at too much of a risk of losing the pot.
Key Points
• Avoid slow-playing pre-flop.
• Wait until you have flopped extremely strong hands.
• Feign weakness and check to your opponent to encourage them to bet.
• Be ready to switch back to standard strategies to protect your hand if scare cards appear.
Chris
- Chris Laquinta is a magazine editor, content specialist and poker fanatic with 10+ years writing experience and over 1,500 published articles. Chris is a naitive of Southern California, where he spent his entire life learning gaming concepts and theories from relatives that had been former professional gamblers. He currently resides in Torrance, CA where he works as a professional content writer and part-time SNG professional.
