The fairness debate

I love playing against these players, either early in tournaments or in ring games, because they’re so easy to beat.

Fold most of your hands preflop, then when you get a medium-to-high pocket pair, bet big preflop. I’m talking 8-10BB big. Assuming they hold an ace, there’s only going to be an ace on the flop about 18% of the time. If you’re up against more than one player with Ace-Rag, flopped aces will be even more rare. On the vast majority of flops that don’t contain an ace, continuation-bet around half the pot. Often they’ll fold, you’ll take down a bloated pot, and can survive another bunch of orbits. If they call, try to check down to the river, and scoop there.

Don’t think this works? Here’s a hand I played earlier this week with this exact strategy that netted me about 25BB. Was that a one-off? Nope: here’s another from the same session that picked up an extra 40BB.

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