A couple of topics today. First, something that drives me nuts: people discussing strategy at the table. We have new guy in town whom I call Mr. WAPMAS. It stands for “Win a Pot; Make a Speech.” The guy cannot help talking about how he plays hands. Typical is “I would have semi-bluff raised you on the turn, but I knew you would call, so I just called hoping to draw out. Then I felt you might check the river so I had to bet.” Who needs this? Strategy is for books, forums, discussions with friends, and, yes, lessons. The table is for making money. You cannot make money by talking about strategy…all you can do is either make your unaware opponents smarter, or cause them to stop having fun and start worrying about the fact that they are not thinking enough or about the right things. Tables are for talking about fun stuff, sports, and maybe a funny play or two. Please heed this.

A number of people are having problems with suited aces, so I thought I would deal with it briefly. Weak suited aces are bad hand, and typically you should not play them. I know how hard it is to throw them away, and I had trouble with this leak for many years, so I understand it is easy to say and hard to do. But let’s look at what kind of hand it is.

First, it makes top pair bad kicker. If an ace flops and you have top pair, you will win the pot with little difficulty unless someone else has one too. If they do, your weak kicker will lose or tie unless you draw out. And you do not want to be in a position where you have to hit three outs to win a small pot. Ace-rag is the type of hand that wins smaller pots and loses bigger ones. Of course, you can also make small-pair top-kicker, but this is a tough hand to get to hold up. So as a power hand, suited aces are really only used heads-up where aces have value as a winning hand if neither player makes a pair.

There is also the suited aspect. Suited-ness helps when there is a large field, so you are getting a good price to flop a flush draw (around 7:1, including flopping a flush) and then a price to make it (2:1 against). This means with many opponents suited aces play well (almost regardless of price in limit hold’em) and against small and medium fields they don’t.

Suited aces are thus only playable in late position (unless your game is totally loose) with a large number of players, or in late position when you are first in looking to play heads-up. Otherwise, while it takes discipline, you will save money by tossing them away.