I’m glad you think so too. 
It’s tough when that happens. You have the highest trips possible with the current board, and with the two on the board looking scary for anyone not holding a 7, you don’t want to scare off the fish, so the move a lot of players will make is to:
- Check, thinking to disguise the strength of their hand, and hope the opponent bets with an inferior hand, possibly an under pair with the pair on the board, or
- Bet lightly, to look like a weak attempt to steal the pot, and maybe induce a raise, or at least get a call and grow the pot for the next street.
But sometimes, though, you may wand to play the trips aggressively, and take the pot down. Especially if you’re last to act in the hand, and someone else has bet it, it might be better to raise them off, or if you can’t get them to fold, at least you’ll take a bigger chunk out of them at the river if you do win. If you’re representing 3 of a Kind with your raise, 2 pair is smart to fold. That doesn’t mean they always will, and sometimes when they don’t they may beat you, but a lot of the time it means they’re losing. Any odds calculator will tell you this, but it won’t tell you the outcome of the hand that you’re in ahead of time. It can only tell you the odds.
Unless you have some additional information that puts your opponent on a likely pocket pair themselves (such as a big raise preflop, or if they sustain a call to a reasonable-sized bet with the board paired) then you don’t really know what you have. Sure, it looks good, and a lot of times it is good, even with an over card on the board that fills a pair for just about any opponent’s ranges. In fact that’s the kind of hand you want: Someone paired a King or an Ace, while you’re holding trip 7s.
Just pray they don’t fill out. Two pair doesn’t draw to a full house as often as three of a kind does, but if you have trips with a pair on the board, that pair will turn another player’s set into a full house, and that’s a deadly trap for most of us, unless we have the kind of sense to know when trips isn’t good enough. I’ve taken out opponents many times where I hit a set, they had trips from a pair on the board, and thought they were invincible, and ran right into my boat. There’s a reason sets are much more desirable than trips, and that’s it. They are more hidden, and a pair on the board can help everyone, not just you.
That’s kinda what I had going on last Tuesday when I started this thread. I was so astounded by the way these hands kept breaking against me that I went back through my history and documented it here, and then just kept adding to it as the night went on and continued to deliver improbable situations, the deck setting me up with good cards and then turning everything sour for me by the river, missing flops entirely, running into wrong-suited flops, and suck-out situations, again and again and again, until I’d lost about 9 games in a row, many of them on promising hands where I reasonably should have expected to win most of them.
Indeed, I think about it, and my next thought is “what would the motive be? what would they have to gain by it?” Maybe nothing. But I’m sure it’d be a much more serious crime to do it on a pay site and win real money through cheating. Cheaters do get caught on pay sites from time to time, usually it’s collusion rather than hacking. But a lot of hackers will try to hack something just because it’s there, and you don’t really need a lot of motive to do it then.
I don’t watch anyone that closely to see what their bankroll growth is like over time. 300M/month is a LOT of chips, and if it’s a regular, timed thing, and always the same amount, that would indicate most likely someone buying a lot of chips, but the amount of money that would be required to do so… Maybe if they’re the owner of the site, or an angel investor buying chips as a way to keep the site afloat operationally. But if they’re actually winning that through play, then no, I don’t have any explanation. Players, good or bad, should have some variability, ups and downs, in their game. That’s just the nature of the game.
The thing with KK, it’s about 80% to win against any two cards, but against Ax it’s only about 67% to win.
If you’re really getting beat 9/10 of the time when someone calls you and you go to the river and you see the Ace, then there’s something wrong about that. But you are going to lose with KK vs Ax more than the expected 20% of the time. The difference between 1/3 and 1/5 might feel more like 9/10 if you’re very sensitive to losing what’s supposed to be one of your best hands.
It’s easy for those beats to stick in your head, painful memories are how we learn from mistakes afterall, and those memories will seem bigger than the memories where the hand goes as expected and you win, it’s almost a non-event because the outcome is exactly what you expected, and while it’s pleasant and you may win a lot of chips, you’re not going to remember it as well.
But when you play KK by playing an all-in preflop shove with it, you also have to consider every hand you folded out by making that move. Who’s calling shoves? It’s going to be AA, AK, AQ, AJ… maybe some ill-advised AT-, and pairs like AA-99, depending on how desperate the player is to double up. The hands most likely to have a better than average chance of winning, in other words.
But then there’s also hands like JT or 89, which might well hit a lucky two pair while your monster pair fails to improve to anything, or they’ll hit a straight with it, or maybe a flush… An idiot might call once and get lucky their very first time with it, and remember that and play it a dozen more times and lose with it every time, but they’ll still keep playing it because it’s their “lucky hand”…
Stick with the numbers, that’s where the luck is, though.
There’s lots and lots of ways to get beat with just a pair, even a great big one.
Players who shove too much, get beat too much.
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