Playing Suited Connectors

If you’ve reached the stage where you’ve become a reasonably competent poker player that’s moved to a more intermediate table with a higher buy-in for tournament style games or a high blind level for the round table variety, the chances are that you’ll be playing the game in tight but aggressive style.

Obviously, this style is maximised when holding two strong cards in the ‘hole’ which will determine your level of aggression both before and after the flop.

Playing a tight, aggressive style can be a strong enough strategy to win games against lower level intermediate players but to really maximise your chances, it pays to learn how to increase the range of your hole cards to significantly improve your game further.

Playing hands that speculate possible winning combinations is a superb way to increase your level of skill when playing poker, and suited connectors are a fantastic way of bidding for your share of the pot.

Although other speculative hands can see you win rounds of poker on an occasional basis, suited connectors are usually preferred because of their ability to produce a strong finishing hand such as a straight, a flush or, in more rare scenarios, a straight flush or a royal flush.

Suited connectors also offer other speculative combinations such as two pair combinations or three of a kind, and these offer a certain amount of disguise and bluffing capability when trying to draw your opponents into making vital and costly mistakes.

A massive benefit of playing a hand using suited connectors is the fact that they are incredibly easy to play. Because there’s a strong chance that you’ll draw a competitive hand nearly every time, all that’s needed to use suited connectors is a firm understanding of the game itself and some background knowledge on poker odds and possibilities to know exactly when to draw.

Suited connectors tend to be best played late in the hand as this allows you to weigh up the actions of your opponents first without taking any unnecessary risks with your own stack. This way, you’ll have more a more accurate summary of pot count, levels of aggression and other influencing factors when playing your own hand.

A competent poker player will probably know that the odds of drawing a straight or a flush are both approximately 4:1. Having suited connectors in the hole means that you should be able to produce a straight or flush draw on the flop.

This will leave you in a strong position if you have a couple of opponents who are prepared to call along with you, especially if it appears that they are limping into the betting. In an ideal word, 3 or 4 other players will limp into a hand with you.

Playing fewer than 3 limpers is probably best avoided as it reduces the number of potential calls and ultimately has an adverse effect on the size of the pot. As well as affecting profits. It’s not a particularly clever move to blow your strategy if you’re not going to make a decent profit from it, hence the fact that it’s always preferable to play suited connectors aggressively later in the game.

Another good reason for not playing suited connectors early is that you are only around 8:1 to flop a straight draw or a flush draw against 4:1 by the time the river has been dealt. There’s an overall probability that you won’t flop either draw most of the time so you need to have as many limp players in the pot as possible when you eventually do.

The best way to play after the flop is with a basic call or fold strategy. The action really has to reflect the correct odds of drawing a straight or a flush. There will, of course, be other influencing factors such as heavy betting or drawing from the lower end of a straight so making a firm analysis of play is vital. If your analysis is correct, playing your suited connectors shouldn’t be too difficult.

Using a tight, aggressive strategy can make the semi-bluff a viable option. If you choose to semi-bluff, there’s always the possibility of collecting a pot when you might not have had the correct odds to draw for a straight or a flush but were able to frighten your opponents out of the betting.

Even if an opponent calls a semi-bluff, it can sometimes be worth staying in as this displays a lack of willingness to raise the betting with their own hand which may indicate that his hole cards are little above average.

Suited connectors will always make you money in the long-term if you learn to play them correctly. By maintaining a discipline that allows you to select your involvement based on the pot odds, you’ll soon learn when to draw and when to fold. This means you not only have a better chance of taking out the fish, but you’ll also win your fair share of pots against tighter opponents as well.