Poker: dealing with Bust Em Hands

If you have played poker in your local casino, perhaps with the person you introduced to the game, then you will be familiar with the form. You sit down at a full-ring cash game; the action is crazy. 

You observe your opponents and decide the correct approach is to play tight and aggressive. 

The table is so loose, you are sure when your hand hits you will get paid off.

There is the usual array of limpers and you pick up ace-king on the button and decide to isolate.

You know you need to increase the size of your raise, otherwise everyone is going to call. 

You make a 5x raise and receive just one caller. The flop is [Ad] [5s] [2h], and all of the money goes in, after a series of raises and re-raises. 

You are sure your opponent has gone crazy with a weaker ace; then, they turn over [5d] [2s] for bottom two-pair and they take all of your money.

Daniel ‘Kid Poker’ Negreanu christened this type of hand a ‘bust-em’ hand. It is a speculative hand that is going to miss the flop a lot more than it hits, but when it does, it is going to cause maximum devastation. 

It is not a bad strategy to deploy some of these types of hands against tight but weak players; the types of players whom you know will stack off with top pair-top kicker or an over pair to the board. 

The best time to include this type of hand into your arsenal is at the beginning of the competition, when you are deep-stacked, or any other time that you are deep-stacked throughout the tournament.