Thought about this a bit more. Winning 300BB in one hand doesn’t require just holding a strong hand, it requires the other player also holding a strong hand, that they’re willing to go in for the big scire, too. Or else fooling them into making a colossal mistake.
So, adding to the improbable situation of winning the occasional hand with 63s, in order to be profitable, when it does win, it needs to win big, offsetting the many times it will lose, when it must lose small. Well, supposing you hit a winner, and you can only win a small pot with it. How often would an opponent shove on you with a baby full house, flush, or straight? If you can only get them for 10BB on average, is it still worth it to play such a hand? Can’t you win just as many chips with top cards?
I actually really like this down-bet. Personally, I probably would have gone even a touch smaller, closer to 25% pot.
The board is fairly dry. What 2’s or 3’s will the big blind have that they’d choose to call instead of fold OOP? I’d play A4 or A5 as a 3-bet from the big blind, given stack depth and how wide the cutoff will be opening, so removing those gutshots from his flatting range would make it more difficult for him to have high-equity or decent bluffing hands. Pretty much the only “connected” hands that could lead to check-raises or dangerous draws are 45 or 46. Further, since the cutoff opened and the big blind merely flatted, the cutoff will have all of the overpairs and broadway hands in his range, while the big blind’s range is much weaker. Considering the big blind will be playing all future streets out of position as well, it’ll be harder for him to realize his equity if he does hit turns/rivers that improve his hand.
As a result, with both a range advantage and position advantage, I’m a fan of c-betting pretty much my entire range, whether or not they’ve connected with the board. When you’re betting with all of your hands, you need to bet small to avoid getting punished when your opponent does happen to wake up with a 3. You’ll want to make it awkward for him to continue when they just have random overcards, but will also want to get value when they do have a drawing hand like 45, 46, or 56. A small-ish continuation bet like 25% is good for that.
Any time you win chips on average in a cash game, it’s worth it to play that hand. Usually that requires building a pot on early streets, rather than the typical play you see at lower levels (passive play early, then going crazy on the river when you make your hand, hoping your opponent gets coolered).
Generally, with increasing stack depth, you’ll see wider open ranges, more 3-betting and 4-betting, but might also see paradoxically fewer open-jams (or 5±bets). Super-strong hands like AA won’t be unhappy getting it in preflop when hundreds of blinds deep, but will want to build in wider 4-bet ranges to better disguise the strength of their hand - or get away from the hand in the chance of a very connected and/or monotone board.
I mean if your average pot won with 63 is only 10BB, and then you have to factor that more than half the time, you’re losing with these cards, does that 10BB average pot win still outweigh the several losses offsetting it? How do you think you can get someone to shove on you every time you hit a monster with 63s, just because you’re on a 300BB stack, doesn’t mean you’re going to win 300BB with this hand any time it wins, right? Your opponent also needs a deep stack, and then they need to be confident in whatever they’re holding enough to put in the middle.
Averaging 10 bb’s per hand is HUGE. This is more than just about the chance of winning a huge pot. It’s about being in position while deep stacked at a short handed table where your ability to put max pressure on your opponents is magnified. We’re in LP 40% of the time 5 handed which is a huge advantage that we must capitalize on. Forget the 63s for second, BB is going to have a top 20% hand 1 out 5 times and that hand is only going to hit flops 50% (rough estimate off the top of my head) of the time. When they’re playing too tight we have to constantly apply pressure that makes them uncomfortable and eventually trips them up into these kinds of mistakes. Have you ever been at a table where the guy on your constantly raised your limps, 3! your opens, c-bet relentlessly, bombed turns and rivers when all you could was the normal marginal hand? You just want to punish him after an hour if you could just make a good hand. More than that you want to stack and make him go away. Then every time you tried to trap him or you finally got a good hand to get him with he just folded with barely a scratch. Until finally, after all this punishment you’ve had to endure you finally got him. You have the big hand and he’s not folding, you caught him without a bluff. Then you put all your chips and he has the nuts. That’s what we do to people. 63s is why they over bet jam rivers with the 4th and 5th best hands. Then they leave wondering how the donkey gets so lucky. You’ll get him next time, his luck will run out.
One quick simple example. You can not cooler someone for 150 bb’s by cracking their AA if you have AA. On A86r you have AK it’s much less likely that they have it so how are you going to get their chips in the middle?
I wouldn’t open this hand if I wasn’t absolutely confident that I can win the pot well over 50% of the time. I don’t need to stack my opponent for 300 bb’s to play this hand in this spot profitably, it’s just an added incentive and a pretty damned good one. When we talk about being 300 bb’s deep we’re referring to effective stacks which the effective stacks are always equal to the smallest stack involved in the hand. So if we’re 300 bb’s deep V could have 300 bb’s and I could have 1000 bb’s. We can still only play for the 300 he has.
Is buying a lottery ticket a good idea? Some guy showed me a winning lottery ticket, and showed me the receipt. He won $100,000,000. And the ticket only cost $1!
I went out and bought 1000 lottery tickets. So should I just buy the Grand Canyon to store my money? On credit, of course, I don’t have the money yet.
Well, my first lottery ticket didn’t come through. The second one didn’t either. The third ticket, every number was off by 1, so I was very close. To my surprise the lottery commission said this didn’t win anything. But my FOURTH ticket, ho ho! It won $10.
So what I’m saying is, you get a shove into your boat and get a big pile of chips with 63s. HOW OFTEN DOES THAT happen? Not very.
More likely:
You bet, steal the blinds preflop sometimes. +1.5BB, Like winning $2 with a $1 lottery ticket.
You get called, flop misses you, your opponent bets, you drop the hand. Like reinvesting that $2 win into another two lottery tickets, and both lose.
you hit something, low pair, a draw that misses, and put more chips in, but ultimately lose the pot. Like buying $1000 lottery tickets because this weekend the jackpot is up to $500M. But you still lose.
you win $100. Now you can play the lottery for two years every week and never win again, and still break even.
but once in a while, someone manages to win $100M on their $1 ticket.
So you gotta make plays like this, right? It’s a mandatory call. You can count on a few times hitting the $2 prize, making it reasonable to play, and once in a while you’ll hit the $100 prize, and you’ve seen on the news someone the next town over won $50M last week.
Lottery’s can’t be beat because too much money is removed from the prize pool. But hey $2, if it’s insignificant to you might be worth the shot in the dark at $330M
" I don’t need to stack my opponent for 300 bb’s to play this hand in this spot profitably"
Doesn’t that contradict what you said earlier, about deep stacks making this play reasonable? Potentially large pots do not pay the bills, actually large pots do, don’t they?
Better odds that the lottery, I guess, but you’re still not winning better than half the time.
Except if you’re counting stolen blind hands, which of course we should be counting those. If you get half of those, and win 45% of the hands when you get called, I guess it can be profitable. In the long run it is probably a lot of small pots, occasionally a big one, and you’re losing the big one half the time or more.
When you do get called, how do you advise playing a missed flop? Do you c-bet? Or put the brakes on?
Post the where I contradict this one. I have never said that the incentive of winning a big pot is the only reason to play it. I have stayed weak fish on the button, weak player in the small blind, tight aggressive player in the big blind who is decent but mostly face up and definitely face up when he puts in the rare 3!. I have also stated that playing in position is profitable and since we’re 5 handed 40% of your hands you’ll be in a blind and 40% you’ll be in an LP spot. I don’t know how involved you are in ring games, to my knowledge from the many HH’s of yours posted in these forums that I’ve read through you play mostly single table SnG’s. These aren’t the game. I don’t know what more to say. Playing this hand under these circumstances is +EV, not just for me but most players and the fact that most players through this in the muck highlights why it is mandatory to play and why aggression is so effective.
This calculator has absolutely no use in this conversation. All this tells you is if all the chips go in pre flop and both players are guaranteed to see all 5 cards, this how much they should expect to win.
When I open 2.5 bb and V calls we have 5.5 bb’s in the pot with 200 bb’s effective back. In this scenario the odds calculator would tell you 6s3s is 83% favorite. And it’s really slightly better than that as I let you keep the back door flush draw which V did not have as his 54 was off suit.
You just can’t take these hand strengths in a vacuum. There is a lot of poker that happens post flop.
I would be mixing the wheel A’s between calls and 3!, however I don’t think this villain is ever 3! these combos. Which IMO, and yours, is a mistake.
This is probably the most important message that players need to grasp. Position is the biggest weapon we have in NLHE, again my opinion.
Bingo Bango Bongo… I’m 100% range c-betting this flop. ALWAYS, 100%
+EV is profitable and assuming you’re properly bank rolled for the stakes you’re playing these +EV spots should never be passed up on. +1 for this comment @WannabeCoder.
The flop. 3d 3h 2c makes 6s3s an 83% favorite over 5c4c. The thing is that every decision Point is separate from every other decision in the sense that no matter what the last thing you did was, now your goal is to make the MOST +EV decision because that is what’s most profitable. Now we don’t discount decisions made in the hand before we got to this point, we still use them for information in narrowing our opponents holdings. Example is a common fallacy that many players go by is that is they call the turn with a made hand they have to call the river if it’s a brick because the relative strength of the board didn’t change so we got no more information. Well this just isn’t true, we got additional information by our opponent continuing to bet and we can use that to further narrow range and make good folds.
Oh, ok, yes on the flop, it hit you well. No doubt it was great to be in the hand at that point. I thought you were saying that the raise plus your stack size changed the odds to 83% somehow, which made no sense.
I’ll tell you, lately every time I get a couple of face cards, it seems like I completely miss the flop, or land an inside Broadway draw,which keeps me in the hand and of course misses. And when I do hit the flop with a strong Ace, I get beat by a weak Ace who paired their rag card. I don’t posses the skill to make the board match my holding, lol. And half time when I’m cold, I’ll watch my unplayable garbage cards flop monsters. I guess I will try playing these from position and see if I can do well with them.
You’re correct that I am playing tournaments. I haven’t sat at a ring table for many months. With rising blinds it does make a difference, and stealing from position is a necessary tactic. But it’s a bit harder to be wrong, because it is not about +EV in the long run, it’s about winning THIS hand, and finishing in the money. I can’t just “make it back later” if I get eliminated, so I’m a little more careful about raising the blind from sb or late position when the table folds around. But 3-4 handed with the blinds high, it can absolutely make all the difference, especially if you’re raising your SB, and the guy to your right is folding theirs.
Sorry if my tourney stuff sidetracked the accountant’s high stakes ring thread. That scene is the lab that’s cranking out the weapons at the pointy end of the new poker revolution. Last I heard, they were going to somehow transport the hand to their lab and feed it to Fropzirra or whatever, and we were kinda waiting for it to belch forth some perfect numbers. I asked about the smaller bets in the lull because it’s not the way I would play it in a tournament and I think it’s interesting to look at differences. I’m glad that I did.
The bit about the downbet making it cheaper so you could bluff more is new to me. I’ll have to stuff that one into my skull and chew on it for awhile. It’s very interesting. Maybe that’s something I can use, Thanks for answering.
Wanting to keep someone around to punish them is pure ring. Yeah, if you can beat a guy you want him to reload and give you those chips too. And maybe he will reload lots of times and give you fat stacks. As a side note: that whole post about just wanting to whupp on a guy was just brilliant! I think that was some of your best writing yet.
In tournaments, I need to punish people and have them be gone. The tourney will drop half the field in the first 45 minutes, and all that time I’m playing musical chairs with a ton of people I never saw before. I don’t get 75 hands to watch a fella, I need to do that in 8 or 10 hands, because half the field will leave with 0 chips, and I want to at least double up in this time to stay ahead of the average stack.
So yeah, it’s a different game as Dayman said right up top.I like medium-ish MTTs, so that’s what I write about. A lot of the ring stuff does translate to tournament play, though not always directly. Talking about things like this helps me sort stuff out. Thanks.
I meant this thread to highlight the importance in not only using your opponents image to make decisions but keeping in mind your own image as he/she may perceive it. They are both equally as important, this holds true for tournaments as well as ring games. All good.
Your descriptive writing is the best on these forums. If we had a writing tournament I would stake you. I may have said something about plugging ranges into Flopzilla or Flop Falcon, don’t remember for sure. I am however relegated to my phone as I’m in the middle of a very busy two weeks of work so I’m not sure when I’ll have a chance. Could be the weekend.
I use down betting probably slightly more in tournaments. Because of the increasing blind levels you’re really incentivized to play more aggressive poker. You don’t have time to sit and wait for hands, sometimes you just have to get in there and Hulk smash some fools. That being said a lot of bad tournament players here and live play the exact opposite and are way too protective of their stacks and are over folding a ton. Anytime you’re at a table where they are over folding you should be over bluffing and smaller bet sizes gives a better price and thus more bluff opportunities. I encourage you to experiment with down betting in some tournaments and see for yourself. One last thing, when you get such a good price on your flop bluffs and pick up equity on the turn, you can size up your turn bets and really threaten stacks.
Thank you very much. Funny though, I’ve not proof read a lot of these post and I read back through a couple and find I’m omitting some key words, nothing so bad the content can not be understood.
especially the earlier levels, Replay does offer a few pretty decent tournament structures. Cheers man, I appreciate all of your forum content and I am pleased that you take the time to check mine out and involve yourself in the discussion. Your flat Earth stuff though, I have to read a few times before moving to the next post. I’m still a little behind there. You can thank @JuiceeLoot as well for me when you see her
