Dave Lins Holdem article

[petricig]

While I do look the most of the ideas that Dave covered in raising pre-flop because you are given an advantage with your payoff in the future.
I don't quite understand his second exmaple in which he discusses how sometimes raising preflop can be a bad play because you want to knock out draws post flop with a bet.

Can anyone give me an examples of a situation where it would
be better to NOT raise preflop, so that postflop you can bet to knock out opponents on draws.

[scorer]

do you have a link to this article

[teajay]

[ QUOTE ]
do you have a link to this article

[/ QUOTE ]

http://www.twoplustwo.com/magazine/current/lin0706.html

[teajay]

I can't come up with an explicit example of when you should not raise PF and opt to force players out on the flop with bets and raises. Although, I am pretty sure a way of doing this (or at least from my understanding of the article) would be to find a set of hands that when plugged into software like PokerStove, one of them (presumably yours) has only a very small edge.

What I did want to say however was that I believe this concept is analogous to that of waiting until the turn to raise as described in SSH. For instance, Dave is claiming that sure, we may have a 2% equity edge on our opponents preflop and so we make money with every raise we put in but there is more to it. Once the flop comes down we have seen 3 of the 5 cards that are to come down and this can cause a HUGE change in our equity. If we flop a monster, or the board is relatively uncoordinated our edge may rise to 15% (posterior extraction method) in which case we will make way more money off of the bets and raises on the flop than we would have preflop. In this case, we are better off having waited.

Of course in practice all these numbers are estimates, and tough to compute so these concepts are hard to apply to hand histories and seem to be of more theoretical interest.

[arahant]

I've been looking for this sort of example, too. I've heard the concept bandied around a lot, but i haven't had the time to verify to myself that it makes sense, and to me it is not exactly intuitive. The crux of the issue isn't being able to induce a mistake later in the hand, but rather the relative value of the preflop mistakes and postflop mistakes.

It strikes me as quite difficult to quantify the relative size of the two 'mistakes', because of the huge number of scenarios post-flop. By raising good hands preflop, i can almost guarantee that my opponents are making a mistake (in the FTOP sense) by calling.

When playing the typical SSH type game, i do tend to follow the 'wait until turn to raise' line, but i also know that the real reason i'm doing it is because i hate the suckout. That is, i do it because i'm fundamentally a coward, not because i believe it maximizes my earn.

[opuslive]

QQ on the button or in the blinds with 5 callers. If you raise - its correct for everyone to call with the odds you offer them.

If you can raise on the button (or check raise from blinds) - you may be able to make it a mistake for others to call on the flop.

[davelin]

It's not quite so easy to determine which hands have only a "slight" advantage pre-flop (and thus want to keep the pot small) versus hands that have a more "significant" advantage pre-flop (and thus don't mind bloating the pot even if it means everyone has the odds to call). But maybe looking at it more mathematically will help.

When we don't raise hands that have an advantage pre-flop, we are giving up a certain equity profit. Some hands like my first example (let's say AKs) this profit is big and some hands (let's say ATo) isn't very big. So the question is this equity advantage bigger or smaller than the equity advantage we gain when a caller will fold post-flop (because the pot is small). So -

A) Equity profit given up pre-flop > Equity gained by folder post-flop
B) Equity profit given up pre-flop < Equity gained by folder post-flop

Case A is a clear raise pre-flop, case B may be a situation that we keep the pot small even if we have a small advantage pre-flop. Of course this brings up another point, if you are playing against opponents that never fold post-flop no matter the size of the pot, then raising pre-flop with all hands that have an equity advantage is probably correct.

[SlantNGo]

[ QUOTE ]
QQ on the button or in the blinds with 5 callers. If you raise - its correct for everyone to call with the odds you offer them.

If you can raise on the button (or check raise from blinds) - you may be able to make it a mistake for others to call on the flop.

[/ QUOTE ]

I disagree--QQ is too strong for this at most games. KQ on the Button after 4 limpers is a good example. You certainly have an edge but probably not much of one and bloating the pot is not in your interest because you're trying to make top pair and knock out a few others in the process.

[Bill King]

if you have aggressive opponents to your left and you're in relative early position, where you find many of your hands are being raised and re-raised already by them, you can make a limp re-raise which is effective on your image and value.

[Bill King]

with a hand like QQ you really could care less if everyone calls correctly. the hand is so big and has such good preflop and overpair strength that you want to build a big pot. you will flop an overpair way more times than you will have the flop come AKJ.