Any Two Suited Cards

"I don't play any two suited cards.  I play any two unsuited cards.  That way I am drawing to two different flushes"  Amarillo Slim

Lately I have been surprised by the number of people who will play any two suited cards even against big raises and also put all their chips in on a draw despite horrible odds.  They are sometimes successful, but one important poker lesson (and maybe a "life" lesson as well), is that bad decisions are bad decisions despite sometimes having good or desirable outcomes.  Personally, my quest is to keep trying to make good decisions and separate the outcomes.

Poker is a game of incomplete information.  Sometimes our decisions are driven by purely mathematical odds.  Do I limp in from the small blind with my 7/2 because the entire table has limped in?  Do I call a shove with 2/2 for my tournament life?  Do I chase a gutshot straight draw to a pot sized bet?  Most of these decisions are fairly easy.  We look at our situation and go for the math, go for the gamble, or live to fight another hand.  Based on what I see, many people are going for the gamble on a regular basis.  At some point, we are forced to do this.  Many players, however, go for the gamble much too early in a tournament.  As a regular in turbo tourneys there is definitely a sweet spot where you must gamble and many others when you do not need to.

Getting back to the two unsuited cards topic, we all know that being suited only adds a small percentage to your odds.  So, what makes those 9/3 suited hands so attractive?  The higher the rank of your largest cards does add value as a J/3, Q/3, K/3 and definitely A/3 all are much better than our 9/3 example.  Why are they better?  Well, a pair of 9's does not win as often as a pair of jacks, queens, kings or aces!!!  But here is the rub.  Say you are lucky enough to flop top pair.  You bet, it is raised, what do you do now?  Call and hope that you hit your kicker?  This horrible predicament was caused by a poor decision at the start, to play your miserable hand.  Sometimes an even worse thing happens. You flop or turn your desired flush and get big action, and maybe that person is just like you and plays any two suited, except his includes a queen or king.

I remember a low limit game played many years ago at Spirit Mountain Casino.  A player at my table could not lose a hand.  He had accumulated a massive pile of chips, around 400-500 as I recall in this lowly 3/6 limit game.  He was crushing it.  I got into a hand against him with a suited ace.  We both hit the flush and in this particular game when you are heads up, there was no limit on raises.  We both just kept going until I was out of chips and won the hand.  It was a good lesson to me.

I am currently re-reading "Decide To Play Great Poker" by Annie Duke.  One of her early points is that we always want to make good decisions.  Much of poker is putting ourselves in position to make those and having our opponents make bad ones.  Playing "any two suited cards" often puts us in a spot where we are having to make tough decisions and often bad ones.

According to my friend google (and I'm sure that he is nice enough to answer you as well if you ask him), the odds of being dealt any 2 suited cards are 3.3 - 1 (or 24%), if you have 2 suited cards the odds of flopping a flush are 118 - 1 (or 0.84%), and with 2 suited cards the odds of making a flush by the river are 15 - 1 (or 6.4%).