Hand of the Week: Suited Connectors Preflop

Thanks to everyone who participated in the first installment of this little experiment. The question I left you with, essentially, was about whether a suited connector like 87s should be raised in early position, and if so, why?

As I expected, a lot of the comments hinted at the right answer without quite nailing it on the nose. That’s good, as it will give us a chance to address some common misconceptions. Here’s a representative example: “when you raise pre flop, you don’t raise a hand, you raise a range of hands. You want your range to be balanced, so you have to put big hands and hands with potential. Even when 87s is behind pre and post flop, it’s your whole range that matters.”

This seems to imply that opening 87s is -EV, but we should do it anyway. This should never be the case. The route to optimal play is to make the most +EV decision at every opportunity. Folding has 0EV, so if raising is -EV, then folding is better. Contrary to popular belief (a belief that I myself espoused until not too long ago), you shouldn’t make plays “for the sake of balance”. At equilibrium, the EV you gain from, for instance, giving your opponent more incentive to pay off your strong hands because he knows you also raise weak ones, can’t be so great that it overwhelms whatever you lose by playing weak hands. If it were, your opponent could just revert to not paying off your strong hands, let you get the occasional bluff through, and unilaterally increase his own EV.

What this hints at, however, is that the general composition of your range may actually make it profitable to play other sorts of hands. This is what people have in mind when they talk about “implied odds”, although I find that term misleading because it conjures up images of “slot machine poker”: making big hands and then getting paid off. In fact, as we saw in the hypothetical above, hands can outperform their hot-and-cold equity not only by getting paid big on certain boards but also by bluffing on boards that are good for other parts of your range.

There’s a small universe of hands so strong that they can be opened and, even with six or seven people left to act, be a favorite either to win the blinds or be called by worse. Your opponents simply won’t be dealt better hands than, say, QQ or AK often enough to both defend the blinds vigorously and consistently be ahead. So, you certainly will open hands like that from early position. Just for the sake of argument, let’s say that range is {AQo+, AJs+, TT+}

Now let’s think about how that range will play on two different boards: 654r and AT5r. On the 654 flop, the danger is apparent: this range never makes a stronger hand than one pair, which gives opponents the opportunity to make both bluffs and thin value bets with impunity. Having 87s will not necessarily “protect” you from this strategy. It will, however, give you the opportunity to win a big pot on this flop. This is why I say that it’s not about making a -EV raise with 87s in order to protect some other part of your range, but rather about the composition of your range making it profitable for you to include some different types of hands.

The danger on AT5r is less apparent. Many people are perfectly happy to see a flop like this with AQ and then with the pot and perhaps even another bet before eventually taking it down with a turn or river bet. I even see people who want to bet hands like KK on this flop to “represent the Ace” because the board so strongly favors the pre-flop raiser.

The reason you may have trouble winning big pots with objectively strong hands like AQ or AK is that your opponents correctly perceive you are rarely bluffing on a board like this, because it is so good for your range. If the weakest hand in your range is JJ, well, I guess you might as well turn it into a bluff, but that isn’t going to be terribly profitable. You may not realize it, but a very tight range is missing out on profitable bluffing opportunities for lack of hands that strongly prefer bluffing to checking on a board like this. Playing 87s may not cause you get more action with your strong hands, but it will enable you to profit from your opponent’s folds. This, too, deserves to be called “implied odds”, though it usually isn’t.

More useful terminology has recently entered the poker lexicon. Videos from Ben Sulsky, Sean Lefort, and others use a variable, r, to represent the percentage of its equity that a particular hand can realize after postflop play. This is often used in analysis of blind defense, to determine exactly how little of its equity a hand can realize while still being a profitable call.

In this case, however, we are looking at a hand that will have r > 100%. This is because 87s can win several times the pot on boards where it has near-100% equity and also have a reasonable chance of winning the pot on boards where it has near-0% equity. Thus, even though its hot-and-cold equity is poor relative to other hands in your opening range, the overall composition of that range gives your opponents incentive to play in certain ways against you, which makes it possible for a few weaker hands in your range to outperform their equity.

You have to be careful not to take this too far. If your opponents are so loose and poor at hand reading that you can play a very tight range pre-flop and still happily put your stack in with AQ on AT5r, then 87s will probably not have the implied bluffing outs discussed here, and you may be better off not playing it in early position, especially if your opponents are also very loose pre-flop (and such opponents almost always are). Likewise if you are going to pass on the profitable opportunities that playing this hand presents because you are averse to bluffing. I don’t think you’ll show a profit playing this hand if your only goal is to make two-pair or better and then hope to win a big pot.

There’s room to include only a few such hands in your range – if you go overboard, then you risk exploitation, quite possibly unintentional, by loose opponents, or by passive opponents who don’t attack you on 654r. The stronger suited connectors are the best candidates for this. Their raw equity is higher than that of lower suited connectors or suited gappers, and their ability to realize equity is better than that of off-suit broadway hands like ATo, which tend to be strong or weak on the same sorts of boards that are already good or bad for the majority of your range.

As one commenter pointed out, PokerSnowie does in fact advise folding this UTG at a six-handed table with 100BB stacks. That seems excessive to me, but with sufficiently skilled and aggressive opponents (getting 3-bet when you’re holding 87s sucks), I could see this being correct. In practice, it’s a hand I play 100% UTG in, say, a $1/$2 ZOOM game with a $200 stack. At 250BBs, I think the case for playing it only gets stronger, and it’s stronger still with typical live opponents whose three-bet ranges are, shall we say, sub-optimal.