This post is about pocket jacks as the title says, because it's insane that I just got horribly beat with quad jacks.
I'll make a post about that in the hand analysis forum in a second but here I am voicing my opinions about them first.
There are a bunch of different starting hands in Hold Em that play for themselves very easily.
Pocket pairs are easily minimum raised at the least but they are easy to fold pre-flop to a serious raise. Say if I have pocket 3's and decide to limp in, I am going to fold to a 500 chip raise. And fold quickly.
Connectors that are suited are easy to lay down if you don't hit the flop. If I have Jc10c, and the flop comes 4h5h6h, I'm folding obviously, no matter what the bet is.
Aces and Kings are great hands to raise as much as you can pre-flop so you can get your monies worth and try to win the chips and the hand.
But what about pocket Jacks?
Pocket Jacks are the fourth best hand in poker preflop so if you don't hit on the flop you are pretty much guranteed to be beat if there is a queen, king, or ace on the board.
If you have jacks and someone is betting back at you, you might have a coinflip 50/50 on your hands, but does that mean you play them like pocket 6's or 7's or what?
I personally never limp with Jacks. I think that would be the biggest mistake because you need to get an understanding from where you are, and you can't tell where you are if you just limp.
If you limp with them, you might as well play pocket 6's and see if you can get lucky and hit a set. If you get beat because you don't raise enough with pocket jacks and they hit a queen, king, or ace on you without raising, then you deserve to get beat with them.
If you are playing in a tournament too, at some point you are going to need to make a move for survival and if you don't risk it with pocket jacks, I don't really know what you are going to try to shove with. You could do worse than jacks if you ask me.
Now on to the analysis of where I got quad jacks beat today.
