[Pokey]

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Well you have to re-raise from the blinds with hands other than your BPP. AQ (sometimes) is a good candidate. You dominate a large proportion of his range. You hit top pair top/good kicker 30% of the time. You shouldn't mind going to the felt with those hands, with so much of your stack in preflop.

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So, we shouldn't mind stacking ourselves with these speculative hands because we're pot-committed preflop, but we should reraise preflop in order to pot-commit ourselves postflop? This line of reasoning strikes me as circular, risky, and typically unprofitable.

Think of it this way: if we smooth call against this aggressive opponent and check to him on the flop every time, he's going to c-bet, and his c-bet would be about as large as our preflop raise. Now, which is better: committing that money to the pot preflop when we know very little about our hand other than that it is speculative, or committing that money POST-flop when we know we've got something worth chasing?

Similar line of reasoning: our preflop raise knocks out some of the more speculative hands that we fare VERY well against (moreso with AQo than with 33, here), whereas those hands will commit the same amount of money just about 100% of the time on the flop if checked to. Is it better to let our opponent escape with a $3.50 loss when he's got A4o, or would we rather get him to spend $10 on the same hand by letting him c-bet uselessly?

We're not getting all the money into the pot preflop (well, we'd BETTER not be -- that would be a huge mistake), so we're going to have to play our hand postflop. Against a savvy and aggressive opponent who has position, I'd rather have as little money in the middle as possible before I have to decide if I want to go to war.

I guess I'm still not convinced of the efficacy of reraising preflop OOP with speculative hands, especially heads-up against smart and aggressive opponents.