Drawing hands are the bread and butter of looser player’s game style. The sheer fact that straights and flushes general take a pot is a huge enticement for any player to play drawing hands. There is two types of drawing hands, drawing for a straight or drawing for a flush. Flush being the rarer of the two statistically speaking it is also the better hand and often represents the nuts in many hands of poker. Playing these often low cards that could give you these bigger hands innately has larger amount of risk involved and that risk has to be noted.
How should you play connectors? Well statistically the best connectors to play are those that are in order, consecutively, so like 5-6 or 10-J. Simply because it is statistically more probable than trying to get a straight with say J-6. If you had J-6 you need to get three specific cards to get your straight and out of the five total cards you are going to get, those odds are not good. Even worse are the muck cards that you should never play and those are cards like 9-2 or something as equally unplayable. Please note though those hands become worth a lot more when they are suited as you can go for flush draws (below).
However, back to straight draws specifically a player should always try to play those consecutive card hands. A good player should also realize that the best connectors are 5-6, 6-7, 7-8, 8-9, and 9-10. You may ask why this is? Well the fact of the matter is those six hands have the most ways to achieve a straight out of any connecting hands you could get dealt, if you look a the hands and reason it out its because for example on 5-6 you could have on the table A-2-3-4-Q and have a low-end straight or you could have the other extreme, a high-end straight, and have 7-8-9-10-A. Or a more common one which might be something along the lines of 3-4-7-10-Q; now if you take that into account the combinations with those above five card sets; it makes them the best possible connectors.
Flushes are just impressive, and everyone wants to hit one and it makes all pre-flop hands that are suited that much more potent just because you have the option of a flush with only three more same suited cards. Playing these cards, especially when they are low cards that are not even good connectors, like 6-9 of hearts; really comes down to the issue of how loose a player you are. Flushes are rare and statistically hard to complete but when you do they can often lead to huge pots that you can only reap if you stick with it. Now it is an easy decision whether to play A-K suited but whether or not to play 10-4 suited and to help you make that decision you should consider your pot and table as well as your own personal image. Perhaps, you have been playing tight and you can afford to bluff and represent a better hand and take the opportunity to play a low suited hand. A play like this, if you win is always great whether you bluffed them out or you take it to the river and bring into the pot a ton of chips. It is also good if you fold or just lose/check through to the end or something because it can help you trap other players later on and help loosen up your image at the table, since they may perceive you to be worse than you will let on.
