If you’re here to refine your game, you’re in luck. Here’s another piece of online poker strategy that will bring your game to the next level. Winning speculative hands is something that can separate pros from joes pretty quickly.
One thing that you’ll often see professional poker players do is play hands like a suited J-8 pair past the flop. Now playing speculative hands like this may not make sense initially since one doesn’t even have a drawing hand yet, but it is something that must be done in order to win big tournaments. Of course you’ve got to know how to play hands such as this, and the best place to start is by looking at the mistakes people make when holding speculative hands.
The first major mistake is that people with quality speculative hands will underplay them by calling or folding too often. A common scenario is for a player to upgrade to a drawing hand only to call the flop and turn bets, then fold on the river. Not only is this a huge waste of chips, but if you do hit your draw then opponents are going to know as soon as you start raising and re-raising out of nowhere. Basically, don’t bother with speculative hands if you’re not going to play aggressively with drawing hands.
Another big mistake made with speculative hands is that people overvalue hands they hit on the flop. For instance, some players will hold the aforementioned suited J-8 pair and hit a pair of J’s only to raise and re-raise if it’s top pair. A pair of J’s is not why you were playing the speculative hand in the first place, and you’re not going to win most of the time when holding jacks by them self.
The key when playing speculative hands is to know exactly what will help you win beforehand as well as what can beat you too. For example, let’s say you’re holding a As-5s pair pre-flop which would give you realistic top pair, two pair, and flush options; plus you could get a straight if everything aligns right. Assuming a flop of 10s-4s-3d hits you would have both a straight and flush opportunity on the board.
Looking at what hands could beat you at this point, there are pocket 10’s, pocket 4’s, and pocket 3’s that all have the potential to do so. If you’ve been paying attention to how players have been betting, you should be able to determine if someone actually has one of these hands. But even if someone does have one of the previously mentioned pocket pairs, you’re still only about a 2:1 underdog to take the hand.
In fact, the majority of the time you can end the hand right here by making a big raise and forcing opponents out of the pot. Few people are going to take a big risk on such a bad flop, and there will be even fewer times when someone actually has you covered for sure in this instance.
