Transmission Wire

The online poker situation: You’re playing 1/2 six-max and you’re dealt AJd on the cutoff. It’s folded around to you and you make the standard raise of 4x the big blind. Making it 8 to play. You get called by the small blind and the big blind. The dealer folds.

The flop comes Jc-Kh-2c. The small blind checks and the big blind leads out with a bet of 8 into a 20 dollar pot. What does this tell you about his poker hand?

First it says that he’s either on a) a drawing hand, b) top pair, or c) a set. The set is most likely not the thing you’re worrying about. Instead, you’re wanting to see if he’s really got the king or he’s just betting because he hit some of the pot.

Now our hand is a little tricky. We have 2nd pair with the nut kicker. There is a straight draw out there as well as a flush draw and an over pair possibility. All of these could crush our hand if we gave a free card, and the K is already crushing our hand if it hit. So we’re going to use our relative position to the bettor to do two things. First, we want to isolate the raiser and get the small blind out of the picture. Just calling wouldn’t do that effectively since we’d be giving the small blind huge pot odds to stick around.

So we decide to info raise which also will serve as an isolation raise. We bet out 20 dollars into a 28 dollar pot. The small blind folds, so we accomplished our isolation, and the big blind decides to call again. Another sign of weakness on his part, which leads us to believe now that he’s definitely on some kind of draw and doesn’t have top pair.

Let’s see what our villain is going to do now. The pot is up to about 65 and he only bets out 22. That’s giving us incredible odds to look him up, even with third pair, and will give us a lot of info on how he plays. He ends up turning over J9s, giving him two pair on the river. So now we know how he plays his drawing hands. It cost us little money a we controlled the pot most of the way through, and we successfully isolated. Sure we didn’t win the hand because he luckboxed us on the river with his two pair. But for future reference, we now know that we can’t bet him off of second pair with a coordinated board with a pot sized bet. And we can evaluate from his play that he’s loose and slightly passive. Ahh, inforaising at it’s finest at the casino online.