Devil of a hand

This ended up being a bit longer than I thought.

I'm trying to catch back up and look over some hands from July at the same time. I've been looking at how I play pair hands, as I feel like although I win with them overall, a lot of times, I win too little or lose too much with them. I don't know of an easy way to get to them in Poker Tracker (the closest is filtering for pocked pairs), but I was trying to evaluate hands I set-mined and then hit the set. A lot of people -- me included sometimes -- justify pre-flop calls with medium and low pairs because of the stacking potential. I assert that we don't stack our opponents (deep stacked, anyway) that often when we hit, as they have to have a hand worth stacking off.

For the hands I hit my sets when calling preflop (as opposed to being the aggressor preflop), in fact, I did not stack anyone with more than half a stack. Now, I'll caveat this by saying that this is only over 11k hands or so, meaning that this is not a large sample size by any means. And it's certainly possible that either I'm playing these poorly or am too easy to read, so I don't get full value when I hit.

In July, the two biggest pots I played after hitting a set when calling pre-flop were when I was up against flush draws. The money went all in on the flop in both hands, and the flush got there both times. That's poker, but because the pots you lose with sets are likely to be big ones, you need to account for them when evaluating your implied odds.

I think that while you're a little worse than 7:1 against hitting your flush, you should really be looking at about 10:1 implied odds when set mining. I'm sure someone has written about this somewhere, but I'm just kind of thinking out loud here. Anyway, after backing out the two big cooler hands I mentioned above, I still only won about 4 times my set mining investment, far short of where I need to be.

So, on to the hands. I looked at a couple 66 hands where I set mined and hit (finally the post title reference ;) ). These were dug out of Poker Tracker, and I didn't think much of them at the time, so I don't have specific opponent notes, and in fact don't have that many hands on the villains.

Hand 1:

Full Tilt Poker - No Limit Hold'em Cash Game - $0.10/$0.25 Blinds - 5 Players - (http://www.legopoker.com/hh)

SB: $14.70
Hero (BB): $33.65
UTG: $7.60
CO: $33.75
BTN: $11.55

Preflop: Hero is dealt 6c 6s (5 Players)
UTG folds, CO raises to $0.85, 2 folds, Hero calls $0.60

Flop: ($1.80) 6h Qc 3d (2 Players)
Hero checks, CO bets $1.80, Hero raises to $4.00, CO folds

Here, maybe I should not checkraise the flop, since it is pretty dry. No turn cards really scare me, so I could wait, and then try it then. As an aside, I don't float all that much, and hands like this are probably good opportunities to do so, or to take the same line if the 6 were instead a 5.

Hand 2:

Full Tilt Poker - No Limit Hold'em Cash Game - $0.10/$0.25 Blinds - 6 Players - (http://www.legopoker.com/hh)

SB: $15.80
BB: $50.65
UTG: $27.95
MP: $54.70
CO: $9.15
Hero (BTN): $26.80

Preflop: Hero is dealt 6h 6d (6 Players)
UTG raises to $0.85, MP calls $0.85, CO folds, Hero calls $0.85, SB calls $0.75, BB folds

Flop: ($3.65) 6c Kc 4s (4 Players)
SB checks, UTG checks, MP checks, Hero bets $3.00, 3 folds

I think my line is OK here, as I would like to protect against a flush draw, and I could hope that he's slowplaying AK, or even AA. Since he had a big stack, I would like to try and start building it on the flop.