good or bad

[RemyXO]

2 overs. Gutshot. Backdoor flush. Big pot.
RAISE.

[MrWookie]

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wook,

good analysis and persuasive argument. however,

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We could easily be dominated by AK, AQ, or a tricky JJ+ from UTG or perhaps an AQ from a cold caller.

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aren't these arguments in favor of raising (other than "tricky JJ+") because these hands are likely to fold for 2 bets cold where they will obviously come along for 1 bet?


riku,

the bus to 3town leaves from the button preflop. take all these chumps with you.

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I saw that, and I declined to comment. Here's my comment, though:

We're almost never reverse dominated on our J's, and we dominate all other J's. Thus, a raise to "clean up our outs" is only to clean up our A's, and to potentially fold some K's and Q's that might draw out on us if we hit a J on the turn. If we're folding out a better A, we're talking about buying 2 outs scaled by 1 minus the percent of the time those A's actually fold to our raise. If UTG always has AK and he always folds to our raise and there are no other A's out there, we buy ourselves an increase in equity of about 8%, plus a small effect of not getting out drawn, which I'll generously call 1%. That's 9% total. Nine percent of the pot right now is 1.17 SB, which would mean that putting in an extra SB to earn 1.17 SB in equity is a +EV proposition. However, as you might have noticed, that implies that a good parlay of things have to go our way, and that 9% is still an upper bound on our increase in equity. The A[img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img] is not exactly a card we'd like to see, filling a gutshot for 4x AND completing the flush draw. Notably, neither 4x nor flush draws will be folding to our raise, so we can't protect against this effect. The J[img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img] is less bad for us, but it's still not great. All of a sudden, that 9% we bought ourselves starts to look like 5ish%, and that's not enough for a raise to be +EV.

If the board was drier, this is a great play in large pots, but this isn't the right board for it. Alternatively, if we held A[img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img]J[img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img], this would be closer. As is, I still don't like the raise.

[BigBadBabar]

this is my first time seeing this post

i think call >> raise >>>>> fold

[jeanbaptiste36]

My two cents is that the A:s we are trying to clean probably is in pf-raisers hand and he was loose as you said. You won't clean him, so call.

[Big Folder]

I 3-bet preflop especially if UTG is loose. You have a really nice hand and lots of opponents already. AJs is a great hand multiway. You have an edge now push it.

On the flop I definately raise for the reasons you stated. You could get a free card, you could clean up outs where you otherwise might be reverse dominated.