We found this article in the Delaware County Daily Times, where the author warns against slowplaying your "monster hands" at the table. He relays this hand:

"With the blinds having been raised to 75-150 with a 25-chip ante, I was in the big blind with Q-K suited – a strong starting hand, particularly when the only two players to act before me were my fellow large stacks, both of whom only called. I decided I wanted to feign weakness by casually checking when the option to raise came my way…

The flop came out K-Q-5 … Yahtzee! I was first to act, but I coolly checked the hand, praying one of my fellow players either caught a piece of the flop, or would try to use position to bluff their way to the chips. Instead, both players – a young, solid player, and an older, wily gambling type – checked.

"The turn card was an Ace…"

After the jump, we’ll dissect the slowplay efforts here, and let you know where this guy went off the tracks… SLOWPLAY YOURSELF BROKE So what happened after that Ace fell on the turn? Back to the article:

"The turn card was an Ace. It made me slightly nervous, but my gut told me that if the other two players had a bullet, they were playing it, at best, with a kicker card of 10 or lower. Otherwise they would have raised before the flopv. The young player threw in a bet of 500 chips, which the older player next to him called. I made my move, raising the bet 2,000 chips, or slightly more than what was in the pot. The young player responded with "all-in."

"Clearly I had slowplayed myself into a mess. However, instead of taking a moment to think things over, I committed the mortal sin of acting out of self-loathing. I called, my opponent turned over 10-J suited, and after counting out the chips I went from great shape to a long walk to the parking garage."

Let’s take a look at the conditions that must be present for a slowplayed hand to be effective, cribbed from David Sklansky’s Theory of Poker:

"1. You must have a very strong hand.
2. The free card or cheap card you are allowing other players to get must have good possibilities of making them a second best hand.
3. That same free card must have little chance of making someone a better hand than yours or even giving that person a draw to a better hand than yours on the next round with sufficient odds to justify a call.
4. You must be sure you will drive other players out by showing aggression, but you have a good chance of winning a big pot if you don’t.
5. The pot must not yet be very large."

We see the mistakes of slowplaying all over the low limits online, and it’s invariably a violation of one of the first three conditions. The first condition, "You must have a very strong hand," is qualified by the adjective "very" for a reason. Two pair is pretty solid, but can be exposed easily, as we see in this case. Moving on to conditions two and three, if you’re going to give the table a free card, you’ve got to have a hand that can’t (or is extremely unlikely to) be beaten by the wrong card turning up. Not only that, but giving your opponents the right odds to chase a hand on the come with a runner-runner straight to crack your Aces is problematic as well. Ask yourself, "What cards could hit the board here that would give my opponent a better hand?" In this writer’s scenario, Ace, Jack and Ten would be three cards we wouldn’t want to see on the turn. While you might not want to get away from the hand, you would be forced to slow down further, minimizing your chance to win a big pot. Is there a hand you could have with a board of K-Q-5 rainbow that you could always successfully slowplay? No. While holding pocket Kings, Queens, or even Fives gives you a great chance to show down the best hand, any scare card on the turn (twelve of them either in the deck or in your opponent’s hand, so there’s twelve scare cards twice to come from the flop) should be sufficient enough to pull you off the slowplayed mess. The players who get their "monster hands" cracked on a slowplay usually get what they deserve. Unless you flop something nearly unbeatable, getting "tricky" by acting weak just gives everyone else a chance to catch and/or pass your hand by. So where’d our Delaware County guy go wrong? First, overvaluing two pair. It’s a nice hand, but on the flop it’s the fourth nuts, and to improve it you’re drawing to four outs (for the full house). Second, once that third card to the Broadway straight (Ace through Ten) fell, he could be beat by pocket Aces, any two-paired Ace (A-5, A-K, A-Q), any Jack-Ten, and the four hands that had him beat on the flop. And fourth? If you’re going to make a move with the tenth best possible hand, do not call off all your chips doing it. If you push, you put the pressure on. If you call, you’re just walking face first into the plate glass window, will look like a retard, and will only be drawing to four outs on the river. Good luck with that. Our advice on slowplaying is to know the Sklansky conditions, only break out the move when you’re sure it’s going to work (you flop a full house, opponent on an Ace-high flush draw), and don’t put yourself in a position to give away free cards that can beat you. Seriously, the players at lower limits are so god-awfully bad anyway that you don’t need a ton of deception in your game to take their money. Bludgeon them over the head with your monster hands, and you’ll almost always have one jackass calling you down to the river with third pair. Poker: Slowplaying a big hand is a dangerous ploy [Delaware County Daily Times] David Sklansky’s Theory of Poker [Amazon]