Should I Fold A Set Of Tens?

Today’s question comes from Carlos who wants me to review this hand played at 6max online. This hand is from 2NL, and Hero has TT, opens from middle position, gets a call, gets a call, gets another call and goes 4 way to it. He flops bottom set on a very connected board. Check, and Hero decides to continuation bet. Now, a lot of players would continuation bet here as a default, and the only thing I’m going to say here is at least pause for a moment before you CB, and consider the value of going for a check raise instead.

Is this the kind of situation where you could check and induce a bet from either the tag or the unknown on the button? Maybe get a call from the loose passive, and then you can start going to town from there.

Always at least pause and consider that question first. Far too many people just auto CB that, and I’m not saying see that means awful, but at least consider the check raise. So we end up getting called, and Carlos has said in his writeup that the good tag snap called in this situation. There’s a shove from the unknown, and a fold back to us.

I want to give a little bit more information that Carlos gave me in the writeup, so in this situation, Carlos did actually end up folding, and he said that he remembered one of the videos that I did called when is 2 pair a weak hand, and reviewed this hand as if his pocket tens were in fact a weak hand, and he was putting the good tag on probably some sort of good, strong-ish hand, and putting the other guy on something even stronger, mayeb even Jacks or King, Queen, something like that.

He felt that the good tag wouldn’t snap call like this without some really strong, monster hand, and felt that he would raise with something like ace Jack, Jack 10, ace 10, all those kind of things, and then Carlos also went on to say can you explain how to calculate fold equity in a multilay pot, so this is one of those situations where sometimes when we’re learning something in poker, it’s easy to learn something, or learn a tactic from a video and then massively misapply it, and I would say this is a great example of misapplication of some concepts.

2 pair can be a weak hand in very, very select situations, but I’d say this is not one of those situations where 2 pair is going to be equal to a set, and I’d also say that there’s no reason to say that you are behind anywhere near enough at a time to justify folding, and another big, important piece of this puzzle is let’s just say that you are behind, right? Let’s analyze this using Equilab and input our hand, the board, and let’s just plug in an absolute worst case scenario, someone has exactly King, Queen, and that’s it.

We still have a huge chunk of equity, and if we go in here and we add anything else, ace Jacks, ace 10s, and I don’t know, let’s just throw that in for the moment, evaluate it … Notice that we’re just crushing again. I don’t think there’s any reason we can give either of these 2 people credit for just having King, Queen. There’s no way we can do that, and I’m not just saying that because it’s 2NL. I’m not just saying that because of 6 max. I’m saying that because there’s just so many other hands that could very realistically be in either of their ranges.

Then the last past of Carlos’ question was asking about calculating fold equity in multi-way pots, and I just say this is one of those spots where that’s an unnecessary thing. We don’t need to calculate fold equity in this situation. We’re not drawing … I mean yes, in a worst case scenario against King, Queen we’re drawing, but we have a huge grip of equity, but against everything else we’re crushing them, and they’re drawing against us, so again, this is just a situation where so many second best things can and will continue, and could even be doing this. The unknown could be doing this with spades trying to get you to fold something like ace king, or ace queen, or pocket kings.

There are so many things like that that could realistically be in here, that folding here is just criminal. We’re in a spot where we end up seeing king, queen, and okay that is what it is. It sucks to be us, but even still, we should be getting this in very happily, very comfortably, and yeah, we’ve saved ourselves a little bit of money in this rare spot, but that should really never be the case.