Exclusive Netbettor Texas Hold'em Article:

Playing Ace High Part IV
Ace High on the River

As we briefly mentioned last week, one of the great things about ace-high hands is that they become much easier to play as the hand progresses. Ace-high on the turn, for example, is far simpler to navigate than ace-high on the flop. And as it turns out, ace-high on the river is worlds simpler to play than ace-high on the turn.

Why is this? Simple—because you’re just about always checking. To understand why this is just about always the proper course of action for ace high hands on the river, let’s look at the two reasons you bet on the river. One, you bet for value—that is, you’re making a bet that you hope gets called by an inferior hand. The other type of bet you make on the river is a bluff—which, as you all know, is a bet that you hope will get a superior hand to fold. So, when you bet the river you want either a) a worse hand to call, or b) a better hand to fold. But when you bet ace-high on the river it’s very unlikely that either of these things are going to happen. If your opponent has a pair, and has been calling all the way, he’s going to call now, which means you won’t get a better hand to muck. And if he doesn’t have a pair he’ll fold to your bet, which means you won’t get a worse hand to call. Thus, the only reasonable move is to check.

This should be self-evident, yet every day you see players betting the river with unimproved AK’s and AQ’s. When they get called by some guy’s unimproved pocket 2’s they start in on how bad their opponent plays, and openly wonder how he could make that call, blah blah blah. The irony here, of course, is that the hero made one of the dumbest bets you can possibly make in limit hold ‘em. If the call with pocket 3’s was bad, then the bet with ace-high vaulted the bettor to a whole new strata of fishiness.

There are a couple exceptions to this. One notable exception occurs when you’re pretty sure that your opponent has ace-high as well, only you think he has a better kicker. For example: you're in middle position  with A T and call after two other callers. The next player raises, and all fold to the two original callers who both call again. Now the flop comes 9 5 4. You bet as a semi-bluff, the pre-flop raiser calls, and the other two fold. The turn is the J. You bet, and again he calls. The river is the 6.

Bet again. You figure he would have raised the flop with a big pair, so it looks like he has either AK or AQ. The pot has 8 1⁄2 big bets in it, so a bet here only needs to work about 11% of the time in order to be profitable. Bet out, and pray he folds.

But these hands don’t come up all that often. Generally speaking, if you have ace-high and it’s checked to you, you check along and hope for the best. But what do you do if someone bets? As with everything in poker, this depends. Obviously, the larger the pot the more inclined you should be to call. Also, be more inclined to call if either a) you raised pre-flop, then bet the flop and checked the turn, b) if the hand was heads-up by the river, or c) there was a two flush on the flop, and the flush didn’t come in by the river. Let’s take a quick look at these individually.

Point A
A pre-flop raise and flop bet followed by a turn check just screams ‘unimproved ace high’. If you do indeed have ace high you should consider calling. Many players—and particularly those players that haunt the Party Poker tables—will indiscriminately fire away with absolutely nothing on the river here, hoping you’ll fold Big Slick. When the pot’s over 6 big bets, and we’re heads-up on the river, I’m usually inclined to pay off a river bet here. Of course, it depends somewhat on how the board looks. If the flop came off J 9 7, for example, I might lay down. But if the flop came 6 5 3, or J 6 4, you can usually pencil me in for a call. You only have to be good about 14% of the time to make a call here break even, and you’ll probably be good at least that often.

Point B
If someone has the moxie to stage a bluff in a three or four handed pot on the river, then I’m usually willing to concede the pot. True, I don’t have anything, but there’s no reason to believe that nobody else has a pair either. Most players, even bad ones, understand that it’s far more difficult to blow three players out of a pot than just one. When someone bets the river in a multi-way pot, I’m almost always going to fold.

Point C
When there’s two suited cards on board on the flop, and the flush never arrives, there’s that much greater chance that the bettor is bluffing with a busted flush draw. This is especially true if the turn action was checked around. If I have a hand like A 4 on the button in a five-handed pot, and call a bet with a flop of 8 3 2, and the turn action gets checked around, I’ll probably call on the river if the player who initially bet the flop bets out. The chances are just too great that he took a stab at the pot with something like J T, or even Kd Q, for me to fold. For a call here to be correct, though, I usually want to be getting at least 7:1 or so from the pot (which I’ll always be getting, since I wouldn’t have called on the flop with my gutshot if there wasn’t at least seven bets in the pot to begin with).

Hopefully this ace high series has laid out a blueprint for you that will help you extract more profit from these marginal hands. But there are times when you need to go off the beaten trail a bit. An example of such a hand occurred about eight months ago, as I was mixing it up in a unbelievably juicy 10-20 game on Party. An early position player raised, and five players called. I three-bet on the button with A K, the small blind—a truly, truly horrible player—made it three bets, and everyone called. I capped it. Nine to the flop for four bets each.

The flop came 8 8 7. The small blind lead out, the big blind called, and strangely enough all folded to me. I couldn’t possibly fold in a 38 small bet pot here, so I called, with the intention of re-evaluating on the turn. The turn brought the 3, again the small blind bet, and again the big blind called. Now the small blind could have had absolutely anything, and the big blind wasn’t far behind him in terms of sheer fishiness. In fact, the only thing I was fairly sure of at this point was that neither of them had an eight. I could have just called, but I chose to raise—hoping I might somehow represent an eight myself (neither of these players would have been smart enough to realize that I couldn’t have an eight if I capped pre-flop), or maybe get the hand down to just one of them. Unless one of them held an ace or a king they both had at least six outs to a pair, and with a pot this big I wanted any hand with a draw to beat me to fold. Plus, if I didn’t hit an ace or a king on the river I could just check it down. Since I was probably going to have to call a river bet, I reasoned I might as well raise now. I might get someone to fold, and I would probably make more money by raising the turn if an ace or a king hit the river.

Anyway, both called. The river was the T. Both checked, and I checked as well. And both of them flipped over J 9 offsuit for the rivered gutshot.

The results, obviously, were disappointing. But I was happy with every decision I made, which counts for something. The key to this hand—and to my aggressive turn play, which was a little out of the ordinary—is that the pot was so huge. Remember—when the pot gets really big, it’s almost always worth taking extra steps to improve your chances of winning it. This means pushing slim margins (which I did with my AK here) and making more unusual calls than you would in a small pot. As we’ve said time and time again, evaluating the size of the pot must be your first move whenever you’re considering making an unorthodox play.

Return to Exclusive Netbettor Poker Articles