[curtains]

in response to craigthedeac:

There are lots of "theroetically best" ways to play the hand. No one involved in the hand was close to them at any point however, so it's not really too relevant when trying to figure out what the players should have done in the actual hand with the actual game situation.

Theoretically I suspect that raising A9o is ok

I suspect that reraising T5o is just bad theoretically

I also suspect that moving allin with A9o is theoretically bad, but only because theoretically the SB should have a much tighter range to reraise as they did. If we put them on junk hands sometimes, AND somehow think that they are playing perfectly from that point forward, we can start reraising hands with the knowledge that the will fold with some kind of optimal game theory strategy. I'm not sure if A9o falls into one of those hands we can now reraise but who knows.

In the actual hand it seemed to go:

Button: [censored] it ill raise
SB: [censored] him he has to fold I reraise
Button: [censored] him he can't push me around all day Im allin, A9o is like ...I dunno, very high % against random hand, play for first etc!!
SB: ahh pot odds, who knows what he has, I call!

No one was worrying about theoretical ranges in the above thought process I think.

Btw since we never plan on folding to a 4bet as the SB, moving allin with a trash hand is clearly superior to raising to 70k (although folding is probably best), because our opponent may at least fantasize that they have FE, which is a big disaster for us.


Despite all of this I'd still probably not open raise with A9o against an aggressive player that I felt was likely to reraise with any 2. Theoretically A9o probably falls in the range of one of the hands we should open raise and fold to a reraise. This is because we must open raise with some hands and not be willing to committ our whole stack to a reraise or else our play becomes too predictable to be theoretically correct. I think A9o is one of these hands, but [censored] theory, we are at a final table in a very weird spot with 3 players left, and it's really just not that important to try to follow some perfect game theory here. Personally I'd rather just avoid such a guessing game in this situation.


As I said earlier, against a random SB I would raise, against someone who I think wants to bully me I would probably open limp. I think that if SB raises after our limp, we barely lose that much because it helps us when the SB loses such a large chunk of their stack. If we fold, the SB may even do one of those "keep the short stack alive" routines, and torture us forever, regardless of whether such a strategy makes any sense.