This article was written by blackrain79.com contributor Fran Ferlan.
No matter which side of the spectrum you fall on, it’s undeniable that they
can be quite tricky to play.
Still, they are a premium poker hand, and should be one of your biggest long
term winners.
If you get nervous when you get pocket Jacks, or even worse, you
tend to avoid playing them, keep reading.
Chances are you might be playing
them wrong.
This article will show you how to play pocket Jacks the right way, or at least
how to make your life easier playing them.
1. Play Pocket Jacks Aggressively Preflop
One of the crucial things to keep in mind when playing pocket Jacks is the
fact that, while sometimes tricky to play, they are still a premium hand, and
should be played as such.
This means you should play it aggressively,
especially preflop, since you’re likely way ahead of your opponent’s
range.
For example, pocket Jacks are a 77% favourite to win against another random
starting hand in no-limit Texas hold’em.
This is a statistically huge edge,
and should be exploited while your hand is probably ahead.
If you play pocket Jacks aggressively preflop, you’re automatically making
your life less difficult post-flop.
Since pocket Jacks can be tricky to play
postflop, you want to make the situation easier for yourself by creating a
shallow stack-to-pot ratio, (or SPR for short).
Put simply, an SPR is a preflop and flop metric that measures how committed
you are to the pot.
As the name suggests, it’s calculated by simply dividing
the effective stack size (the smaller remaining stack of the players involved)
with the size of the pot.
For example, if the effective stack size is $100 and
the pot size is $20, the SPR is 5.
The smaller the SPR, the more pot-committed you are, and the more willing you
should be to play for the rest of your stack.
Conversely, the bigger the SPR,
the less willing you should be to put more money into the pot.
As a rule of thumb, if the SPR is very small (3 or less), you are
automatically committed to the pot with a top-pair hand.
Since pocket Jacks
will often be an overpair on a number of middling or low flop textures, you
can be confident your hand is fairly ahead of your opponent’s range.
If the
SPR is small, you can comfortably put the rest of your money in the middle.
This is such a simple little rule of thumb and if I had to start poker all over again, I would want to know this!
Let's look at a quick example to help illustrate this concept better though.
Example Pocket Jacks Hand #1
Effective stack size: 100 BB
You are dealt J♥J♦ in the SB.
A tight and aggressive regular open-raises to 3x from the CO.
A loose passive calls from the BU.
You: ???
You should 3-bet (re-raise) to 15x
This is a great spot for a squeeze play. A squeeze is a situation where you
are 3-betting against a preflop open-raiser and one or more callers.
Basically, you are trying to “squeeze out” the dead money.
It’s also called a
squeeze because both players will find themselves “squeezed” between other
players if they decide to continue, which puts them in an awkward
position.
3-betting in this spot is far more preferable than flat calling.
For one,
calling leaves you vulnerable to getting squeezed from the big blind yourself.
Also, playing from the small blind against multiple opponents without a range
advantage is just about the worst situation to find yourself in poker,
period.
It leads to all kinds of postflop mistakes as well as Nathan discussed in his latest video, the top 5 poker don'ts (avoid these terrible plays!)
Conversely, by 3-betting, you will be the one with the range advantage,
meaning you are the one dictating the tempo.
You will also be in position to
make a continuation bet on the flop.
Opting for a bigger 3-bet size here has a couple of benefits.
First of all,
you are giving your opponents a worse price on a call. Since you will be
playing the hand out of position, you don’t want to make things easy for your
opponents.
You need to let them know that if they want to play against you,
it’s going to cost them.
Additionally, you’re creating a shallower SPR pot, which translates to easier
decision making postflop.
If you flop an overpair, you can quite comfortably
put the rest of your stack into the pot.
(An overpair is a pocket pair that is stronger than the top pair on the flop.)
For example, on a flop like:
Q♦7♣2♦
Pocket Kings and pocket Aces are an overpair.
If the SPR is a lot bigger, on the other hand, things get a lot more
complicated, because you will likely need to play multiple streets with a lot
of the unknown variables.
The bigger the SPR, the more difficult it is to put
the rest of your money in the middle.
In such a situation, your pocket Jacks
get a lot more vulnerable, because they can easily get outdrawn.
This is discussed in much more detail in The Micro Stakes Playbook.
2. Keep Applying The Pressure Postflop For Easy Money
Being a preflop aggressor with pocket Jacks translates to easier decisions
postflop.
If you build a shallow SPR pot, you’ll encounter less complicated
spots on the flop, and the rest of the hand will basically play itself.
Also,
by betting or raising preflop, you’ll get to the flop with the range
advantage.
(A range advantage means you are perceived to have more strong hands in your
range than your opponent).
This means you can fire off a standard continuation bet (i.e. a bet made by
the previous street’s aggressor) on most flop textures.
Pocket Jacks will flop
an overpair fairly often, so you can be confident your hand is ahead of your
opponent’s range most of the time.
But even if you don’t flop an overpair with your pocket Jacks, you can still
fire off a standard c-bet and expect it to succeed more often than not.
There’s a couple of reasons for this.
First off, if you followed the previous tip about playing pocket Jacks
aggressively preflop, you will have the aforementioned range advantage.
This
means you can credibly represent a number of strong hands when there is an Ace
or a King on the flop, for example.
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A lot of players make the mistake of slowing down too much when they have some
sort of a middle pocket pair and a stronger card comes on the flop.
While it’s
obviously better to have an overpair than a second or third pair, it doesn’t
mean you should give the hand up altogether when you don’t have an
overpair.
That’s because your opponent is just as likely to miss the flop as you are.
Most hands miss most flops, so you should assume you have a better hand than
your opponent until they give you a reason to think otherwise.
Example Pocket Jacks Hand #2
Effective stack size: 100 BB
You are dealt J♠J♦ on the Button.
You open-raise to 3x.
A tight and aggressive regular calls from the BB.
Pot: 6.5 BB
Flop: K♣7♠3♥
Villain checks
You: ???
You should c-bet 3.5 BB.
Even though you don’t have an overpair on this flop, a c-bet is still the best
play.
In fact, it is a proven winning poker strategy to make a continuation bet here.
The flop is about as dry as they get, meaning your opponent will have
missed it far more often than not.
You have the range advantage, and you’ll be
able to take down the pot with a standard c-bet very often.
Even if your opponent calls you, you can keep applying the pressure on later
streets.
That’s because you can assume your opponent will call you with some
sort of mediocre Kx hands, like KJ, KT, K9, or some middling pair like pocket
Nines or Eights.
You can exclude stronger hands from his range because his range is capped.
(A capped range means there is an upper limit to the number of strong hands
your opponent can have based on the actions taken in the hand, as opposed to
an uncapped range which can contain very strong hands).
In this example, the villain didn’t 3-bet preflop, so you can exclude strong
hands from his range, like pocket Aces, pocket Kings, Ace-King or King-Queen,
for example.
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3. Pocket Jacks Are Great For Stacking off Poker Fish
Pocket Jacks favour shallow SPR pots because they can often win the hand unimproved.
Conversely, if you play pocket Jacks in deep SPR pots, the
situation gets a lot more tricky, because they are vulnerable to getting
outdrawn.
Any Ace, King, or Queen that comes on the board can make you uncertain how to
proceed in the hand.
The best solution to that is trying to create spots where
the decisions are more straightforward.
With that in mind, pocket Jacks are great for attacking small to medium sized
stacks (which happen to belong to recreational players most of the time).
When
I’m talking about these small to medium stacks, I’m talking about cash games
in this instance.
While you should be careful with playing pocket Jacks with deep effective
stack sizes, you can usually put your money in preflop fairly comfortably
against smaller stack sizes.
A number of recreational players will gladly
stack off with a bunch of random hands, including basically any suited Ace,
small pocket pairs, random broadway hands etc.
In fact, Nathan literally wrote an entire book showing you how to stack these fish again and again.
Against these hands, pocket
Jacks fare pretty favourably.
Against a random hand, pocket Jacks have a huge 77% hand equity.
In fact, they
are even a favourite to win against Ace-King suited, with 54% hand
equity.
Example Pocket Jacks Hand #3
Effective stack size: 80 BB
You are dealt J♠J♥ UTG.
You open-raise to 3x.
A loose and aggressive fish 3-bets to 9x on the BU.
You: ???
You should 4-bet to 20x
If the recreational player is very wild and out of control, an argument can be
made that you can just flat-call instead of 4-betting (i.e. raising another
player’s 3-bet), and then just call very wide on the flop and let them donate
their stack to you with their ill-advised chip spewing attempt at bluffing.
But since you want to keep things simple when playing against recreational
players, because they already make enough obvious beginner mistakes, it’s usually the best idea to put as much money in the middle as
possible when you’re confident your hand is ahead.
You don’t want them to be
able to get away cheaply.
What’s more, considering the player type and the stack size, you can safely
assume they’ll be willing to stack off with a fairly wide range.
In this spot,
pocket Jacks do pretty well overall, as they have showdown value in and of
themselves, meaning they don’t need to improve to win the hand.
Contrast this
with a bunch of mediocre, drawing hands recreational players are likely to
play, you can see that pocket Jacks are a clear favourite.
How to Play Pocket Jacks (Final Thoughts)
Pocket Jacks can be tricky to play, but the same can be said for other
starting poker hands as well.
With that said though, you don't need to spend hours and hours studying advanced poker strategy in order to play them well.
The biggest problem with Pocket Jacks is that you often
don’t know where you stand in a hand (i.e. are you ahead or behind your
opponent’s range).
In other words, pocket Jacks can often find themselves in
marginal situations, where it’s not quite clear what to do.
The best way to counteract that is to get back to the basics.
Pocket Jacks are still a premium hand, and should be played as such.
This
means you want to play pocket Jacks aggressively preflop, instead of trying to
set mine with them, for example.
This will make your life easier postflop, as you will:
1. See the flop with the range advantage, meaning you are perceived to have a
stronger hand than your opponent,
2. Be able to fire off a flop c-bet to keep applying the pressure on your
opponent, and even turn your hand into a bluff on consecutive streets (turn
and river),
3. Create a shallow SPR pot, so your decisions will become simpler.
By playing aggressively preflop, you will also avoid huge multiway pots where
more players will be able to outdraw you.
The more players in the pot, the
harder it is to win the hand.
If you’re having trouble playing pocket Jacks, don’t overcomplicate it.
In
most cases, playing them straightforwardly is the way to go.
So put your money in, and let the math take care of the rest.
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