Internet Poker - Why you keep losing money with Ace-King

By Raphael Zimmerman

Welcome to my internet poker column! In this column, I will be discussing winning strategies for online holdem, stud, omaha hi/lo, and more. I have been playing regular online poker for over a year now, and it has been an interesting time for me, and an overall pleasant experience. In addition to providing mathematically-minded players with an opportunity to win at poker without having to maintain a “poker face”, internet poker also provides a lot of opportunities for people to play poker, even if they live nowhere near a casino or legal cardroom. I believe that internet poker is already playing a great role in the expansion of the game’s popularity across North America and Europe, and that people will continue to play it as the sites remain in business longer and become legitimized.

Now I would like to talk about a part of the game which, if you have been following the recent newsgroup postings, you should agree is an undeniably large issue in internet poker. I refer, of course, to bad beats. If you’re like me, you probably don’t enjoy taking bad beats very often. In low-limit holdem games, it is not all that uncommon to raise Ace-King under the gun, get smooth-called by an A6o, and stare down at a flop like A67 rainbow. With this flop, your opponent is going to most likely wait until the turn to raise you, and you’re going to call all the way and lose, then muck your cards without showing.

Here's the big question: did you play this hand poorly? Well, let’s examine some alternatives...

• You could have folded the Ace-King preflop, but I think that we can quickly agree that this was not a viable alternative.

• You could have check-called the turn and river after being called on the flop, which in this case, would have saved you one big bet. But then you would have run the risk of giving a free card to a worse hand, making it good enough to beat you. If the turn card is a Q, then you run a bigger risk of losing by giving a free river card than if the turn card is a 2, but most of the time, it’s not going to be a good idea to give this free card. Another problem with this approach is that against a very passive player holding something like AJ, you will actually lose a big bet when your opponent checks along with a hand that he/she would’ve called with.

• You could’ve check-raised the flop “for information”, but the quality of information that you receive will vary depending on the type of opponent you’re up against. Against a tight-aggressive player with a weaker holding, check-raising the flop is probably a worse alternative than check-calling the whole way, because you are likely to scare your opponent out of the pot on the flop, when you have the best of it by far, and he/she might have given you more action later on. When the pot is big, and your tight-aggressive opponent would have pot odds to call this check-raise even knowing about your powerful holding, then it becomes a good option to go ahead and check-raise, because you’re forcing your opponent to choose between making a call with the worst of it, and a “bad fold”.

• In a larger-limit game, you could wait until the turn and then check-raise with top pair, top kicker. But doing so when your opponent is holding this A6 in this low limit game is clearly disastrous, unless you are able to get off your hand on the turn when re-raised, or unless your opponent is timid enough to just call your check-raise with 2 pair instead of reraising.

The truth is that while you may have played your hand predictably by leading all of the way and then check-calling the river, you probably did not play the hand poorly.

“Then why do I keep having losing sessions after playing like that?” you ask?

It’s probably because you’re not really playing like that the whole time. After losing that hand with Ace-King, you’re finding yourself picking up ATo under the gun, and raising it to get back at that A6 player. You’re perfectly right about AT being just as effective against A6 as AK is, but then disaster strikes when you’re reraised by a dominating AQo and lose a big pot, knowing that things would have gone differently if you’d stuck to big hands in early position, such as AA-JJ, AK or AQ offsuit, or AKs-ATs. The real losses aren’t actually occurring “with” AK. They’re occurring during the several hands you spend on tilt, afterwards.

Low limit holdem is a game of extreme fluctuation, but whenever you start talking yourself into making obviously bad plays in order to “catch the fish at the table”, you’re usually giving up some of your edge instead of maximizing it. And you’re also growing fins.

In a game such as online poker where there are no nonverbal tells, lack of discipline can be especially suicidal to your bankroll.

I’ve lost a lot of big pots which I looked back upon and asked myself why I was in the pot to begin with. If you can’t answer that question preflop, then you’re looking to be in a world of trouble by the showdown.