How to Play the Most Dangerous Board Textures

08 Mar 2025

Intermediate

This material is for medium-skilled players

We all know what it's like to be the preflop raiser, get called, and see a really bad board texture. But have you ever wondered which are the actual worst board textures for the preflop raiser? Well, if you have, then this topic is for you!

Now, to give you an idea of how we're going to do this, we're going to look at a few different examples, but we're not really going to be focusing on the solution archive. Instead, we're going to be looking at aggregate reports. But in particular, we're actually going to be looking at data that I've drawn out of the aggregate reports for a variety of different scenarios. 

So the way I'm referring to this is we're aggregating the aggregate. We're taking different scenarios and our overall frequencies for seabedding in various different spots. And we're comparing, for example, a tournament spot and a cash game spot to see what trends might exist.

We've picked out two cash game stack depths here of 100 and 200 big blinds. We've picked out two MTT stack depths of 25 and 50 big blinds. And all these examples are going to be single-raised pots, and they're either going to be low jack big blind or low jack button formations. So one in position, one out of position. Just to give us a general sense of the trends here in terms of which boards are causing us to slow down and c-bet less often.

Now, the three categories of boards that I've picked out as being the most dangerous ones:

• Monotone. First of all, it's going to be monotone. And in particular, we're going to split those up into ace high monotone and connected monotone. Now, when we use the term connected here, remember that that refers to board textures where a flopped straight is possible. So    or   , for example, would be connected.    or    does not count as a connected board. Counts as an open ender board, let's say. 
• Connected. Second is the connected category as a whole. Ace-high wheel and 7-high or lower connected being the two categories we're going to really focus on. 
• Paired. Finally, we have paired boards, but really only one specific category of paired boards. It's the board with AXX, where X is between an 8 and a 4. So that's going to be    through   . And those in particular you'll see are quite interesting. 

So with that said, let's dive into some of this data and start talking about what trends there are and why they exist. 

So first, let's look at our monotone boards:

You can see here that I've got the frequencies for each of these formations listed under the all boards category. Generally not going to be seeing anything too surprising here. The MTT formations, we're going to have higher c-bet frequencies because generally the ranges are wider. There's more money in the pot, so the caller is calling wider and so on. 

And if we focus on the left hand side for the cash game ranges, you can already see that across all monotone boards, there's about a 12% drop in the in-position spots, 13%-ish. And then there's about a 5% drop in the out-of-position spots. So immediately monotone boards as a whole, we're slowing down a bit. 

On the ace high monotone, that drop is going to be amplified in all four of these cases. There is a little bit of a caveat in the connected monotone category, simply because connected monotone also includes boards like    or   monotone, where maybe we actually have sets in two pair hands that our opponent doesn't have, so that's going to slightly neutralize it a little bit. But in a general sense, you can see that our frequency on these connected monotone boards is significantly lower than our overall c-bet frequency for the spot as a whole. 

And the reason for this is that the big blind is jamming preflop with a lot of suited hands, and that means that when they defend preflop, they're actually a little bit more weighted towards having more off-suit hands. 

So they're going to be jamming a lot of their suited ace hands, suited broadway hands for 25 bigs, but they're going to call with a bunch of off-suit stuff that doesn't make flushes. So that means monotone boards at 25 when we're in-position, not quite as bad. But if you look at the out-of-position, similar trend. Monotone boards drop our c-bet frequency by about 12%, 10%, depending on the exact stack depths. 

Again, you can see that the connected category is slightly offsetting things, but there's definitely a pretty big drop-off there in most of these cases. Of course, the MTT ranges for the fairly shallow stacks are going to be affecting things a little bit here, so it's not that easy to immediately identify those same trends at the 25 big blind stack depth. It is just going to be a product of the fact that a lot of hands are jamming pre at this stack depth against a raise, so just have to keep that in mind. 

Strategy Summary

But let's talk about why some of these trends are happening. In essence, what we're seeing is that in any single-raise pot formation, both us and our opponent, or both hero and villain, raiser and caller, are going to possess a lot of suited hands. And one of those four suits in every spot is going to flop a flush on any monotone board. So that means that even when we account for the off-suit hands and the pairs that exist in the ranges, both players are going to flop flushes about 10% of the time. And that, of course, means that a lot of the other hands in our range have to play more cautiously. 

We're not going to be able to put in a lot of money across three streets if we have to worry about running into a flush 10% of the time. So generally speaking, we're going to have to slow down a lot more on monotone boards, and in particular, the connected ones where our opponent can have a lot more of the sets, and the ace-high ones where our opponent can have a decent chunk of top pair, and maybe they can even have more flushes given that the ace is already out there and they're already weighted more towards the broadway flush cards, pseudo-connector flush cards perhaps. That's going to slightly influence things as well. 

Now our next board category, of course, is the connected boards. And as you can imagine, there's a few trends here that are going to be affected by the exact nature of the board, but we're seeing some similar things to what we saw previously. In fact, in this case, even the MTT spots are starting to obey the same principles that we might expect in a lot of situations. 

We can see that there's a big drop-off in all of the out-of-position spots down to about a 12% or 13% frequency in the cash game situations, and a 30% to 45% frequency in the MTT spots, and particularly when we add the other elements like the ace-high wheel boards or the 7-high or lower boards, we start to see some really low c-bet frequencies. The frequencies for 7-high or lower, so   ,   , etc., in the cash game spots start to go down to basically zero. We start to range check.

Now, you might be wondering why the ace-high wheel boards are in this category. Well, in the cash game situation, a lot of the time it's going to come down to the fact that the preflop caller can have two of the sets. So, for example, they can have deuces and threes. On   , we can only have aces. And at depth, that's going to have a big impact. 

But the only reason for that is because a lot of the  ,  ,   are going to jam from the big blind here against the low jack open. So that's going to slightly restrict things there. 

But as you can see here, those board textures, even in the MTT spots, are not as good as the average for this particular formation. And it comes down to the fact that even in the MTT scenarios, big blind is defending a lot of  hands that the preflop raiser, when they're opening from the low jack, can't necessarily have. Obviously, when they're flatting from the button, it's going to slightly change things. 

The exact distribution of  hands in their range is going to alter a little bit. But you can certainly see there's a trend here where these two textures of ace-high wheel and then the 7-high or lower are seeing substantially different c-bet frequencies with a big drop in most of these formations. 

Strategy Summary

Again, the question becomes: «why is this happening»?. Well, unlike monotone boards, our opponent isn't always going to have the flop straight in their range, depending on what the exact flop is. So connected is not quite the same as monotone because on any monotone board, our opponent can have a flush, but not necessarily always the case that our opponent can have the straight combination on a connected board. 

For example,    is connected, but there are a lot of spots where our opponent can't have   or  . But on connected flops, where our opponent can possess a lot of 2 pairs and sets, this can make life a lot more difficult for us. And this is where the ace-high wheel and the 7-high or lower start to become a real factor.   ,   , etc., they can have a lot of the suited ace hands there. On   , they can have a lot of 2 pairs, they can have a lot of sets, they can also have the straight, and so on. 

So these board textures really start to become problematic because of how many sets and two pairs in poker are going to exist in the caller's range, even in circumstances where they're calling in the big blind. So as we saw before, even when we're the in-position player, we're seeing a drop-off to about 40-50% sometimes with our overall c-bet frequency on these lower-card connected boards because of how many two pairs and sets also exist on top of the straight. 

The exception here is the high-card connected boards because the high-card connected textures like the   ,   ,   , whatever it might be, those are boards where we can have a lot of sets in two pairs. And, crucially, we can almost always have the straights on those boards as well. Even if it's   , for example, we can have   suited, we can often have   offsuit. 

In a lot of cases there, those high-card connected boards are not that bad for us. And in fact, because our opponent's range is quite often going to be pocket-pair heavy when they're calling preflop, especially if they're calling in-position, there are quite a lot of those boards where we get to bet a lot, specifically because we get to put their low-pocket pairs in a tough spot, even with a small bet size. 

So moving on to our final category of boards here, it's the paired boards, but in particular, it's those ace-8-8 through to ace-4-4 textures. Now, the reason why I've isolated those textures here is, as you can see, there's quite a big difference between those and the rest of the paired boards. 

In fact, if we look at the cash game scenarios, if we look at all paired boards as a whole, our c-bet frequencies actually go up. So this is indicating that there's a lot of paired board textures where we're completely fine with betting at a very high frequency, if not range betting. But the ace-8-8 through ace-4-4 specifically, our c-bet frequency drops all the way down to about 20% to 40% in all these cases. 

The factors behind this we'll discuss in just a second, but if you look over at the MTT spots, you can see some similar stuff. The paired board frequency is still pretty high when we're c-betting in position, and in fact it goes up when we're c-betting out of position. But there's a big 20% or so drop-off when we're c-betting in position on the    to   . 

Now there is an increase when we're out of position on these boards, and the only reason for that, once again, outlier at this 25 big blind depth, is that the in-position player is not flatting as many ace-x hands and pairs at this depth. They're jamming a lot preflop. So that's going to be a major contributing factor here. And again, these 25 big blind stacks are certainly going to have a bit of a different configuration of ranges, so certain things will change there. 

But if you look at the in-position 50 big blind spots, we're very much seeing the same thing. Again, the out-of-position spots, there's a little bit of an outlier there. We're not quite seeing the same principles, although the    to    are betting less often than the other paired boards. So again, some small nuances with the ranges there, but you can still see the principle that we're talking about here. 

Strategy Summary

So why is this happening? Well, the generalities here are that most paired boards, especially the lower card ones, are generally pretty good for the preflop raiser because our prevalence of strong pocket pairs in our range means that we're going to be able to bet those boards a lot. 

Those hands are very strong on those boards, and generally speaking, that's going to influence our strategy towards being pretty aggressive, especially in spots where our opponent has a lot of air hands. The board being ace-high in particular makes pocket kings through pocket nines a lot weaker, and that's an area where we're going to have way more of that stuff than our opponent is. 

And in particular, on top of that, the pair being an 8 through a 4 allows our opponent to have a lot of trips, particularly when they're defending the big blind. So if anything about this board changes, if the top card is lower, so if it's , , , etc., then now our overpairs, our pocket aces, kings, queens, etc., are very strong. 

And if the pair is towards either end of the deck, so if it's   , for example, well, now we have a lot of trip aces. If the board is   , we have a lot of trip kings. We have ace-king, we have king-queen, etc. If it's   , well, our opponent doesn't really have a deuce very often.   , same thing. 

But that 8 through 4 category, they have a lot of suited hands, they have a lot of hands that can make trips there, so generally speaking, we have to be a little bit more wary on that category, and that's going to contribute to making it so that our overall c-bet frequencies across the board are going to slightly decrease in these scenarios. So it's not a blanket principle there, but it is going to be relevant across a lot of spots. 

So to summarize our strategy a little bit here and give you a little bit of a guideline, what you'll observe here over these different categories is that they're all categories where our strong pocket pairs, as the preflop raiser, are getting a lot worse. They're not as willing to put a lot of money in. 

And in contrast, a lot of the hands that are willing to put a lot of money in are going to be 5-card hands. They're going to be sets, they're going to be full house combinations, they're going to be straights, they're going to be flushes, etc. So ultimately, what it comes down to is that the boards that are going to be most dangerous for us as the preflop raiser are going to be boards where our preflop pocket pairs are no longer as strong as they previously were. 

Any board where a strong pocket pair like   or   is not going to want to put a lot of money in is going to be a board that we're going to be checking a lot more often. And conversely, when our pocket pairs are stronger, when our pocket pairs are happier to put more money in, we're going to be very content to play more aggressively as a whole. And you can certainly see the trends across all of this data that even no matter what scenario you're in, whether you're in a cash game, a tournament spot, the boards where you have to slow down a lot are the ones where your strong pocket pairs aren't going to be able to play big pots at a high frequency. 

We did obviously see some outliers with the MTT ranges because of the nuances of those short stat scenarios, but hopefully everything was still evident for you in terms of why these particular board textures are the most dangerous board textures as a whole. So that's it for this topic. Thank you everybody for tuning in!