OK to Slowplay

Edit: Made a mistake in the original post. Villain did not have two pair, he had Aces with a kicker that didn’t play.

$5/$10 NLHE, $1100 effective stacks. Action folds to a decent TAG regular in the SB, he opens to $30, I make it $90 with AJo, he makes it $200, I call. Flop is AJ4 rainbow. He bets about $200, I call. Turn is an off-suit 6 7. He checks, I check. River is a 9, he checks, I shove something like $650 into the $800 pot, and he calls with A6s.

There are two major disadvantages to slowplaying that I think I can pretty well avoid in this situation:

1. Losing the Pot. Giving a free card risks improving your opponent to a better hand or letting a scare card fall that enables your opponent to bluff you out of the pot.

2. Losing Additional Bets. When your opponent has a second-best hand that can pay off multiple bets, slow-playing can cost you one or more bets. In big bet games, this is especially bad since the pot size grows geometrically. In other words, the bet that you miss is usually a lot bigger than the bet that you get.

These two risks are somewhat in tension with each other. On the one hand, it is safer to slowplay in a small pot, since if you do accidentally let your opponent draw to a better hand for free, at least you haven’t cost yourself a large pot. On the other hand, a small pot usually means a lot of money left in the effective stacks, and slowplaying may prevent you from building the pot in a way that will enable you to take your opponent’s entire stack.

In practice, negotiating this tension means estimating how often Villain will have  a hand that can stand up to heavy pressure right away, how often a free card will cost you the pot ‘(and possibly more bets as well), how often a free card will improve Villain to a second-best hand that can pay you off, how often your slowplay will induce a bluff from a hand that would have folded, how often your slowplay will induce a call or value bet from a hand that would have folded, and even how slowplaying this hand will protect your range in the future. In other words, you have to play poker.

In the hand above, the pot was large and I was in position, so there was  no risk of not getting the money in by the river.  Whether I shove the turn or check the turn and call or shove the river, all the money gets in. There were also very few draws possible, so while Villain could make a very unlikely three-of-a-kind, a free card was more likely to give him something like a worse two pair. The only way his two pair could beat mine would be with AK or AQ, and since those hands aren’t folding the turn anyway, the result is the same whether I slowplay or not.

The biggest risk of slowplaying here is that checking the turn and betting the river actually looks stronger than just betting the turn. When I bet the turn, my hand looks either like a float that is now bluffing or a monster hand. When I check the turn and bet the river, a bluff looks a lot less likely (since I probably would have bet the turn), so it’s more likely that I have showdown value. That means I either flopped a monster, flopped a weak made hand that improved, or am turning a weak made hand into a bluff. There’s not much reason for the latter, so I think the river bet should actually be read as quite strong.

I don’t think Villain’s call on the river is a good one, and I didn’t take this line hoping to get called light on the river. Rather, I thought I might induce bluffs or even value bets from hands that would fold to a turn bet. But hey, this works too.