♠️🗺️ Flop Play Friday: Texture of the Week — Paired Boards

Read the board. Trust your range. Let the right hands do the work

Author

Mike Deckard
May 16, 2025

🗺️ Flop Play Friday: Texture of the Week — Paired Boards


This week we're starting a new segment called Texture of the Week, where we spotlight one type of flop and how to structure your strategy around it.

Let’s start with a simple question:

How often do you think a flop comes:

  • Not paired?

  • Paired?

  • Tripled?

Take your best guess before you scroll.

📊 Answer:

That might surprise you.
Sure, paired boards don’t show up all the time — but roughly 1 in every 6 flops is paired.

That’s more than often enough to make mastering them a priority.

🔍 Let’s Zoom In:

T♥️ 5♣️ 5♠️

This board looks scary to a lot of players — mostly because we’ve all been called or check-raised here and shown a random hand with a 5 in it that we didn’t expect to see. But let’s step back and run a better thought process.

 Check your priors:

  • How often does the preflop raiser connect with this board?
    → Rarely.

  • How often does the preflop caller connect with it?
    → Also rarely.

🧱 Foundational Concept:

When both players miss, the advantage goes to the player with stronger preflop hands.

That’s the preflop raiser.

  • They have all the overpairs.

  • They have all the strong Ax hands (more on this later)

  • They can credibly represent strength, because they’re supposed to have it.

If you’re always checking back or slowing down just because the board is paired, you’re likely missing value — and missing out on great bluffing opportunities too.

If you’re living in fear of trips every time you see a paired flop,
you’re missing the forest for the trees.

🧠 Use What You Already Know

Let’s bring this all home with a quick thought experiment:

Think about a dry, unpaired board like
K♠️ T♦️ 5♣️


Let’s say you’re holding J♠️T♠️ and face a bet.

You’re not folding, right?

Even if you’ve never worked through it explicitly, you probably just know you’re supposed to call.
But ask yourself: why?

If you don’t know why, you can’t transfer that principle to a different board — even though it’s the same game with the same logic.

So let’s break it down.

You call with middle pair because:

  • You beat all of your opponent’s bluffs

  • You still have equity to improve (two pair, trips)

✅ That’s a clear, structured reasoning.

Now let’s apply that same lens to paired boards, like T♥️ 5♣️ 5♠️

We don’t have one pair hands nearly as often.
So what’s our equivalent?

What hands take the place of middle pair?

Take a moment. Really think about it.

🔑 Key Insight:

After one-pair hands, our next-highest category is…
Ace-high.

Let that sink in.

On many paired boards, Ace-high is a value hand.

Have you ever seen it that way?

It checks all the same boxes as JT on KT5:

  • ✅ Beats opponent’s bluffs

  • ✅ Has equity to improve

When you start treating Ace-high as a bluff-catcher in the right spots — and stop folding just because “you didn’t hit” — your flop decisions will start to feel controlled, not desperate.

What is the one flop texture that always throws you off?
Hit reply — I might break it down in a future Flop Play Friday.

Stay sharp and curious,

— Mike

Want 1-on-1 help with your flop play?


Book a coaching session and we’ll develop a repeatable process that takes your game to a whole new level.
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