A pair is always a welcome guest in a player’s pocket as it gives him a variety of options to generate value. If your pair is a high one (like JJ, QQ, KK, or AA), your course of action is pretty simple. If you manage to get someone to call your all-in on anything weaker than that, you’ll have succeeded.

Sometimes it’s wiser to slow play your high pocket pair, but you should be aware that whenever you give your opponents free cards, they run a pretty good chance to crack your pair.

If your pocket pair is a small one though, things get more complicated. A pair will seldom improve with the board because it has very few outs to hit a set, and completing a flush or a straight is also less likely.

Should you just muck your small pocket pairs then? Well, sometimes you may have to do that (especially when faced with a huge raise), but if possible, you should attempt to see a flop on it. The implied odds make playing such hands worthwhile in the long-run. What are implied odds?

Whenever you call the BB (or whatever else you have to call) to see the flop on a small pocket hand, you give up value because the immediate result of your move is a negative EV one. You make the call in hopes of catching a set on the flop, and most of the time you will not catch the flop, so the call will cost you money. The few times that you do catch your set though will more than make up for your losses and that’s where your implied odds enter the equation, making an apparently bad call a good one over the long-run.

With that in mind, what you need to seek are cheap flops. By minimizing the money you spend on seeing the flops that do not land you your set, you’ll maximize your overall winnings. Tight tables are excellent for set-mining as they will allow you to see many cheap flops.

Many of the online poker cash tables however are ultra-aggressive, which means you won’t exactly be able to sneak under the radar and give your low pair the implied odds they deserve. If you stick to limping under such circumstances, you’ll lose the value you would’ve gained through your set-farming, so obviously, a different approach is required.

The strategy you need to implement when faced with a low pocket pair dilemma at a very aggressive table is to turn on your preflop aggression level. That’s right, you need to put more money into an apparently bad call. Why is that? By raising preflop, you’ll knock some of the players out of the hand early on, thus increasing your hand’s odds.

If you happen to hit your set, you’ll already have a nicely built-up pot on your hands, and if you miss it, well in that case you’ll still have good old poker playing to fall back on.

Firing out a second bullet against a hesitant opposition may well win you the pot, but if you get called, your bluff will still just be a semi-bluff because you still have a chance to make your set both on the turn and the river. Make sure you do not commit the grievous mistake of chasing after your set though. Your final hand is about 70% made on the flop, so there’s not really much you can do after that.

Regardless of how you decide to approach the pocket pair matter, always play on a rakeback deal. The best rakeback deals will give you money back on every real money hand that you play, and that is extremely profitable, especially when it comes to cash games.