Cold calling a bet on the flop to see if your hand improves on the turn is called Peeling (aka peel a card of the deck). I’ve been thinking lately about given different flop textures, what would a good range of hands I should have to make peeling a good idea. If I am on the button and have good overcards to a dry flop with only one bet in front of me. This might be an ideal situation to peel because I have decent odds to hit my hand or possibly to improve to a draw. Say I have Qd-Jd on the button, a 10s-6d-2c board and a bet and two calls in front of me. I’m closing out the action so no need to worry about getting raised. I have a decent amount of outs, any of the six Q’s or J’s is probably good, any diamond gives me a flush draw, a 9 or K give me open an ended straight draw. That’s 28 cards that would make me at least want to stick around and see the river.
But, what peeling presupposes is that there is an unraised pot. In other words, everyone limped in, including me (an overlimp), the small blind probably completed and the big blind checked. If I’m on the button with a strong suited connector like QJ, why wouldn’t I raise? It might be that this is an extremely weak-tight table where only hands like AA or KK are raised preflop. If that’s the case there may be a lot of hands here that have me in trouble. Players in front of me could easily limp in games like this with hands like AJ, KQ and lots of pocket pairs as strong as JJ. All of these hands would have me in serious trouble. While these games do come around now and then, they are pretty rare where I play. Loose-passive is the name of the game in low limit fixed hold’em. My opponents are MUCH more likely to have hands like A-x, K-x, unsuited connectors and gapers or any two suited. Against that sort of hand range my suited QJ stacks up pretty well. So the answer to our raise question is there is “no answer.” We really ought to be raising here.
Let’s say as played, I did overlimp on the flop, peeled the turn and picked up one of the cards that improved my hand to a draw. More often than not I’ll miss on the river and if bet into I’ve only got Q high. I’ll have to fold. What I’ve done here is traded any smidge of fold equity I had to save just one small bet preflop.
Now let’s say I raise preflop. Now, I’ve got odds to bet this flop. I have to use discretion. Say a 7 comes on the turn and I’ve seen a check-raise or two from my opponents. I may have to check behind when the action gets to me, take my free card and see the river. But, barring anything like this I have fold equity. Say a K comes on the turn for 10s-6d-2c-Kh. I’ve improved to an open ended straight draw and I can bet as a semi-bluff. With a board like this what’s my opponent going to think of is his 5-6? He doesn’t have to fold that often to make this play profitable and even if he does call I’ve got outs and good odds with a pot this big.
So, what does all this have to do with our original question about peeling? The truth is that if I am playing fixed limit hold’em correctly (i.e. aggressively) there should be very few opportunities for peeling. It’s rare to open or overlimp out of position. It’s best to either raise or fold with one bet in front. In position, I should be raising my marginally strong hands preflop and betting down barring any bad cards or opponents playing back at me.
