When facing an overly aggressive player, most players revert to slowplaying their hand. There is a logic to it; the player is betting too much. Why would we want to scare them off by playing the hand aggressively?

The solvers have shown us what smart players already knew, which is that the way to deal with maniacs is to fight fire with fire. We want to take the fight to them, with a strong range, and capitalise when they come over the top of you.

Even the biggest Maniacs can sense when you seem too happy to check call every street.

There are, however, times when it is correct to slow play your hand.

A rough guideline for when to slow play is when we:

• Heavily block value
• Have a checking range we want to protect
• Are facing a polarised range
• Have a hand that doesn’t need protection

We want to block value, that means we have such a strong hand that it’s hard for our opponent have much of anything. This means they have lots of bluffs, and when they have lots of bluffs, we don’t want to bet and let them get away cheaply.

We also want hands in our range that naturally want to check/call. If our weaker hands don’t check/call too, then we will make it very obvious when we are slow playing a monster. This is what we mean by protecting our checking range.

Finally, we slow play hands that do not benefit from protection. Slowplaying a hand like TT on an 8 high board is a bad idea because so many bad cards can come for us, which hit a bluffer’s range. 88 on an 8 high board, however, is much harder to crack.

A natural slow play example

A classic example would be if we were the BB with 99 and the flop comes 952 rainbow.

We block a lot of value, all the 9x, so if we played the hand aggressively, it would lead to a lot of folds. So check/raising would be an error here.

While we crush the flop, our range misses this board a lot, so we have a lot of natural checks and check/calls that we want to protect. If we didn’t check/call the nuts on this flop, our opponent could run all over us.

Our opponent also misses this board a lot, and this is an overbet board, so we are up against a polarised range. If we raise here, all we do is fold out the bluffs.

Finally, we are not worried about protecting our hand, so there is no reason to bet to deny equity in the way which we might with TT here. We want our opponent to improve a little.

Now that you know the best time to slow play your hand, don’t overdo it. It is still often better to go with the wise advice of Doyle Brunson, which is to never slow play your big hands, and instead just hope your opponent has something they can call with.

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