River full house

[DrModern]

[ QUOTE ]
what im getting at is that you are better off focusing on THE TYPE of hands that occur often and not hands where you are concerned with capping a river. This sort of river decision (to cap or not to cap) just doesnt come up often enough to significantly affect your winrate IMHO.

[/ QUOTE ]

QFT. Listen to Aussie.

[Xhad]

I disagree completely. Reading hands is a very important general skill to have, and this hand is as good as any to talk about it.

[DrModern]

I get your point, Xhad. And I of course agree that hand reading is important.

All I'm saying is hands where you cap vs. don't cap the river after runner-runnering a boat don't come up that often, and that, when you're just getting started, it's more important to focus on difficult situations that come up frequently. These impact your winrate a lot more than whether or not you cap the river in this situation.

Now, I know you'll say that whether or not you learn hand-reading also impacts your winrate, and you'll be completely right. So let me just agree with you about that, and add that that I also think that learning to recognize spots that give you persistent trouble is also important. IMO, this decision isn't really one of them.

[teampursuit]

Hey gang, here's a n00b's perspective: Cap the river.

I think villain has 9x spades in his hand. If he had deuces, he played horribly. It looks to me like he got a piece of the flop, then hoped for something good to happen. I think him having the case K is very unlikey.

[Xhad]

I think learning general concepts is a lot more important than trying to categorize (postflop) situations and then come up with a preselected response for different categories. In other words, I don't agree with trying to find a "common hand" because even if we can agree on what that is, there's enough variation between them that they're still really just individual hands.

No, it's not often you're thinking about capping the river with the 3rd nuts HU. But it is common that you need to try to put your opponent on a range and consider a value bet.

[DrModern]

[ QUOTE ]
I think learning general concepts is a lot more important than trying to categorize (postflop) situations and then come up with a preselected response for different categories. In other words, I don't agree with trying to find a "common hand" because even if we can agree on what that is, there's enough variation between them that they're still really just individual hands.

No, it's not often you're thinking about capping the river with the 3rd nuts HU. But it is common that you need to try to put your opponent on a range and consider a value bet.

[/ QUOTE ]

I agree completely, Xhad. There are only individual hands that call for individual responses. I like Phil Gordon's way of putting this from Little Green Book: "poker is a game of situations."

My point isn't that we should try to categorize these situations and come up with generic answers. My point is that, for someone starting out in hold 'em, the consistent leaks aren't going to be from hands like this one, and that winrate can be improved more by analyzing those hands that pose persistent problems.

Surely you'll agree that there is such a thing as frequency of a situation: i.e. is OP frequently making incorrect c-bets on the flop? is OP playing too loosely preflop? You have to make those kinds of decisions often. You don't have to decide whether or not to cap the runner-runnered 3rd nuts HU on the river often at all.

Edited to add that I realize Aussie's post makes it look like the objective is to find a hand "type." I think a better expression might be "frequency of decision making." What I'm trying to say is essentially the same point that Ed Miller makes in SSHE about how even if you folded all of your royal flushes you could still be a winning player, but if you don't learn good preflop discipline, you can't.