Alan Goehring on min raising - do you agree?

[GeniusToad]

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Problem in my home games was nobody was ever smart enough to reraise when they did have strong hands; so you couldn't put anyone on a hand.. Most would see the flop with almost any two cards w/a large range of bets .. Of course you couldn't talk these guys into playing for anything over 5 bucks too..Meh.

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yes, this is more of an advanced to expert level tourney strategy that isn't suggested for most home or online games. at leats imo.

[DLizzle]

ok, I'll try to make my point again. Do not tell me that it's wrong because of all the reasons just stated. I KNOW. that is not the point. It's a theoretical point that I don't even actually use. I raise to 3xbb preflop. I understand that a 2xbb raise gives the blinds great odds to call, and that given what I said before it is impossible to make an efficient raise preflop by my standards. That was a very good point. Kind of stopped me in my tracks, but then got me thinking again.

What is the purpose of the preflop raise? In my personal opinion, it shouldn't be to take down the blinds. In tournaments I have often raised to steal the blinds with weak hands but I'm trying to stop. I've thought about it and this approach doesn't work for me. I steal when I need the blinds or else I'm making value bets.

Look at it from the perspective of what you are winning. A 3xbb raise risks 3bb to win 1.5 if everyone folds. That is what I mean by inefficient. So then that makes me think you don't want everyone to fold when you make a preflop raise, so why not a minraise? There are two reasons to make a larger raise, for which I have answers to.

The first is that you may want to build a pot. This is easy to take care of, in tournaments you don't really want to build pots preflop, pot control is extremely important. A 2xbb raise works better in this way than a 3xbb raise.

Second, you want to thin the field. For this reason, I think that a minraise would only be beneficial from fairly late position. A minraise from EP will often be called by many players, and this makes post flop play difficult.

I hope you got this so that I won't have to go over it again, because I obviously suck at explaining. I'm not saying we should all switch to minraising maniacs, just trying to provide a theoretical position to the topic of the thread.

[andre006]

with the kinda range he's got i think he 's better keeping the pot small

[bobby rooney]

I understand Alan's min-raising in the early deep-stacked stages of a tourney. It's similar to why Doyle recommends limping with a lot of hands in deep money cash games. Basically deep-stacked poker is a postflop game, and though you sacrifice a bit of pre-flop equity on your big hands, you make up for that by being able to use deception as your preflop raise range is larger so it's harder for your opponents to put you on a specific holding and thus easier for them to make mistakes later in the hand. For a great post-flop player, especially in a stage of the tourney where most players are in over there heads, it makes sense to postpone the play till after the flop as much as possible.

What I don't get is how his min-raising strategy works later in the tourney when the average stack gets really small compared to the blinds. He didn't say that minraising was something he only did early in the tournament, but that 90 percent of his raises throughout the tournament were minraises and a few to 2.5BB. Can somebody enlighten me on the merits of this strategy later in the tourney? The only one I can think of is that any time you pick up the blinds and antes you can be sure at least one of your opponents has made a mistake.