Back in the mid-2000’s, when even Howard Lederer and Gus Hansen were making money in poker, slowplaying was actually an accepted way to play big hands. The slowplaying concept was centered on a belief that you didn’t want an opponent to know you were holding a monster hand until later on.
But like so many other old school poker concepts that have been laid to waste during the last few years, slowplaying has been proven to be quite ineffective. So why am I rehashing the fact that slowplaying is an idiotic move. Well because I recently came across a “new” article on some other site where a wannabe poker strategist was talking about slowplaying.
You’ve probably come across these sites before in the past….where they talk about tips such as table position and what the premium poker hands are, which is stuff that my 5 year-old niece already has down. Anyways, this article inspired me to go over why slowplaying is such a bad move.
The main problem with slowplaying is that it robs you of a whole street of betting as well as exponential growth in building the pot. Sure your opponent doesn’t know you have a monster hand after checks and tiny bets, but you aren’t getting maximum value from the hand either.
And the main advantage behind getting a huge hand is that you want to get your opponent’s whole stack (assuming you’re playing No-Limit). However, it’s nearly impossible to do this if you are slowplaying.
To illustrate this point, let’s say that you are holding pocket 9’s in the button and the player before you bets $15; everybody else folds except for you as you call. For a further description of this scenario, let’s also say that you have a $280 stack while the raiser has $210 (before the raise).
The flop comes up 7-9-J rainbow, which is perfect for you. Now the player before you simply checks, and you check too under the guise that you’re trapping the opponent. The turn is a king, which draws another check from the opponent and a $14 bet by you (the opponent calls). Here’s where the problem comes in: Counting blinds and the previous bets, you only have $65 in the pot – so how are you going to get the rest of their $181 stack?
If you go all-in, it’s unlikely that they’ll call provided they don’t hit a set on the river (at which case you could be in trouble). After all, a $181 bet is a lot to call provided this isn’t high stakes poker. And seeing as how the goal is to get an opponent’s entire stack in No-Limit, you’ve failed miserably with this puny slowplay.
Instead, you should be value betting on all three streets while decreasing the opponent’s stack all along. So instead of checking on the flop, throw out a $25 bet; then on the turn, throw out a $60 wager. With a much smaller stack, your opponent is much more likely to bet their whole stack on the river.
