The Playable Hand Theory: Poker Thoughts

The Playable Hand Theory

One of the most important things in poker is getting inside the head of your opponent and trying to figure out how they think and more importantly why they do what they do when playing a particular hand. After playing thousands and thousands of hands online, I have come to formulate a certain theory that many (not so competent) players use when playing in small stakes online tournaments. I call it the “Playable Hand Theory”. 

There are many novice online players that look at their hands in a vacuum. By that, I mean that they don’t take into account all of the other factors that they should before making a decision on how to play a specific hand. The hand that you are dealt is only 1 of many factors that should be considering when deciding whether to put unforced chips into a pot. 

Some of the others are position, stack size, situation (in a tournament), players already in the pot and table image. Players should always try to take ALL factors into consideration when making a decision, NOT just what cards they have.

Here is a perfect example of 2 different scenarios where a hand goes from being very playable to being not playable. Let’s say that you are in the mid stages of a tournament and have 25 big blinds and someone raises from middle position to 2.5 big blinds and you have AJcc on the button. This obviously is a very playable hand. Players can choose to call or raise depending on some of the other factors in the hand (such as how active is the initial raiser and how sticky are the blinds). 

If instead the action in front of you is that the under the gun player raises, another player calls then the middle position player who has been super tight reraises, you should pretty quickly and easily muck your AJcc as it looks to be in bad shape in the hand based off of the previous action before you. 

Many online players in this situation would just look at their hand and say, “Hey, I got Ace Jack Suited...it’s a playable hand so I have to play it.” This is horrible logic! If you play regularly online, you should add notes to a player that plays like this so that you can take advantage of him/her in future tournaments by making bigger pots in situations where you have a PREMIUM hand and he/she has a PLAYABLE hand. 

Remember that in the end, your job is not to have to agree with another player’s logic. It is to UNDERSTAND another player’s logic. 

Best of luck on the tables!

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---Frank DiRe

Nerdthusiast Content Writer

@FLD15 on Twitter