This hand is a classic example of why raising with small pairs can be a winning play. It also shows that continuation bets are important to follow up your preflop raise with a strong bet on the flop.
Let’s go over this hand, decision by decision.
Decision 1 – Raise 3x UTG to 150 (7 handed) with 55 leaving myself with 1530 back.
Comments – I always want to advocate to people that raising and unopened pot is almost never a bad play in the right conditions. At this stage of the SNG, I really want to get a few hundred chips so I don’t become desperate when it gets down to 5 or 4 handed.
Raising puts the onus on your opponents to make a decision based on your decision to raise. They must react – no matter what they decide to do. Folding, reraising, calling – they are all reaction based decisions. Putting your opponent on the opposite side of the fence is almost always a winning play, as you are able to take control in the hand (unless of course they reraise, meaning they have now taken control.)
Options – I could limp here, but than I am not taking control of the hand.
An UTG sometimes looks very fishy, so that can be used to your advantage under the right conditions. An example would be if I had a bigger stack, and limped. If someone bet at the flop, I could smooth call (representing a bigger hand, possibly AA).
The only problem with this is that some players don’t pick on this. If they are the type of opponent who think top pair is the nuts, than this strategy is pretty useless. The flip side to that is if you do actually pick up AA UTG, and decide to limp – than that same player may dump all his chips to you thinking his top pair is good (but of course, limping with AA is a little risky because you are letting people see a cheap flop and the more people in the hand, the less chance AA has of holding up)
I like raising if I am going to play a pot. Generally, at this stage of a SNG and all subsequent levels – I will never limp as the first person in the pot. I will limp behind someone who has limped, but almost never just limp myself.
Decision 2 - Bet 200 into 350 on the Tc Ks 2c board.
Comments – You will almost always be checked to if you are the preflop raiser, meaning you can decide how the action is going down. You can decide how much you are going to bet based on the board’s coordination. Generally, it is a good idea to bet on almost every flop – regardless if you hit it or not. Your bet is asking your opponent A) is your hand really worth calling a bet with this flop? B) Did you hit anything? (he doesn’t KNOW for sure if you did or not)
If you check behind him, it is not necessarily a bad play – but we will talk about those situations in future hand scenarios.
Options – The only thing here that you can really vary is how much you want to bet at this flop, because you should be betting in these situations 95% of the time. It makes it very hard on your opponent to read if you hit your hand or if you are completely full of it. Combined with the fact that you have position on him – your situation becomes even stronger.
Generally, people don’t think about what you might hold – but only think about the cards in their own hands. The thought process usually goes something like “I’ll call the raise because my hand looks decent.” And then, “well I didn’t hit anything on the flop, I’m obviously not going to call a bet here. I have nothing!”
This process happens instantaneously in your opponents head, because the majority of players at low limits only play their cards. However, we know that playing your own cards can only get you so far. You must play situations, not cards.
Lesson – Raising with small pocket pairs is a winning play in later levels because continuation bets work so frequently.
Hand Of The Day 
