3. Some thoughts about pocket pairs

With a pocket pair we can mostly push, unless we want to lure the opponent into the pot with a slowplay. This is only advisable with real monsters (AA, KK, QQ, maybe JJ) though because:

• The probability for one or several overcards on the flop is very high for pocket pairs which are smaller than QQ. If there are overcards, it is often difficult to continue as we assumed the stacks to be relatively big, and we are often behind. We can expect to pay a lot more with only a few outs to the showdown.
• Our chance to improve the hand with community cards is much smaller than the opponent's (unless he also has a pocket pair). Therefore, the opponent is in the advantageous situation of being paid off even more if he hits, but getting away cheaply if he doesn't.

In addition: If we already pushed quite often previously, a raise could become more suspicious than a push, and Villain might fold a hand like A7 against our AA, even though he usually would have called an all-in.

A push is thus the best option in most cases and you notice in chart 1 that the stacks have to be very big already for a push to no longer be +EV.