Slow-Playing

Slow-playing, like running a big bluff or making a heroic call, feels great when it works. It feels like you are winning by wits alone, playing your opponent like a fiddle as you cajole them into throwing ever more money into a pot they have no chance of winning.

The danger of this good feeling is that it may seduce you into slow-playing when it is not wise to do so, costing you many chips, if not the entire pot. Ultimately, you want to play big pots with your big hands, so it’s best to find ways to create deception while still putting chips into the pot.

In this article, we will consider the incentives around slow-playing:

What Is Slow-playing?

You probably have some idea already, but for the sake of clarity, when I talk about slow-playing, I am talking about:

Deliberately taking a passive line—checking and calling—with a hand strong enough to bet or raise for value.

The purpose of slow-playing is to deceive your opponent into thinking your hand is weaker than it actually is. To keep things simple, I will generally talk about slow-playing the flop, but similar considerations will apply to slow-playing before the flop or on the turn (or on other streets, in other games—the material in this article is not terribly specific to Hold ‘em).

Incentives and Deception

Deception is not an end in itself.

Your ultimate goal when you hold a strong hand is for the pot to grow. Deception is valuable only insofar as it causes your opponent to put more money into the pot than they would have had you played your hand more aggressively.

For an extreme example, suppose you checked the nuts last to act on the river. That would certainly be deceptive, but it would not accomplish your goal of playing for big pots with big hands. This example may sound ridiculous, but in fact, people make ridiculous, counterproductive slow-playing decisions all the time because they fixate on deceiving their opponent rather than on growing the pot.

Deception in poker is not necessarily about playing a hand contrary to its incentives. Often, you can be just as deceptive by playing your hand in a way that is perfectly aligned with its incentives but which could also credibly represent a different sort of hand with different incentives.

An Example

Suppose you open the BTN in a 100bb cash game and the BB calls. You bet 125% pot on a K♠9♥5♦ flop and 125% pot again on a 2♣ turn.

From one perspective, it sure looks like you have a strong holding. You’re shoveling money into the pot, with the threat of an all-in bet looming on the river. That’s exactly what you’d like to do with a very strong hand, and your opponent has good reason to fold for fear that you may have one.

But they also have good reason not to fold because, from another perspective, this is also exactly what you’d like to do with some of your weakest holdings. Precisely because this is how you’d like to play a strong hand, it’s a good, deceptive way to play a weak hand. And vice versa. Playing strong and weak hands in this way gives both the opportunity to accomplish their objectives and puts your opponent in a genuinely tough spot.

In other words, it creates deception without compromising the incentives of each hand in the range:

As it happens, the solver takes this line with both strong hands (such as sets) and weak hands (such as gutshots).

What Does Slow-playing Represent?

Checking and calling looks like either a medium-strength hand or a trap. That’s not necessarily a problem, as representing a middling hand could entice your opponent to run a big bluff, but you should be aware of what you’re representing so your play (storyline) remains coherent on later streets. If, after checking and calling, you come out with a massive bet on the river, that’s not consistent with a medium-strength hand, nor is it the best way to win money from your opponent’s bluffs, which is what you were presumably trying to induce by checking and calling in the first place.

Risk 1: Giving Free Cards

The obvious risk of slow-playing, the one people are most aware of, is the risk of a free card costing you the pot. The less obvious risk is failing to grow the pot, which, as we will see, can cost you quite a lot of potential winnings even when it doesn’t cost you the pot itself.

This is not to say that the risk of giving free cards is negligible, only that it tends to get too much attention in discussions around slow-playing. In particular, people tend to fixate on the wrong ways in which a free card could hurt them.

A free card costs you the pot only if the hand that improved to beat you would have folded to a bet.

Big, obvious, strong draws like flush draws and open-ended straight draws don’t generally fold to bets, so while slow-playing may cost you the opportunity to put money in as a small favorite against those draws, it doesn’t cost you as big of a pot when they draw out.

The scenarios where a free card really costs you dearly are when a hand that would have folded hits an unexpected miracle. If you check 55 on that K♠9♥5♦ and your opponent holding 66 turns a bigger set, you aren’t costing yourself just the current pot but additional bets on the turn and river as well. It’s not a likely scenario, but it’s expensive when it happens.

Risk 2: Failing To Grow the Pot

The other risk of slow-playing is failing to grow the pot, which can result in winning much less when your opponent has a hand that would have put more money into the pot. Suppose you flop a royal flush against a very special opponent. This opponent will sometimes fold to flop bets, but they never fold to pot-sized bets on the turn and river. With $100 in the pot, you have a choice between two betting lines:

How often does your opponent need to fold the flop in option 1 to make it worse than option 2?

It’s easy to calculate what option (2) is worth. Your opponent never folds, so you win a $100 bet on the turn, a $300 bet on the river, and the starting pot of $100, for a total of $500.

When your opponent calls your $30 flop bet in option (1), you then bet $160 on the turn and $480 on the river, plus the starting pot, for a total of $770. Missing out on one small bet might seem like a small price to pay to get two big bets guaranteed on the turn and river, but because that small bet sets you up to make even larger bets on the later streets, you lost out on not just the $30 bet but a total of $270 over the course of the hand. Your opponent would need to fold the flop more than 40%Let x be the flop fold%:
EV(Line 1) = $500
EV(Line 2) = (1-x)($770) + $100(x)
—
Set EVs equal to each other to find x:
EV(Line 1) = EV(Line 2) when x = 40% of the time to the 30% pot flop bet to make option 1 less desirable!

But There Are Also Rewards

Real poker is much more complicated, of course, but this simple example demonstrates one common effect of slow-playing:

Checking the flop with a strong hand often makes it more likely you will get two bets, but less likely you will get three.

There are three primary means by which checking might induce your opponent to put in bets on later streets with hands that would not have paid you off otherwise :

In light of the above risks and rewards, we can reach some conclusions about when slow-playing may be desirable. Recall the two major risks of slow-playing: getting outdrawn and failing to grow the pot. When neither of these represents a grave concern, slow-playing becomes more desirable.

On that K95r flop we’ve been talking about, very few hands show a strong preference for betting over checking. The few that do include 55 and 99, but not KK. Why do you think that is?

The hands most likely to call you down on three streets have a King in them. So, the cost—in the form of missed out on benefits—of slow-playing KK is less than the cost of slow-playing lower sets because, when you so heavily block the BB’s King-x hands, you are unlikely to get three bets paid off anyway. This is also why a set of Nines has higher EV than a set of Kings.

Another argument for slow-playing is when your hand simply is not strong enough to value-bet three times. In that case, checking doesn’t cost you a bet because you weren’t going to bet three times anyway.

Checking as a slow play doesn’t cost you a bet when that extra bet couldn’t be profitably made.

BTN often slow-plays their weaker Kings on this flop because they are tough to draw out on—only one larger card could fall—and won’t bet three times unless they improve:

You may not think of this as slow-playing, but that’s essentially what it is, and there’s an important point here:

The best hands for slow-playing are often not your very strongest hands, with which you’d like to be growing the pot, but rather hands that are tough to draw out on but also not so strong they want to grow an enormous pot.

This is especially true when it comes to inducing bluffs, which is one of the three rewards of slow-playing we identified earlier.
Top pair with a bad kicker beats bluffs just as surely as bottom set does, and it gives up a lot less when it checks to induce.

If you have ever seen young children play soccer, you will understand this concept intuitively. Before they understand the concept of (or have the necessary discipline for) playing position, children just swarm the ball, everyone trying to kick it all at once. There is nobody to pass to and nobody playing defense because they are all in a pack around the ball.

Hands in your range are like players on a soccer team: some fit certain roles/positions better than others, and your team will perform best when everyone sticks to their role/plays their position. Very strong hands excel at betting for value, so that is generally the position they should play. Medium-strength hands are better assigned to the bluff-catching position, especially when they are tough to draw out on.

(Even at 40bb, the lower sets sometimes slow-play.)

Note that other strong hands such as AA, AK, KQ, and KJ purely bet. Of course, they don’t require three streets to get stacks in any more than 99 does, but they are more vulnerable to free cards. With the pot being larger relative to the stacks, the reward for slow-playing is reduced, making the risk of getting drawn out on a greater concern for more vulnerable hands.

Another Way To Slow-Play

Although KK and 99 do not really check in the 100bb equilibrium, they do often bet small. This is true despite the fact that BTN often uses larger bet sizes, including with these hands.