Being dealt a low or mid pocket pair in Texas Hold’em can lead to all sorts of dilemmas. Depending on your position on the table and the action that has gone down in front of you, your cards could be exceptionally valuable, or not worth the paper they are printed on.
The way to approach the decision about whether to play or fold is largely down to your situation at the table. If you are short stacked, then you may wish to wait for a better hand to come along, however, if you are doing well at the table and have read your adversaries correctly, a minor pair can prove very lucrative.
Your first consideration has to be that only a card of the same rank is going to improve your hand, and as the chances of that happening are pretty slim (nearly one in five pre-flop) how can you best play your low to mid range pocket pair?
You could try and limp through to the next round of betting, and the next, and the next, but if several overcards appear, you really do not have much chance of winning the pot and you are just throwing your chips away. Better still to use your pair for the basis of a bluff.
In early or mid-position, provided that you have not used this strategy too frequently, a sizeable bet, followed by some controlled continuation betting may see the rest of the table fold. If you want to discover the strength of your opponents´ hands, give a fake “tell” after the turn, where you bet very quickly, and see how many people stay with you. In later position, this maneuver is much simpler to pull of as you have control of the betting. Your bet here should be much larger, particularly if you have several short-stacked players on the table against you.
There is also the possibility that you will catch a set in the later rounds (which of course is disguised) and by using your betting patterns to suggest that you do not hold anything of value, you are in a position to make a substantial re-raise when other players choose to bet into you.
Overall, limping into the pot with a low to mid pair is a bad idea. Either go for it or fold, because after all a pair of twos beats a suited AK until the board tells you different.
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