Top Pair, But Not Top Kicker

[Sos1l]

We’ve all been in this situation:

You enter a hand with KQ vs AQ → flop comes Q-high.
You play QJ vs KJ → flop comes J-high.
Or any other spot where you hit top pair but your kicker might be behind.

On paper, hands like QJs, KJs, JTs, KQs, QTs, KTs look great — they can make straights and flushes…
But in practice, they’re often a trap: you hit top pair or trips → and still end up dominated.
But completely avoiding them is also –EV.

I think at higher stakes these hands should often be folded if they don’t have a draw.
Against a nit: call once, and if there’s no improvement and a big bet comes on the turn — it’s usually a fold.
Against a loose opponent: call down to showdown — sometimes you chop, sometimes you win everything.


Questions to players:

1. How do you play these spots?
Call-call to the river to control the pot?

2. Or do you fold early when you feel you’re dominated?

3. Should these hands even be played often in cash games, considering how many problems they create?

4. And the main question:
If “top pair with a weak kicker” gives you small wins and big losses, is the correct strategy simply folding preflop or playing extremely cautiously postflop?

We should remember: the best players win by folding — not by making hero-calls.

But at the same time, no one wants to overfold or overcall.

In general, medium-strength hands produce medium-strength results — and that’s the biggest leak for weak players.

How do you handle these spots? What’s your strategy?

 

[joango123456789]

It all depends on the style of plaey of your opponents and your position. For example if I am called by an agressive player I would call him on flp, turn and river. But if I'm called by a nit I would give up on the turn or river.

 

[Sos1l]

It all depends on the style of plaey of your opponents and your position. For example if I am called by an agressive player I would call him on flp, turn and river. But if I'm called by a nit I would give up on the turn or river.

Yes, almost everyone says this. Against loose players, call call call. Against a nit, either fold on the flop or, if there is no improvement on the river, also fold if the bet is big.

 

[fundiver199]

It depends a lot on the situation. In a late position battle against a single opponent, top pair weak kicker is a quite strong hand. But in a multiway pot or against someone, who opened from early position, not so much. The key word is hand planning or pot control, which is explained in this section of the 30-day course.

 

[Sos1l]

It depends a lot on the situation. In a late position battle against a single opponent, top pair weak kicker is a quite strong hand. But in a multiway pot or against someone, who opened from early position, not so much. The key word is hand planning or pot control, which is explained in this section of the 30-day course.

Thank you brother

 

[EarnDAStack]

There will be a frequency of the time where being dominated will be the outcome but if you have a proper strategy where you are defending soundly that's the price of doing business.

You've created some fairly good baseline heuristics but you can get much more into detail as you study the game further. A bunch of the hands you mentioned will end up being essential bluffs or bluff catches because of their blocker properties as the pools you play in improve and your opponents begin to play a more developed strategy as well.

Also you're probably thinking about how poker works at higher stakes incorrectly. You can't play less aggressively you need to play more aggressively or you'll just get looked at as dead money and picked apart.

Many of the hands you listed are also slam dunk 3-Bets in many formations that you're going to HAVE to take as you climb up the stakes. If you miss 3-Betting QJs at 100NL players are going to notice and take into account you're significantly under 3-Betting and incorporate that into their strategy for how they play against you, meaning you're going to be bet into a lot and get no money when betting using that example.

Also there are pot odds, the dead money in the pot make calling down top pair 2nd kicker mandatory in many spots or you'll be left with spots where you're supposed to call 25% of the time but only have a small % of your range above the top pair 2nd kicker threshold meaning you're making yourself over fold losing the hand and money because you don't want to lose the hand and money.

You'll lose a LOT of hands in poker, while I agree with the your statement on hero folding, the pros know where the thresholds are and make adaptations from there, they don't set rigid heuristics that they never stray from them.

Hope this helps

GL

EDS

 

[sibkaz]

I don't like weak kickers)

 

[Sos1l]

There will be a frequency of the time where being dominated will be the outcome but if you have a proper strategy where you are defending soundly that's the price of doing business.

You've created some fairly good baseline heuristics but you can get much more into detail as you study the game further. A bunch of the hands you mentioned will end up being essential bluffs or bluff catches because of their blocker properties as the pools you play in improve and your opponents begin to play a more developed strategy as well.

Also you're probably thinking about how poker works at higher stakes incorrectly. You can't play less aggressively you need to play more aggressively or you'll just get looked at as dead money and picked apart.

Many of the hands you listed are also slam dunk 3-Bets in many formations that you're going to HAVE to take as you climb up the stakes. If you miss 3-Betting QJs at 100NL players are going to notice and take into account you're significantly under 3-Betting and incorporate that into their strategy for how they play against you, meaning you're going to be bet into a lot and get no money when betting using that example.

Also there are pot odds, the dead money in the pot make calling down top pair 2nd kicker mandatory in many spots or you'll be left with spots where you're supposed to call 25% of the time but only have a small % of your range above the top pair 2nd kicker threshold meaning you're making yourself over fold losing the hand and money because you don't want to lose the hand and money.

You'll lose a LOT of hands in poker, while I agree with the your statement on hero folding, the pros know where the thresholds are and make adaptations from there, they don't set rigid heuristics that they never stray from them.

Hope this helps

GL

EDS

Yes, thank you. I immediately noticed that you’re a mature player who has gone through a long journey.
I’ve studied high-rollers and even played with them — you could say I started my career from the high stakes, like Benjamin Button: born an old man and died a baby 😂

And now, analyzing my spots, I realize how brave and loose I used to be in the beginning (reckless, really). That was only because I hadn’t yet run into brutal coolers and bad beats, I hadn’t been disappointed by strong hands getting cracked, and I hadn’t faced many situations where my good holdings ran into even better ones.
All that real practice — the pain and the losses — taught me to wait, to wait patiently, to fold, to analyze, to read opponents, and to play adaptive poker against every type of player.

And still, you need to live through practice, not theory. One drop of real experience is worth more than tons of theory.
Unfortunately, I have a very self-critical and depressive personality type, and that's why I play tight when I can — just to avoid situations like flopping trips with AJ against AQ and losing my whole stack.
The same with flushes: I’ve lost so many times with the second-best flush. And of course that doesn’t mean I don’t open my whole mid-range anymore. I do — but I play it differently than before.

On the high stakes, I never saw a single non-aggressive player. But at the same time I saw one extremely strong player who knew how to wait. He could sit 40 minutes without opening anything if necessary — but when he did open, he went all the way and won huge money.
Even the most aggressive players couldn’t stop him with bluffs, overbets, shoves — somehow he was almost always ahead of them.
I admired him. (He was from Ukraine.)

So now, I want to play in a way where I can wait, choose my spots, and enter the pot only when I have some measurable advantage. And I want to be able to fold when I feel I’m behind.

At high stakes they really opened hands I would never open at micro limits 🤣
A7o, J4s, K9o, A2o… and honestly Ax-offsuit is a disgusting hand for me — too risky in 3-bet pots.
And when your nuts like AKs, AQs, KK, JJ, QQ completely miss the board — that’s a separate kind of pain.

I’m simply looking for a style, a range, a defense and attack structure where I’m not a gift for anyone at the table.
If you make many mistakes — you just adjust, become more careful.
The one who folds a lot is a bad player, the one who never folds is an even worse player, and the one who understands when to fold and when to play is already a strong player.

What torments us is ultimately what teaches us.

If we don’t learn from our mistakes and use them to improve ourselves, then why do we make them in the first place? Mistakes exist so that we don’t repeat them.

Everyone makes mistakes — both the wise and the foolish. But the difference is this: wise people make different mistakes, while foolish people keep repeating the same one over and over.

If you don’t understand the root cause of a mistake and just leave everything as it is, you will keep walking in circles. And it’s absolutely true what people say: a mistake will keep repeating itself until you learn its lesson.

And with great gratitude, we can say that wiser people help us. Thanks to them, we see things we often miss ourselves. Walking this path alone would be much harder.
After all, one hand is better, but two are even better.

Once again, thank you.
You truly helped me, and I felt like I was reading the thoughts of a very strong player.
Good luck to you, brother. I hope we cross paths again.🤝