SB vs BB

[Falcon1511]

Anytime I play heads up SB vs BB, I use the list from Harringtons end game book and I raise if my hand is in the top 20% of hands. KJ is 58% or better to win against two random cards, so I decided to raise in the SB. He is a calling station who I haven't seen fold his blinds yet. His stats are 36/0/.89 after 50 hands.

Party Poker
Limit Holdem Ring game
Limit: $0.50/$1
10 players
Converter

Pre-flop: (10 players) Hero is SB with :ks :jc
8 folds, [color=#cc0000]Hero raises</font>, BB calls.

Flop: :tc :ah :kc (4SB, 2 players)
[color=#cc0000]Hero bets</font>, BB calls.

Turn: :5c (3BB, 2 players)
[color=#cc0000]Hero bets</font>, BB calls.

River: :ad (5BB, 2 players)
[color=#cc0000]Hero bets</font>, [color=#cc0000]BB raises</font>, Hero ???

[gostros]

Pre-flop -&gt; turn... all good obviously

If BB is a true calling station, I think a fold to the river raise is ok... it seems like he was afraid to play his weak ace until it became a lot less weak.

[Ampelmann]

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Anytime I play heads up SB vs BB, I use the list from Harringtons end game book

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I never read it, but I doubt that it is easily applicable to Limit HE cash games (if at all). You should have a look at HEPFAP for HU limit play.

[ QUOTE ]
and I raise if my hand is in the top 20% of hands.

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When it's folded to you in the SB you should raise a lot more than 20% unless BB is very loose-passive. Against a tight player that won't play back too often you can raise any 2. When he picks up your play and starts to play back with mediocre hands you can still raise 50%-66% of your hands.

Edit: And you should never open complete the SB unless the BB is very loose (calls all your raises) and never raises preflop himself.

About the hand: given his stats I'd fold the river to his raise if I have never seen him bluffing.

PS: Please fix the converter.

[Paxosmotic]

When it's folded to you in the SB, you're risking 3 bets to win 3. You only need to pickup the blinds half the time to turn an immediate profit. On top of that, an indeterminate amount of the time you'll go on to win the hand anyway. If you're raising 80% of your hands out of the SB and he's calling with 50% in the BB, you're going to win the hand 45% of the time. I like to use 40% to be conservative.

You can be a lot more liberal with your raising requirements. Also take note of your table image and your opponent. If my opponent is tight and I've been folding a lot, I will take the blinds with 72o without hesitation. If my opponent is loose and I've been stealing everytime I've had the chance, I'll fold J4s to set him up for next time. Heads up play comes down to reads more than vacuum based hand selection.

Breaking down the EVs from my first paragraph, if we're raising 80% of our hands, our EV looks like this:

20% of the time we lose 1 bet from folding outright. EV = -.2
40% of the time (50% of the times we raise) we pick up 3 bets immediately. EV = +1.2
24% of the time (60% of the times we're called) we'll lose 8 bets at worst if we call down. EV = -1.92
16% of the time (40% of the times we're called) we'll win 8 bets at worst if he calls down. EV = +1.28

In this example, the EV of raising 80% of our hands from the small blind is .36 bets, a not insignifigant amount. It's worth thinking about.

[Falcon1511]

not sure how to fix converter, new to everything [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]

[Ampelmann]

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not sure how to fix converter, new to everything [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]

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Adjust it to the 2+2 forums.

[jrz1972]

When its folded around to you in the SB, different players have different philosophies:

1. Some people open-raise with any hand they deem good enough to play. This is a perfectly reasonable approach, and people who do this report good results.

2. Some people open-raise some of their hands, but also liberally open-convert a lot of hands with the intention of betting at almost any flop. MrWookie is an advocate of this move, and there's a thread in SHUSH where he and Guruman debate the merits of this play. The long and short of it is that people who make these delayed steals report good results, too.

Which approach you take depends partly on your personal comfort level in blind vs. blind situations, and it also should depend on what kind of player is in the big blind. The tighter the bb, the more inclined you should be to open-raise; this move bloats the pot so that if he folds the flop with air, he's making a bigger mistake than if the pot were smaller. Against a loose opponent, open-converting might make more sense. Loose opponents call too much, and by keeping the pot small you are making their bad calls more of a mistake than if the pot were larger.

But those considerations apply when you have a marginal hand in the SB that you're playing mainly for steal value. KJ is not one of those hands. I would raise this value against anybody.

[Paxosmotic]

Personally I thought my post was pretty good, and jrz1972 advocates a very good alternative.