Flush over flush

How do I quit losing these hands when playing small-medium suited connectors?

Murph1969 said:

How do I quit losing these hands when playing small-medium suited connectors?

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Thank you for posting.

The third flush card on the board is seldom missed by our V almost all know a flush is now possible. They also expect everyone to be chasing flushes. So when our V are willing to pile chips in at that point it is a major warning sign for our low flushes.

Multiway pots our low flushes are to be played cautiously when the board 3 flushes and your villains do not give up by checking or block betting.

Preflop with low suited cards IP we want to 3 bet not call if some of our V will then fold K2s Q4s J5s etc

On the turn no flush yet- 3 way if you think the 3rd caller is flush chasing and you have good equity vs the bettors range you want to raise the bettor to get the flush draw to fold. If they will fold. If you do not raise you have to play the made river flush as a bet small- fold or check-fold to the 3rd players big bet and especially fold if the original bettor bets into 2 players. All your actions are dependent on V's bet sizing tells.

Hope this helps

Most of the time flush over flush is just a cooler, it shouldn't happening very often, you have nothing to worry about.

Murph1969 said:

How do I quit losing these hands when playing small-medium suited connectors?

Click to expand...

Thank you for posting.

The third flush card on the board is seldom missed by our V almost all know a flush is now possible. They also expect everyone to be chasing flushes. So when our V are willing to pile chips in at that point it is a major warning sign for our low flushes.

Multiway pots our low flushes are to be played cautiously when the board 3 flushes and your villains do not give up by checking or block betting.

Preflop with low suited cards IP we want to 3 bet not call if some of our V will then fold K2s Q4s J5s etc

On the turn no flush yet- 3 way if you think the 3rd caller is flush chasing and you have good equity vs the bettors range you want to raise the bettor to get the flush draw to fold. If they will fold. If you do not raise you have to play the made river flush as a bet small- fold or check-fold to the 3rd players big bet and especially fold if the original bettor bets into 2 players. All your actions are dependent on V's bet sizing tells.

Hope this helps

Murph1969 said:

How do I quit losing these hands when playing small-medium suited connectors?

Click to expand...

You don't. This is an inherent risk of playing smaller suited connectors; there is always a chance that you are dominated even when you hit your draw. The reason some players can get away with this playstyle (like Negreanu's "small ball" approach [although he wasn't the first player to play small suited connectors a lot]) is because of their post-flop skill and reading ability to escape dangerous spots when they recognize they are beat.

I won't be too negative about playing the "smaller cards" (I love playing them too!), but it comes with a certain amount of risk you must realize exists. You don't have this severity of risk if your flush draws contain higher cards like Aces and Kings. In the example of 98s (randomly chosen suited connector), the same suit hand with any Ten, Jack, Queen, King, or Ace could potentially have us crushed when we both hit out Flush. Same concept goes for straights. Our 98s could come a dream board Flop with Q, J, T (giving 98s a straight), but then lose a lot of chips when we can't fold against the infamous AK hand (Flopped a higher straight).

True, it will be rare that both players hit monster hands, but it will happen some of the time and when it inevitably happens, the lower hand is setup to lose a ton of chips.

You can play smaller cards, but you have to be careful about the looming possibility of being crushed by an unfortunate spot. The "smaller" the cards you play, then the more "higher cards" are possible to come off and the more times this "unfortunate spot" will come up!

You fold preflop. Small to medium suited connectors are some of the most overvalued hands in poker, and the potential for getting over-flushed is just one of multible issues with these hands. Nearly everyone loses money with suited connectors, so if you treated them like junk and always folded them, your results would almost certainly improve significantly compared to, what they are now.

Ok this is a bit of an exaggeration, but nearly everyone play suited connectors far to often and almost nobody play them to rarely. They should also usually be played with agression, so that ideally you dont even get to see a flop or at least not make your flush, because at that point your opponent has already folded.

With that being said, if you correctly enter a hand with a suited connector, like for instance by open raising from BTN and getting called by BB, and you end up getting over-flushed on a 3-flush board, then it is usually just a cooler, and there is no way to avoid getting stacked. On a 4-flush board its a different story though, since a million different hands then beat a 7 high flush.