Playing Small Pairs
One of the most controversial and often most frustrating hands to play in all of Texas Holdem, online or at your local home game, is the small pair. It’s hard to not want to see a flop with most any paired hole cards, in the idea that if you hit your three of a kind you’ll likely win a nice pot. It’s a pretty awful feeling, too, to have to fold those pairs before the flop comes out only to see that third of your set sitting right out on the board, and then a ton of action that you’re missing out on.
Though most of the time, in fact almost a little more than one out of 8 times, those pairs are going to miss and unless you can move your opponent off his hand, you are just tossing away little chunks of money.
So first off, what is a small pair? The definition obviously includes deuces up to sixes, while 7’s up to 10’s are usually considered middle pairs. Though for the sake of argument, these ‘middle pairs’ often tend to end up working in the same way as their smaller brethren, where if you don’t make that set on the flop and there’s any amount of betting, you’re probably going to be gone.
For this reason, it often seems beneficial, particularly in cash game poker, to play pairs all the way up to 10’s, and maybe even Jacks, widely considered the hardest pair to play in all of poker, carefully preflop, trying to invest as little as possible before you commit a lot of money to the pot. This is especially true at tables where the action is really loose and you’ll be forced to dump those pairs a lot of the time when the usual overcards come down, and when you do hit your hand you can go to town and go after all that loose money out there. Meanwhile, like in other kind of monetary venturing, you keep your investment to a minimum before you know where you stand.
The story changes a bit in a tournament situation where blinds and antes are involved, but for the most part this kind of slow pair poker play seems to tend to be the most profitable in the long run.
