When to Slowplay Premium Hands Against Habitual Cbettors
You don’t always want to play your big starting hands the same way. There is no such thing as standard in poker. If you can extract more value from playing premium hands differently in certain situations then you should. For example, even though you would normally want to be 3betting all your premium hands like QQ+/AK/AQ in the blinds for value, it can make sense to slow play your opponents in poker by calling instead of reraising preflop, if you have a habitual cbettor who cbets >85% raising in late position. These players must be cbetting the flop when they miss the flop a high percentage of the time. Statistically, its not possible for them to always have a hand.
If you know villain will fold to a reraise in the blinds (not so much in position because you risk other players coming along). By slowplaying a premium starting hand against the habitual cbettor, at the very least you will extract one extra bet from them which you otherwise wouldn’t have got if you didn’t slowplay the hand. If you were to have 3bet them preflop if they have a high fold to 3bet%, you’re likely to just win only the initial raise.
When using Holdem Manager, pay attention to the PFR stat. Players with a high PFR and high Cbet% will have a much wider range when they cbet so you have to give them less credit for having a hand and it can be worthwhile slowplaying your big hands against them to try and induce a bluff (unless they are calling stations preflop and calling your raises). However, most bad LAG players at the low stakes tend to play in too many hands and continuation bet with too much frequency, so you want to exploit this.
A player with a continuation bet percentage which is greater then 80% is cbetting almost all the time and is unlikely to be paying attention to the number of opponents or the flop texture. You can raise and call him lighter. These are also good players to float the flop in 6-max when you think they missed the flop, unless they fire a lot of double barrels. If they do fire a lot of double barrels then you would be more inclined to slowplay or call down lightly against them trying to induce bluffs.
Whilst I don’t advocate that you slowplay your hands very often because you generally want to get as many chips in the middle preflop with your premium hands, as you will know poker is situational and if it’s +EV to play a hand a different way then it’s a no brainer to use the play.
Here is an example of a hand where it was ideal to slowplay KK preflop in the SB when facing a raise from a habitual cbettor on the BTN. Villain’s cbet percentage is 87% and they also have a high PFR so were raising with a wider range on the button. Obviously it helps if you flop quads on the flop 