Thirdbarrel.com

I might 3-bet this hand vs. looser opener, but even with position, a suited ace and a decent kicker, I do not think I am ahead of his UTG open range. This hand is an important reminder that not all flushes are created equal. I don’t think his calling from the blinds is bad. But when he shoves the turn, what does he expect I will be calling with? I am not calling with a 5, so that leaves boats and bigger flushes. Now it’s true he could have a boat, but wouldn’t his hand be basically the nuts? If it is, then wouldn’t shoving still be bad? If he has a full house on the turn, he would have raised the flop. As it was, he was drawing dead to T high flushes and better.

Does not feel like a fist pump when it goes in but I end up being 2:1 favorite. I raise the flop because I don’t want a turn card to beat me or kill my action because it scares him. Also, the stacks are large enough that to get it in by the river, this is a clear flop raise. If he was looser but still aggressive, I might wait until the turn to raise, but I think on this board, that might still be worse than just raising the flop. I think he played it OK too. But I would like his play better if we started out w/ 100bb. My raise here is going to mostly be for value so I think he should take the odds and try to spike on the turn. Interested to know how others play it from his perspective.

Basically, this hand plays itself. He’s a loose player with a tight raising range. When he raises preflop, he has a big pair or AK every time and will never fold it with top pair or overpair.

You are playing a 50NL cash game and you raise to $2.00 in the highjack (2 off the button) and you have As7s. Let’s say you raise in this position with do this with 19% of your hands, which looks something like this:
22+,A7s+,K9s+,QTs+,JTs,ATo+,KTo+,QTo+,JTo. The small blind calls and has you covered. The big blind folds. So the pot size is $4.50 and you have $48 behind. The flop is Qh9d4c. Let’s say the small blind knows your range. What percentage of the time should you bet this flop? Answer: 100%. Why? Well, the answer is the solution to a math problem. But the short answer is if you do not bet, you do not have enough bluffs in your range when you do bet here and considering the pot size is small relative to the stacks, I would make it a big c-bet, about 90% of pot.

The factors that should affect your c-bet, turn and river bet sizes and frequencies, aside from player dependant variables, is stack-to-pot ratio, number of players in the hand and your preflop range (or perceived range). Notice I did not say your actual hand. In this case, your range is tight enough and the stack-to-pot ratio big enough that you need to bet as a bluff to protect your strong hands. Let’s say you have AA or a set of queens on this flop, you would bet for the purpose of building a pot and charging draws. Due to the size of the stacks, letting the flop get checked through would be criminal. To get all in by the river, you would need to bet about 90.8% of the pot on each street ($4.10 on the flop, $11.50 on the turn and shove $32.40 on the river into a $35.70 pot. I am assuming that 4% of your 19% range can be bet for value on each street. This is why if you are raising 35% of your hands on the button, I would say should bet the flop considerably less than 100% of the time. You just have a hand that is too weak on average to bet three streets.

The wider your range gets and the bigger the pot gets, you should be making smaller and less frequent bets on average. Keeping this in mind, you should be able to build a coherent strategy, one that links your betting frequencies and sizes with your range and the size of the pot and effective stacks. This will allow you to balance your range over multiple streets, having a larger portion of your bets on later streets made with value hands. In the example above, you would, based on the range I defined, have a value hand only 21% of the time when you c-bet. But you can afford to have more bluffs on the flop because the bets are smaller, the stacks are larger. You are using leverage by threatening larger bets. In the above example, your turn bluffs should be about 54% of the time. That’s right, based on the variables in that hand, when you bet $11.50 on the turn, you should be bluffing more than half the time. This is why you should fold small pairs unimproved on wet boards out of position after calling someone’s preflop raise. If they are a competent player, they will be able to semi-bluff many turns and your flop call just becomes passive dead money that you are forced to abandon on the turn. Also, on boards like the one above, they have a lot more equity than you think when they do bet the flop.

It’s obvious you want to select turn bluffs that have a combination of pot equity and fold equity (semi-bluffs for example). On the river, again based on the problem posed above, you will be betting for value 68% of the time. Since you will be offering your opponent 2.1:1 odds so he cannot exploit you because the odds against your bluffing are equal to his pot odds. Notice how 4 of 5 hands on the flop were bluffs and less than 1 of 3 were bluffs on the river. This is related to the concept Ed Miller refers to as forcing your opponent to “run the gauntlet” of bigger and bigger bets where you just tighten the screws with more value hands as the bets get bigger.

Well I am starting over with my blog after sometone hacked my site. That’s right, I go to thirdbarrel.com (my site) and it looks totally different with some hotmail address. My brother who is very knowledgeable about computers told me if I e-mail the perp it may not be a valid e-mail and I might end up with a ton of spam. Canned meat is just not my thing so the only other alternative is to start over.  Speaking of which, since I started over in poker after cashing out last year following a 28 buy-in downswing resulting from horrible play on my part at 25NL. Well I am happy to say that things are much better. I reloaded and have worked it up to $2,040 playing 10NL and now 25NL. On my new laptop, I have a graph showing the last 27 days ant 25NL. As for advice that I could give based on experience. Have clear goals whenever you start over in anything. They keep you both focused and give you a measurement of success. Cheers.

9/6/09 - 10/4/09