If you can disguise the fact that you are holding A-K, you can simultaneously disguise and exploit the strength of the hand.

Relatively early in a major, multi-day full field no-limit Hold’em tournament, two players have roughly equivalent stacks of 100,000 chips. Antes are 200, blinds are 500 and 1000. Squirrelly Joe (names have been changed to protect the crafty) is in late position, holding A-K off-suit. His foe, Betting Betty, opens with a raise to 3000. Everyone folds to Joe, who knows Betty to be capable of betting with anything from moderate to good hands. He also knows that he’s not about to go broke with A-K in this situation. It’s still early days in this tournament. He can gamble with his good hand, but he doesn’t have to get carried away. His goal is to maximise his gain if he hits, but minimise his loss if he misses. So he calls her raise in position and the two of them see the flop.

Tricky customer

The flop comes 8♠ -4♠ -3♥ … not exactly the flop Joe was looking for, but yet not a disaster, for if Betty has anything other than a set (and she’s unlikely to have a set of Fours or Threes) she can’t feel too enthusiastic about her situation. She makes the expected continuation bet of 5000, and now Joe reaches a crossroads with his A-K. He could, of course, treat his hand as a miss, and muck. But Joe is a little trickier than that. He decides to take the initiative in the hand by raising another 7000, which Betty calls, putting a little over 30,000 in the pot. He figures his raise here will slow Betty down on the turn, giving him the option of leading at the pot or checking behind her if she checks.

The turn is the K♦ , just the card Joe was looking for – but he’s not going to play it that way. When Betty checks the turn, he pauses to contemplate his hand from her point of view. Among other things, she may put him on a flush draw, and figured that his raise on the flop was a bid to get a free card on the turn. Since the King was a blank for the flush draw, Joe goes ahead and checks behind Betty. Now, he believes, any river card that’s not a spade may very well embolden her to bet.

Hidden strength

The river is the Q♦ , a great card for Joe’s hand, as he’s about to find out. Betty fi res 15,000 at the pot, and Joe figures her for a little something or a big fat nothing. He thinks she might be good for another 20,000 or so, so he makes that raise. Note that even at this late stage of the hand he can still escape if she comes over the top (for it’s possible she was betting Queens and hit her set). But he considers it more likely that Betty was bluffing, and will now fold, or else will pay him off with a worse hand.

Sure enough, she calls with A-Q, having been fooled by his (relatively risk-free) check on the turn. That check was the heart of Joe’s gambit. By having a real hand, but feigning a draw, Joe was able to extract maximum value from his unsuspecting foe. That’s using the strength of big slick without overexposing its weakness.

I’d like to tell you that Joe went on to win this tournament, but eventually he got all his money in with A-K against 2-2, failed to improve, and busted out. Big slick giveth, and big slick taketh away.