[Todd Terry]

[ QUOTE ]
Curtains, what do you mean/why with:

"I'm pretty certain that from a theoretical standpoint you should be raising that hand here."

I fold AJ (and 77 too) utg at a full table with these stacks and dont really feel bad about it.

[/ QUOTE ]

I'll give my answer to this, I'm pretty sure curtains and I are on the same page. Assuming that you're raising with AJo and folding if raised (ignoring calls for the time being), you are risking 3000 to pick up the 2400 in blinds and antes, so you need to succeed 55.5% of the time or more to be +cEV. If you assume the rest of the table is giving your UTG raise respect and jamming {99+,AQ+}, then the rest of the table is going to fold a whopping 69.7% of the time, making raising with AJo nicely profitable.

With 87s or 77, the rest of the table is going to fold with the same jamming range 63.3% of the time -- as Curtains said above, having an A is key here because it makes your opponents less likely to have hands they can jam with.

Additionally, if you get called, AJo still has some value.

That's looking at it on a single hand basis, there are additional metagame/game theory reasons to be raise/folding a fair amount of the time here UTG, only raising with hands that will call a jam when you're this deep makes your play too transparent and therefore suboptimal, in that you will be much less likely to get action on your big hands if you haven't shown that you are opening with a sufficiently wide range UTG.

Happy birthday.