[baltostar]

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What's wrong with both players being uncertain about eachother's hands? If you raise the flop, he can narrow down your range pretty much and fold if he thinks you will stick by your top pair. You mentioned checking down if he elects to call your flop raise and that you might fold to a large turn/river bet if unimproved. What if Villain knows senses that based on reads? When he calls your flop raise, he has narrowed down your range a lot, and you know nothing about his hand. He could have a monster, but he could also be calling with any two cards, knowing he can exploit your tendency to fold later and drag a nice pot with a pure bluff.

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In practice, if they don't have a big pair or better they fold to the 3-bet/4-bet somewhere around 80-90% of the time. And if they do have the big pair and call the re-raise they just check it down unless it improves. Absolute bet size tends to speak first and loudest amongst competing logics.


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No-one can do this confidently, but based on reads and experience from similar situations, we can relate different holdings to different actions, and we are able to do it with good precision. Further action allows us to narrow down his hand range even more... But since you're under the assumption that "dynamic hand reading is vastly overvalued", I feel it's no use in trying to convince you into thinking the opposite.

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By calling his bets, you never gain enough information to either confidently move to take him off a better hand or confidently fold, and so you trap yourself into an incremental black hole. You have no other option but to let him control the action. You pay his price to find out at showdown if he had you beat on the flop and/or if he improved on turn, river.


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And why is it wrong to let Villain control the pot and continue putting chips without knowing what we have? If Villain has a hand that we beat, he is just as unlikely to improve as we are. Only thing is, we don't have to improve, because we have him beat.

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Wrong. If villain is behind, he is more likely to improve to a hand that beats us than ouselves in the mirror situation, as I laid-out above.

It is wrong to let villain control pot because it reduces, not increases, our expected avg win for being dealt KK. Your first job with a big PP is to go after the avg expected win, not wander down an incremental black hole.


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You said Bond et al can't see the forest for all the trees, I say it's the other way around. You are too [censored] obsessed with your I-have-already-won-my-expected-share-thinking that you can't see any other way to play than just raise the flop and end it right there. That line is utterly stupid. If you can gain more chips from your opponent by calling, of course you should do so. I don't think betgo posted this hand because he thought his flop play was wrong.

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It's not about "gaining more chips from your opponent". It's about maximizing avg expected chips won per chip risked.