[Pokey]

Your one pair hands should be winners even when you include the hands that did not go to showdown. If you only show the "went to showdown" hands then you're eliminating all the non-showdown hands that lost you money. If most uNL'ers included only their showdown hands their winrates would go way, way up -- we have to count all hands to evaluate our play.

Overall these should be your biggest money-making hands. If they are not, there are only a few culprits that could be to blame:

1. You pay too much for these hands preflop. If you find yourself routinely calling big raises or reraises (relative to the effective stacks) with your pocket pairs you may be setting yourself up for a loss. The most common problem here is playing a smaller pocket pair for set value only but then failing to get a proper payoff when you hit your set. A good target is to win ten times your preflop bet from the hand when you connect with your set. So, if you're playing $10NL and someone raises to $0.80 preflop, you must WIN $8 from the pot ON AVERAGE when you hit your set in order to profitably play for set value only. (NOTE: some books suggest twelve times the preflop bet instead, but at uNL I think ten times the preflop bet works just fine since the opposition will go far with weaker hands.) If you routinely call big bets for set value preflop and fail to win ten times that preflop bet when you hit your set then you will lose money from these hands in the long run. (Final note on this point: saying "win ten times the bet when you connect" does NOT mean "the pot is ten times your bet when you connect." It's saying you collect a PROFIT of ten times your bet. So if you have to pay $1 to see the flop preflop heads-up you need to win at least a $20 pot on each hand when you hit your set for the call to be profitable.) The upshot of this is that occasionally you will have to fold your smaller pocket pairs preflop because you can't win enough to make the call +EV.

2. Overplaying your pocket pairs postflop. If you raised preflop with JJ and the flop comes AKQ, you're pretty much done with the hand. You can c-bet, but if you get called you are check-folding the turn and river (barring a miracle card). I also see people frequently overplay their oh-so-pretty overpairs when it's pretty obvious that they are beaten. If you've got red aces on a board with three spades and your passive opponent check-raises all-in on the flop, folding should be a serious consideration. Pocket pairs should not be an automatic free pass to your stack for your opponents. Now, properly folding an overpair is hard, but playing for pot control is easy. Shrink your bet sizes, check behind on the turn and/or river, and try to play for a small pot if you have any reason to believe you are beaten. Mind you, if a calling station calls on a J94r board, keep betting with your KK because he's calling down with J7. But if a rock is the one calling down it might be a good idea to slow the heck down, because your overpair doesn't look so pretty anymore.

Keep these rules in mind and your pairs will start making you more profits: be sure that you can build a proper-sized pot if you hit your set and make sure you don't overplay those pretty-looking second best hands that your pairs will all-too-often flop.

Quick example: yesterday I had pocket aces. I raised to $5 preflop at the $100NL table and got FOUR callers. The flop came Q93 with two hearts; I bet $15 and got two more callers. The turn was the Q[img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img], pairing the board and putting a possible flush out there. I checked, the next player checked, and the third player went all-in for $78 into a $65 pot. Even though I had the ace of hearts, I folded. I lost $20 on the hand but I played it well, since calling would have been a huge mistake. When you're beaten, you're beaten, and it doesn't matter how good your second-best hand is. There's no silver medal in poker.