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 Slow Playing
Slow playing is one of those tactics that I don’t use much, however you have to switch up your game as a part of a good poker strategy so I will slow play when I am convinced I have the strongest hand and I sense a lot of weakness in my opponents. Slow playing I just don’t think is necessary if you are an aggressive poker player. If you have established yourself as an aggressive poker player you will get action with your monster hands and sometimes you will even get re raised in to. It’s all about how the table sees you.
Sometimes slow playing comes in handy when you flop a monster hand like Quads, a Full House or the nut flush. Then you may want to slow play the hand depending on the read you get on the table. Quads you will usually have to slow play to get paid on unless you know the other guy made a Full House. Most of the time something like quads is such a strong hand that you will not get action unless you let the other poker players at the table catch a hand to bet on. Generally once they bet you can do no wrong after. So really the only time to slow play poker hands is when you sense weakness and when you have hit a monster hand that requires you to let the other poker players at the table catch something so you can win some chips on the end.
I think most of the time except for the above mentioned exceptions it is trouble to slow play hands in order to try and trap players. This tactic will catch up to you eventually. Let me give you an example of something that I saw in a tournament a few months ago. I am sitting at a tournaments and we are about an hour and a half in to the tournament when a new guy gets seated at the table. I watch the guy for a few hands and he slow plays everything he has AK suited with good position and does not raise before the flop. He totally blind-sided a guy with the nut flush on the turn because all he did was call. So right now this seems like a good poker strategy. A few hands later the guy on the button raises 5 times the blinds with Q10. The slow player simply calls with AA. The flop comes. Q 5 9 rainbow flop. So the guy with the AA is first to act he checks. The guy on the button bets 2000 the blinds at this point were 4 and 800. The slow player with his AA calls. The next card is 10. The guy with the Aces checks the guy on the button bets 4000, which is about half the other guys stack. AA being slow played calls. The next card comes 10. The guy with the AA goes all in and is out of the tournament. That is how slow playing gets you in trouble. Some people thing this is a good way to play poker however you will not find any of the pros play this kind of poker so that should tell you something. The guy with the AA should have bet before the flop and aggressively after, but by letting Q10 raise and see all those cards killed the Aces. The funny thing to me was that the guy said, “ You better have trips to beat me”. Well the guy with his Q10 had better then that the Full house.
So this is why it is a bad idea to slow play your hands. It is important to analyze all the cards that come on the flop, turn and river. If you see same suits or a straight draw start betting aggressively, if you don’t and you let your opponent see to many free cards even a good hand like trips or aces can get killed by slow playing so the moral of the story is don’t slow play unless you just sense absolute weakness in your opponents and you have such a hand that it will be hard to beat even by letting your opponents see free cards.
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