QJ Strategy On Aggressive Tables

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Hello and welcome to Ask SplitSuit A Question. I am James “SplitSuit” Sweeney here from ThePokerBank.com, and today we are going to answer one of your questions. Today’s question comes from Shane D. And Shane asks “What’s your opinion on playing Queen Jack off suit in early position facing a loose aggressive table, or as you like to call them, aggro fish?”

Shane that’s a great question and one of those question we can answer in one word, and that word is FOLD. If we are at a table where there’s a lot of loose aggressive individuals how are we going to make money by playing queen jack off suit from early position. Open-limping is certainly out of the question, we are just going to go out of position every single time pretty much so there’s a lot of players between ourselves and the button that can and will take position on us. We can’t handle an isolation and we don’t really want to open-limp and just keep limp-folding, that’s going to be horrible.

If we are thinking about raising then what’s going to happen if we realistically raise. So likely if we raise, a couple of things are going to happen. One, we are likely going to face a lot of three bets. You did say loose aggressive which I’m thinking that three bets are certainly on the table. And we can’t really handle a three bet out of position with queen jack off and even if we have queen jack off in position say if someone on the blind three bets us that’s still not a great thing for us. Its still going to be a hand does that not perform very well at all its definitely on the butt-side of equity almost every single time and I don’t see much of a reason to get involved in that situation.

So I don’t want to face a 3bet and then also, even if I say get one or two callers, its still a situation where it’s not going to be very easy to make money in that spot. Again we are going to be out of position a lot of the time if we go post flop and another thing to consider is how queen jack is going to hit, so its usually going to miss the flop about 2/3 of the time and catch about 1/3 and do we really want to be continuation betting when we miss that 2/3 of the time against fishy opponents especially loose fishy…I’m not really super happy about that.

And then the other thing to consider is that a 1/3 of the time we do hit. Now sometimes, that’s going to be OK but as your hole cards get lower and lower you know, it’s different with AK, but when you have a hand like a queen jack you’re going to catch more second pairs which are certainly going to be very tricky to play out of position. And even when you catch a single top pair it’s all well and good but there’s certainly going to be some reverse implied odds which are going to be troublesome and very difficult from out of position. Then are you really going to make all that much the times you hit anyway?

Again, reverse implied odds are against you and even the times that your ahead its going to be very very tricky to play the rest of the hand out. So all those things combined, and again I don’t want to face 3bets, I don’t really want to be limp-calling either…what’s the point? In a situation like that if I have a queen jack offsuit from early position in a table like that, definitely going to be a situation where I’m finding fold button pretty much every time.

Thanks for the great questions Shane, and if you or anyone else has any other questions feel free to leave them at our google plus page. And also please make sure to like and subscribe especially if you are liking this kind of video, any comments will certainly help. And same as always if you have any questions please don’t hesitate to let me know otherwise good luck out there and happy grinding!