Meat And Potatoes Real Life Good Question

[David Sklansky]

"All this math is crazy. What ever happened to playing the player"

Your second sentence is nonsensical. Because the question IS playing the player. But I didn't want precise math. That's why I said "about". My point here was to show how a player who usually has what he is representing, but sometimes doesn't, can make your decisions so tough that, out of position, a starting hand that is a definite favorite to be best is still in a lot of trouble. EVEN IF THE TRICKINESS OF THE OTHER PLAYER IS TOTALY, UNCREATIVELY, ALGORITHMIC.

[bugman68]

In my previous post, I answered your question as a positional question and not as a math question. I think I even said I dont take math into the equation much on this one. I just think since most of your questions are math oriented, people answered it that way.

[catlover]

A couple of things. First of all, a quick n dirty calculation shows that if we put in a big reraise, our EV for the hand is roughly -$275. (Basically, if our opponent pushes, pot odds combined with the fact that 1/4 of the time he has AKs will force us to call. Now we are giving up $2200ish vs. aces, but win 1100ish vs. AKs. In addition we have the $500 win against the other hands. Do the math on the whole thing and it comes out to roughly -$275.) If we fold, our EV for the hand is -$100, so folding is better than reraising.

This leaves the question of calling. The postflop issues are not at all easy. For instance if your opponent has AA, and you call, a queen might flop, which would probably save you a lot of money. What if you announced ahead of time that you would always flat call such reraises with AA-KK, AKs, half the time with QQ, and occasionally with something else? Now your range is slightly tighter than your opponents, but you are out of position. It is very unclear to me who would have the equity advantage postflop in that scenario.

One thing about this whole scenario bugs me. If folding KK is better than playing it, then our opponent should be reraising with goofy hands more than 10% of the time! Because basically what this whole thing is saying is that all we can play against a reraise is AA (and possibly AKs, but that is an even more difficult calculation). By reraising, our opponent is risking $500 to win $125, and we will have AA less than 1/5 of the time. So as long as there aren't a lot of people behind him, our opponent should do fine putting in this reraise with (say) A3s, because usually we won't have AA -- and we will fold.

The reason this bugs me is that our opponent was described as a "good" player. And yet these admittedly quick calculations strongly suggest his play is not correct.

[ImWeakTight@UCLA]

can someone stop caseacej from posting is anybody besides me noticing that hes saying to fold kk here

[catlover]

The answer is to buy into the game for less. If our stack were only $1000, we wouldn't be in all this trouble would we?

This may appear to be toung in cheek, but I am serious.

[shawny boy]

Great post. There was another post on this board from a live game where a guy put a move on KK with an all-in reraise with A[img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img] 4[img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img] for basically this reason. He put him on KK, read him to fold anything but AA and even if he did call he figured to have 30% equity in the hand.

[Bill King]

i absolutely agree and i dont think you can position yourself to deal with the many possibilities post flop.. i like to get a hand like KK overwith preflop facing an aggressive raise.

so if it were me i would probably bump it to $2k. he folds.. great. he calls.. probably a good thing. he pushes the rest in.. now im worried

[FreakDaddy]

I'm not a big fan of "wind tunnel" answers. You can't come too close to answering this question correctly into you factor in a few more important variables. 1) (and most important) how does you opponent view your play? 2) How have you been playing this session? 3) How aggresive/tricky is your opponent?

How much are you going to learn from this example unless you factor these elements in? Just curious really. To me it seems fairly pointless. If I'm missing something, PLEASE expand.

[CaseAceJ]

Well the reason he said equal stacks was to make the decision tough. If you only have $1000 then you can either push it in or try to trap. I wouldnt consider folding unless you know the player well enough. While everybodys doing the math on this no one asked the real question. What is my image to the raiser? If I play losse agressive he might reraise me with alot of hands. The great thing about this game is their are so many varibles, and there is never one right answer.

[David Sklansky]

"I'm not a big fan of "wind tunnel" answers."

I am. On the other hand applying wind tunnel answers to real life is a specialty of mine. Perhaps there should be greater discussion about this subject in general.