WSOP Deep Stack Mistake #10: Protecting Hands
When the pot constitutes an appreciable percentage of your stack, it’s often worth putting everything at risk to protect a likely best hand. Even when you think you’ll get action only from hands that beat you, there is substantial value in folding out hands with 15-25% equity. This is much less true in deep-stacked NLHE. You’ll often need to exercise some pot control with your marginal hands, giving the occasional free card so that you can take your hand to showdown.
When I say “take your hand to showdown”, what I really mean is taking it there profitably, ie against a range of hands you can beat. Obviously you could get to showdown every hand if you just shoved all in at the first opportunity. But this would ensure that you only went to showdown with hands that crush you.
You might check top pair on the flop so that you can profitably put money in on the turn and/or river. That is, you create some deception about your hand so that your opponent will feel comfortable bluffing or calling with weaker portions of his range. When you have the nuts, you can get away with fastplaying because you don’t mind narrowing your opponent’s range to only his strongest holdings- you beat those hands and they can pay off big. Similarly, when you are bluffing, you don’t mind narrowing his range in exactly the same way because you are folding out a lot of better hands.
But when you have a medium-strength hand, you need to make sure that you don’t show so much strength that your opponent folds all worse hands and only gives you action when you’re beat. This is a common mistake, as many players are overly concerned about protecting against draws. Thus, they might overbet the pot with top pair and a weak kicker, and while they succeed in pricing out draws, they also get no value from their hand and lose money when they are called or raised. They may even entice their opponents up to make a big bluff that they can’t call.
Being aware of these 10 common mistakes can help you in the WSOP main event and other deep stack tournaments in two ways: by helping you to avoid such mistakes in your own play, and by helping you to recognize and exploit such mistakes when your opponents make them. GL!