Can you Ace my quiz?

[AJFenix]

Hand 1 I would fold.

Hand 2 I would call.

Hand 3, I would reraise. Your hand fares well against his range, but he has position on you and initiative. Even though some of you may say that you aren't going to play this hand just to hit an A or Q when you call, you are going to end up folding the best hand a high % of the time, and occasionally trapping yourself when you do hit and he has a better concealed hand with his garbage. You are out of position, where its much harder to get information and extract value.

By reraising you give yourself that initiative, and you are forcing him to make a hand with the bulk of his range if he wants to continue. You will get him to fold the best hand postflop some of the time, but more importantly you aren't going to be doing the same nearly as much. You are also exploiting a weakness of many of these players, as they are going to be calling you too often preflop trying to outflop your "big pair", and then folding postflop when they miss, which they will the majority of the time. There is also merit to calling with a hand like AQ (but being more prone to reraising things like A4 or rags) because people will really overplay weaker hands , but against the players at these stakes I think you will show a bigger profit by reraising if you repeated this scenario over a good sample. They will still overplay dominated hands, and you retain the rest of the value that reraising has.

Hand 4, Reraise > fold > call. Not even kidding here. I understand that people love pocket pairs, and good things happen with pocket pairs, but the fact of the matter is, its very unlikely your opponent is going to have a good hand when you smack the flop yourself, given how wide his range is. The implied odds really aren't there, and you are leaking money by calling here vs someone with a wide range as once again you are going to be folding the best hand a lot (regardless of whether or not you think you aren't necessarily playing for set value, plus the fact that you can still end up folding the best hand after putting more money in, vs. an aggressive draw for example), and you won't be making enough money when you do hit to make up for it. You are also out of position, as was pointed out, it is much harder to extract value when you do hit your big hand, and OOP without initiative makes it much harder to win those small pots.

Your hand, on the other hand, rates very well vs his range when he is only seeing 3 cards. When you reraise, once again you have initiative, can get him to fold a better hand postflop , end up folding the best hand yourself far less, etc. You force him into making decisions, which means you are giving him a chance to make a mistake, which of course means you make money. Plus some of the time you will still hit your set, which will be nicely concealed, and will win a big pot vs. an overplaying downie.

[ValarMorghulis]

[ QUOTE ]
To everyone advocating reraising with ANY of these hands:

Position is king in SSNL. Why would you build a pot preflop and OOP with a speculative hand against a player who plays "an aggressive smart post-flop style"? You've got the odds to call in these situations, but to me these don't seem like reraising hands without position. A decent reraise would be bumping it to $10 to $12. Let's say we make it $10. I assume we're also planning to c-bet any flop, yeah? That's $15 more. We've now committed 1/4 of our stack with a highly speculative hand and with no idea where we stand. Someone who is aggressive and smart postflop could easily float us and steal a quarter of our stack on the turn, or slowplay us and take even more of our stack when they hit.

Being OOP sucks hot sweaty monkey balls. Given that we're going to be OOP against a smart AND aggressive opponent, I see no reason to bloat this pot with a speculative hand. If he were a total nimrod, raising would be more reasonable, especially with the AQ hands; as it stands, I'm really just wanting to see a flop before I start throwing in big fractions of my stack on these hands.

[/ QUOTE ]

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.

[Paul Thomson]

thanks AJ.

[Pokey]

[ QUOTE ]

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.

[/ QUOTE ]

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.

[sdfsdf]

fold
call
re-raise
re-raise/fold

im not a fan of cold-calling pre-flop if its going to be HU
i'll call in hand 2 because people are more likely to have overpairs when they raise UTG and they probably won't let them go when i make my set. re-raise in hands 3-4 to take control. hand 4 is useless imo if you dont re-raise, you won't be able to extract enough when you make your set to make up for the times you check fold to c-bets.

[ValarMorghulis]

Consider this. If opponent will call the re-raise and given that opponent will always CB the amount of the pot. If you check-raise allin on every flop and he only calls your check-raise allin with top pair or better then that is surely +EV.

You are raising for value, because you are so far ahead of his range.

Maybe it doesn't apply so much for SSNL, but for metagame reasons 3-betting someone who raises with such a large range is surely important.

[epdaws]

[ QUOTE ]
To everyone advocating reraising with ANY of these hands:

Position is king in SSNL. Why would you build a pot preflop and OOP with a speculative hand against a player who plays "an aggressive smart post-flop style"?

[/ QUOTE ]

You don't want to build a pot. You'd like to convince Villain you've got AA or KK and take it down. If he calls, you can evaluate at that point, but leading any flop is often good enough to take it down after re-raising preflop.

Flat calling out of position with an easily dominated hand like AQ is a recipe for disaster.

[Isura]

[ QUOTE ]

Flat calling out of position with an easily dominated hand like AQ is a recipe for disaster.

[/ QUOTE ]

Easily dominated?

[MyTurn2Raise]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

#1 is the most difficult IMO.

[/ QUOTE ]

H1 is by far the easiest. Fold this every single time against that range.

Btw, villain is a flipping nit.

[/ QUOTE ]

yep...I match the VIllian's standards (actually I'm 99+, AQ+) in that position and I love it when AQ takes a flop with me

[ValarMorghulis]

Based on responses here, it looks like there is no hand that some people will call in the BB against a loose preflop raiser. (Either reraise or fold?) Is this true? If not, what hands would you call with.