Forced to Play Straightforward

When playing deep and the pot is small sometimes you are forced to play your hand straight forward

Occasionally, you get into a situation where your action is so strong it is almost impossible for you to be bluffing. This especially is the case when you are the preflop raiser and make a raise in a pot where there is a ragged, one card straight on board.

The following hand went down last week at the Commerce Casino $5-10 game. The Villain in the hand was a total unknown to me. He had just come from a broken game, late on a Saturday night, with about $6500. I had had a nice session and had built my stack up from $1500 to about $3800. It got folded around to me in the cutoff and I raised to $35 with 8♣ 9♣. Everyone folded except the Villain in the big blind. The flop ran out 4♣ 5♠ 6♠ giving me a gutshot straight draw and a backdoor flush draw. Surprisingly the Villain led out at the pot for $50. This is rare, as usually people will check to the raiser heads up even on ragged boards. I decided to call given our stack depth, position and the ability for me to represent the front door flush draw or over cards. A case probably could be made for raising as a semi bluff but I decided to take the less aggressive route.

The turn card came off a magical 7♥ giving me the absolute nuts. Again the big blind bet out at me, this time for $100. So with the board looking like 4567 with two spades you can see what I mean by basically having to announce the fact that I had at least an 8. If he had a set or two pair it was unlikely that he would have folded anyway and this deep I absolutely needed to get more money in the pot against just a bare 8. Sometimes you have to get lucky that your opponent has something along with you. Now if my opponent had been bluffing when I raise he is very likely to fold. So we might not get a final bluff bet out of him on the river. But that really does not matter. It would be a disaster if our opponent checks a scare card like a spade at the end with an 8, where he either calls or even worse folds. So even though we have almost a nil bluffing range when we raise the turn on a 4567 board we still have to raise with this type of stack depth. I ended up making it $450, and unfortunately he folded.