Suited connectors are not the first poker hand that you should play, they should be played after other hands such as JJ, AQ, AJ, and the like. Some people refer to suited connectors as pocket pairs because they look like a pair.
The purpose of playing suited connectors is to make a straight. The straight is a machine-made straight that is considered to be the best hand in poker. The highest straight is a straight of 10, J, Q, K, A. The lowest straight is a straight of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. It is obvious that a straight is higher than a flush, since a flush is a series of cards of the same suit (E.g. 3, 4, 5, 6 of hearts).
Many people that play connectors claim that the hand is favored to win in about 70% of the cases. thats a rather audacious claim, and one that would certainly sound fishy on a French radio station in the middle of a poker game.
The intuition behind suited connectors is that it is a made hand and the straighten is a machine-made straight. The intuition behind this hand is that the straighten will be favored in the very tight environment of a cash game. The cash game is a place where you play a lot of hands, and the better you knows the more hands you will play with confidence.
Whether or not suited connectors will be good enough to win a big pot in a tournament is a question of strategy and experience. New tournament players will probably benefit more from playing suited connectors than unsuited connectors. If you are a tournament player that has built up to decent standard, you probably should play suited connectors.
In the QQdewa game, you can’t make big moves with suited connectors. The kind of hands you want to be playing are ones that have flush potential. The odds of your flush hitting are slim in multiplayer games, so you will want to call a flop or turn bet rather than commit to a large pot. A flop bet is for size. The flush draw is a lot of money in multiplayer games, so make sure you have enough money to keep yourself in the pot.
In the tournament, you can’t play connectors and you are likely to be outdrawn by a better hand. Take a small pot size into consideration when calling a flop bet or a turn bet especially if your connectors are suited. Suited connectors can win big pots. They are fairly strong pre-flop and can give you a lot of information about what the other players have. When you are using suited connectors, look for reasons to play a hand rather than a hand with the same reason. A reason is a hand that is likely to hold some weight in a later hand.
Playing suited connectors can also give you a profitable edge against straight and flush draws. Early in the event, you can get outdrawn by hands that beat you, but as the a seven the event, you should have a fairly high flush draw, and a low straight draw. suited connectors give you the opportunity to have two separate rounded hands. With a high flush draw, you can safely have confidence in your top pair, top kicker, or better. With a low straight draw, you will have more confidence with your low kicker, and should be more cautious with your top hand.
While connectors areknown as strong hands, they are by no means unbeatable. There is a fundamental theorem that is true for all poker hands, as well as poker games. That theorem is this. If you add up all of the cards in your hand, you can sum up your hand and the community cards. If you add up the sum of your hand, you can find the probability of your opponent having a hand that sums up to your hand.
It’s intuition translated, and generally speaking, weak is strong, and strong is weak. There are many players for whom the flush draw is an unplayable hand. They are willing to risk a lot of money to protect the odds that their hand will win. In other words, unless they have plus pot odds, or a very good read on their opponent, they will not play the flush draw.
While suited connectors are strong hands, their drawback is that they are cards associated with a low flush draw percentage. How disappointing would it be to bang out a hand like 8-7 for three times the blind, only to find the rest of the good hands better than yours.
While suited connectors can win huge pots, and do beat many other hands on occasion,I would recommend only memorizing and internalizing the correct play your connectors provide.