Deep Stack Poker

[wins_pot]

i've been trying to write some 'tactics' columns to help clarify my thoughts on the game. here's one...

Playing strong deep stack poker is mostly about making tactically sound bets and raises on the flop, turn, and river. Deep stack tournament poker is similar to cash game play, so some of the examples in this chapter will come from cash games.

Suppose that you are playing heads-up $50-100 no-limit hold’em. Both you and your opponent have $15,000 in front. Your opponent has the button and opens for $300. You call with ace-queen. Sometimes you would re-raise here pre-flop but often you will just call – it’s a hand that will frequently punish you for building a large pot out of position.

The flop comes Q-5-6, rainbow. Is this flop suitable for a check-raise? To me, the answer is clearly no. I will check-raise in this spot with a set of queens, a set of fives, a set of sixes, Q-6, Q-5, or 5-6, or, much more frequently, with nothing, but I wouldn’t check-raise with A-Q.

You should check-raise only when you can confidently answer the question: Am I prepared to put all my chips in with this hand? A tactically sound raise will allow you to answer that question with confidence. If I call pre-flop with J-T, it might well be correct to check-raise with Q-5-6 flop given the high probability that the raise will take down the pot uncontested.

Say your opponent bets $600 on the Q-5-6 flop, and you check-raise to 2400, then he pushes. Are you calling? I’m not. If you somehow know that he’s going to either push or fold after you check-raise, then you can say for sure that check-raising with ace-queen, one of the best possible hands given this boars, yields equivalent results to check-raising with a hand that missed the board completely.

Say your opponent just calls your raise. Are you happy now? On the turn, you will be facing a Q-5-6-X board, out of position, with $5400 in the pot and $13300 each behind. What’s your plan? It will fairly surely entail a lot of discomfort. You have, of course, two options --- check or bet. They’re about equally bad.

Let’s look first at the option of betting. Say your plan is: bet the turn and fold to a raise. Let’s first assume that your opponent will respond to your turn bet by either folding or raising you all-in. If this is true, then your payoff profile still hasn’t changed from the J-T scenario. Think about that for a second –raising the flop with AQ, then betting the turn, yields the exact same results as raising the flop and betting the turn with nothing.

If you bet the turn and your opponent just calls, you still aren’t in great shape. Assume you pot-bet the turn, such that there is $16,200 in the pot and $6900/each behind. It’s not clear what the best line will be on the river --- all that I can tell you, is that tactically unsound play has forced you to confront a very uncomfortable river decision and it’s very probable that you will make a costly mistake.

It’s possible that your bad play will pay off for you. Maybe you bet the river and he somehow pays you with KQ. KQ is really the only plausible scenario where your check-raise->bet->bet line works out better with AQ than it does with XY (where X an Y bear no relation to the board). Maybe you choose to check-call the river and you induce a bluff from someone who paid too much for an open-end straight draw. All told, though, your decision to check-raise the flop with AQ still looks like a serious tactical blunder.

Let’s look quickly at the case of the check-raise->check line of play. Here you can only hope for the turn action to go check-check. If you check and your opponent bets, A-Q is probably buried. I’d fold to a pot bet in that spot. I believe such a fold is correct despite that chance that your opponent holds KQ or QJ --- this again demonstrates that the flop raise was flawed. If you had just called the flop, the likely action would have been: check-check on the turn, then bet-call on the river. In the first case, you are taken off a better hand to lose a big pot. In the second case, you win a $5400 pot.

If the turn goes check-check, you’re probably in good shape despite your mistake on the flop. If the potential flop draws miss on the river, you can check hoping to induce a bluff. If they hit, I would probably bet the river (I’m not going to fold here, so I might as well bet and hope that my opponent has QT, QJ, or KQ.

brandon

[samr]

How enlightening and ground-breaking. Don't turn AQ into 27o.

[yvesaint]

thought process is good, but 15k in a 50-100 is deep stack poker???

[aejones]

nooooo you can buy in for 100 bb's on party, that is not deep stacked poker.

Also, if you were playing deep stacked poker, you could easily c/r with TPTK on this board, are you basically telling us that you play like a nit heads up?

[Butcho22]

Who the phuck are you? Nobody cares about this gay "chapter"

[jcmoussa]

isnt this the guy who challenged mahatma to 200/400 hu?

[Phresh]

[ QUOTE ]
Who the phuck are you? Nobody cares about this gay "chapter"

[/ QUOTE ]

Please shut up. Thanks.

[riverboatking]

are you trying to say that you would NEVER checkraise with TPTK HU out of position?
it would be my assumption that if an opponent can pick up on the fact that you will never do "A,B, or C" HU out of position you have just made it a hell of a lot easier to play against you.

i think a much better statement would be: "i'll sometimes do this and sometimes do that depending on a whole lot of factors that probably can't be put into some kind of formula to describe how to play deep stack poker HU".

that being said i think you make some very good observations that will be very helpful to begining players.

[Spokey]

Very good post sir. Looking forward to see more columns from you in the future.

[cwl]

[ QUOTE ]
are you trying to say that you would NEVER checkraise with TPTK HU out of position?
it would be my assumption that if an opponent can pick up on the fact that you will never do "A,B, or C" HU out of position you have just made it a hell of a lot easier to play against you.


[/ QUOTE ]

i dont think this has to be quite as big a problem as you are implying. if you never play a certain subset of hands in a given way then an observant opponent can eliminate those from your hand range when you make a play. this is only a problem if the hands that are left in your range are not a reasonably broad crosssection of hands.

if you dont ever take a certain line with A,B and C but you do take that line with other, fairly similar, hands then your opponent hasnt gained much info from your unbalanced play. thats not quite the case here because its basically the middle range of hands that are excluded which is a little more significant since it does skew your hand range. this example isnt nearly as bad as someone who will never c/r their monster hands in this spot though. all im really saying is that there is a pretty broad range as far as how big a problem leaking info about hand ranges can be depending on the specific way your skewing your hand range. depending on how bad it is to play a hand in a certain way bleeding a little info may be the lesser evil.