The Ultimate Guide To Slowplaying In Poker (Pt 1)

Slowplaying nutted hands is one the least talked about concepts in the poker strategy ecosystem, and yet it’s one of the most important.

A lot of the exploits available against other players are either a direct or indirect consequence of how humans are seemingly incapable of playing passively enough with the top of their ranges – at least relative to solver and balanced strategies – when the circumstances require such approach.

So, by understanding the mechanics of how and when to slowplay your strongest hands, not only you will be able to protect yourself from opponents potentially looking to exploit you, but you will also be capable of spotting villains that are not balancing their ranges sufficiently with their nuts. 

In this post we will answer the following questions:

1. Why should we slowplay?

2. When should we slowplay?

3. How should we slowplay?
   
   

The first question is about understanding why such plays exist at equilibrium. The second question is about determining what are the circumstances that require such strategical approach. And finally and most importantly, the last question is about figuring out exactly which hands are suited for these plays, and how far you should take it. 

Let’s begin.

WHY YOU SHOULD EVER SLOWPLAY VALUE – THE THEORY

The theory behind slowplaying with value hands is very straightforward. All it takes for you to figure out why it’s important to do it is by picturing what would happen if a player didn’t do it.

That’s a study technique I taught you in the #11 post of this newsletter. If you haven’t read it yet, don’t worry, you can access it later in my website homepage (all past issues are there). 

The best way to figure out why something happens at equilibrium is by forcing it not to happen and then seeing how solver adjusts.

If a strategy is a part of equilibrium, then it means that playing differently leads to some level of exploitability. This is valid not just for slowplaying value hands, but any other strategical execution and range construction. The strategy the solver outputs is the highest EV possible strategy against itself. By choosing a different option, a player makes himself exploitable in some way, and the solver seeking maximum EV will be able to immediately adjust to exploit that deviation. 

With slowplaying it’s no different.

Let’s look at a very common example for cash game players – constructing the probe and checking ranges OOP on the turn, BB vs BTN. We take the As9s7d board, and look at the BB’s turn strategy on a blank 3h turn.

Against this checking range, IP is supposed to play like this:

Here is where we can use our technique. To visualize how exploitable the BB becomes by not slowplaying the top of his range often enough, we can use the node locking function to simulate a BB that fastplays the 2 pair or better region more often than he should:

Against a BB that fastplays the nuts, here is how the BTN is supposed to react and exploit:

We can observe:

• Betting frequency increasing, from 35.26% to 51.51% of the time;

• Bet sizing increasing, with almost 6% of hands using the 2.5x pot overbet sizing, including hands like AJ, AQ and AK;

• Some of the previous pure checking hands getting turned into bluffs now, such as 22, 44 and 55.
  

Not slowplaying is exploitable because once you do that, one of your ranges will get significantly weaker, and at that point your opponent can bet more often for value, with more hands and for a bigger size. That allows him to bluff more and force you out of the pot more often. That decreases the equity realization of all of the bluffcatchers in your range. And since your range is always going to contain a decent amount of bluffcatchers, this will significantly hurt the EV of your strategy.

Now we can move on to when you should slowplay.

WHEN SHOULD YOU SLOWPLAY? 

While slowplaying is a part of equilibrium strategy in a lot of different circumstances, it’s certainly not required at every circumstance. There are some situations where slowplaying with our current strongest hands is not necessary. The following paragraphs will explain why that’s the case and how to make that distinction. 

An important first distinction we have to make is about being out of position and being in position. We can test whether relative position impacts the necessity for slowplaying by solving a spot with 2 symmetrical ranges and same strategic options, and then comparing how the top of range plays for both players. Let’s do that for the example above by copying the OOP turn range to the IP turn range and solving it again.

We can clearly observe that the OOP must play more passively than the IP player:

• OOP checks overall 90.33% of the time, whereas IP checks 72.32%;

• 2 pair or better checks 73% of the time for OOP, whereas for IP those hands check only 17% of the time!
  

It’s pretty clear that slowplaying happens more often out of position than in position. The reason for that is an important lesson for Poker in general, so pay attention:

The difference between being IP and OOP in this context is that fastplaying the top of the range is not immediately exploitable when you are in position. If the OOP player caps the checking range – like we saw a few paragraphs above – then it gets immediately punished in that very street by a more aggressive IP betting strategy. When you are In Position however, another card has to be dealt before you can get exploited. And that’s the key part of the difference – your checking range will often uncap your whole range, even if you don’t check your currently strong hands.

In the board above for example, imagine a river like a blank 4c rolls out. You could bet all your A9, A7, 97, 99 and 77 on the turn that you’d still have plenty of strong hands by the river, simply because your turn check back range contains hands like 43s, 44 and A4 – which would improve to 2 pair or set on the mentioned 4c river.

Cool, you’ve just learned that slowplaying is a bigger necessity when out of position, because the threat of getting exploited immediately is very real, whereas when IP your check back range can improve to nutted hands on the next community card and those improves make slowplaying the current best hands less necessary. 

Another variable that is very relevant in the context of slowplaying is whether or not your range contains middling strength hands. I’ll explain.

The logic of slowplaying from an equilibrium perspective is that once you don’t have (enough) nutted hands in your checking range, your opponent can take his good hands and bluffs and start being more aggressive with them. That being said, notice how nutted hands need worse hands to get called by. If your range doesn’t contain middling strength hands for your opponent to capitalize on, then not checking your strongest hands doesn’t make you very exploitable because there is not much your opponent can do against it. 

We can observe this by taking a look at how solver plays the top of it’s range when it doesn’t have too many middling strength hands in that particular line. One example is turn double barrel after flop big bet. Take a look at solver double barrel strategy on AsKs8d 2h, a spot where IP overbets on the flop and continues to play overbet on the turn, making its range very polarized.

When looking at the same board and same line, but now for SB vs BB instead of BB vs BTN, we see only a little bit of slowplaying (effect of being OOP):

What would happen if instead of betting overbet on the flop, the OOP player decided to bet range for a small size – like a lot of players even at high stakes still do? Well, after betting whole range on the flop and getting called, the SB player will get to the turn with a much wider range, this time containing lots of middling strength hands like 2nd, 3rd pairs and underpairs. For that reason, the nutted hands will be slowplayed more often, as their lack in the checking range can make OOP exploitable faster.

Lastly but not less important – your opponent needs to contain bluffs in his range to actually threaten you with an aggressive adjustment in the next street (or action). If all he’s got are middling hands, then surely capping your range is not a big problem, as once again there is no way for your opponent to capitalize on your capped range.

Summarizing, you should have (some) slowplays with the top of your range when:

1. Your range contains middling strength hands. The lack of nuts will make you very exploitable when you do have middling strength hands to suffer against aggression. The opposite is rarely true;

2. Your opponent is able to threaten you with sufficient bluffs. If his range doesn’t contain those threats, you don’t have much incentive to slowplay;

3. Slowplaying is much more prevalent out of position than in position. OOP gets immediately exploited by being capped; IP can count on it’s checking range to make some nuts in the next street.

With that covered, we can address question number #3.

HOW TO SLOWPLAY YOUR VALUE HANDS

Now that you know why you must find slowplays in your strategy, and when it’s appropriate to do so, finally it’s time to learn how to actually do it. And here, there are basically 2 questions that must be answered:

1. Which hands should be slowplayed?

2. How often should they be slowplayed?
   

We are not going to have time to cover question 2 in this post, so let’s focus on question 1.

The answer to question 1 is about a super hot topic when the context is theoretical poker – blockers.

The logic here is very simple: you want to slowplay with hands that have favorable blockers to the act of slowplaying (or unfavorable blockers to the act of fastplaying). 

Think about it this way – when you’re slowplaying a nutted hand, what do you want to happen after you play passively? Well, you want and need your opponent to put money into the pot. If you slowplay but then your opponent doesn’t put money into the pot, then your strong hand will likely lose value and have it’s EV decreased. Therefore, you want your blockers to increase the likelyhood that your opponent will put money into the pot. 

Inversely, you can think about what you don’t want to happen when you fastplay – essentially you don’t want to face folds. If you fastplay a nutted hand but your opponent doesn’t call your bets, then you’re also losing value. So when fastplaying you don’t want blockers that decrease the probability of villain putting money into the pot.

Let’s look into these 2 scenarios separately.

BLOCKERS TO CHECKING RANGE

When you are slowplaying, the most important thing to consider when choosing the best value hands to do it with is their blocking properties towards your opponent’s checking range. If your value hand makes it impossible for your opponent to hold many hands he would surely check with, then by holding those blockers you are decreasing the probability that you’ll face a check from him after checking yourself – and therefore increasing the probability that you’ll face a bet. That’s exactly what you want. 

Take a look at this situation BB vs BTN in a single raised pot. The board is KT2r; BTN cbets small on the flop and the BB calls. Turn comes another T; action goes check check and river is a blank.

In this spot, the nutted hands from OOP are mainly the Tx combos, with a little bit of full houses. Now, notice the difference in strategy between playing a hand like JT and playing AT. 

This might be a bit confusing for some people. AT is a stronger hand than JT, as it has the best possible quicker; and yet it plays more passively. While JT almost never checks and prefers betting 3x pot, AT almost never bets, and when it does it prefers a 60% pot bet. The reason for this are blockers.

Having the Ace quicker removes many hands from the IP player check back range on the river. By holding the Ace, AT actually faces a bet more often than all of the other Tx combinations, which increases the EV of checking.

BLOCKERS TO CALLING RANGE

The nutted hands you should slowplay with belong to one of 2 possible categories. The first one we just covered – they have good blockers towards your opponent’s checking range, which makes it more likely they will face a bet, which increases the EV of playing passively.

The second category is the category that works in the opposite dynamic – it doesn’t have blockers that favor checking (necessarily), but it has blockers that make fastplaying not a great idea. 

Reason for this is that they make it significantly less likely that the opponent holds a hand that can call a bet. This happens very often at equilibrium when one of the players must bet very polarized with a very big sizing. Usually in those circumstances, the calling range for the other players gets very concentrated in one specific hand class, typically top pairs.

In those scenarios, hands like top set make it substantially less likely that the other player holds top pair, so they play passively and try to get value from the bluffs instead of the bluffcatchers. If you scroll up a little bit, you’ll see that AA on AK8 pure checks the turn after betting small on the flop. On that board, a lot of Ax combinations will reopen, so AA doesn’t have the best possible properties of blocking check back range (like KK does for example) but it blocks so much of the BB’s calling range vs a big bet that it must be played passively to maximize EV.

Summarizing this post, this is what you should take home with you:

• Slowplaying is a part of equilibrium strategy because not slowplaying typically makes a strategy exploitable. When you don’t slowplay, opponent can start betting more often and with bigger sizes against your bluffcatcher heavy ranges. But then if he does that, this can’t be an equilibrium because now slowplaying is surely higher EV for you. 

• Slowplaying is a part of equilibrium when 2 criterias are met: you have middling strength hands your opponent can threaten with aggression; and your opponent has sufficient bluffing hands to threaten you with aggression;

• Slowplaying is a part of equilibrium with hands that have favorable blocker properties towards slowplaying, or unfavorable blocker properties towards fastplaying – they should either block checking hands from the opponent, or block calling hands from the opponent.

• Slowpaying is a part of equilibrium much more often for the out of position player than the in position player, simply because a range that lacks nuts out of position is more immediately exploitable than the same range when in position.
  

If you understood these 4 key points, then you’re ready to start implementing slowplays very effectively into your strategy. If you want to learn more GTO concepts like this, I strongly recommend you check out my course The GTO Blueprint. I have a full module dedicated to Universal Heuristics, which are patterns of range construction that repeat themselves throughout the entire game tree – just like slowplaying blockers to checking range and blockers to calling range. The course also contains a detailed blueprint on how to play every single hand class in your range, in every important postflop line, in all the postflop spots (SRP IP, SRP OOP, 3BP IP, and so on). You’ll want to check it out – here.

| For more practical hand examples and even more insights into when to slowplay out of position, watch this video from my channel where I teach you effective check-raise heuristics for the river

                            How To Check-Raise River And OWN Your Opponents

Thanks for reading. See you next week.
Until then – don’t play the game. Play the Metagame. 

Saulo