Stud hi: What's your plan when 3-bet on 3rd by an overpair?

[Micturition Man]

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I say either raise or fold in this situation. And lean toward fold after he 3 bets.

The only argument I would make for a calldown would be if I intended to raise on a later street.

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I don't think you can fold to a 3-bet simply because of pot odds.

Assuming his 3-bet means AA with a random kicker, you are getting close to correct pot odds to blindly call him down all the way.

Considering that you can improve your effective odds by folding on later streets depending on how the cards break, and that you have implied odds from when you happen to make a big hand, I think you have to call after his 3-bet puts almost 7 small bets in the pot.

That and folding to the 3-bet is hugely exploitable.

[Poker CPA]

EZ call. A fold or raise, and then folding to a 3 bet is just bad poker. Calling, with position, is the play. Its one of the few times that a call can produce a "free card".

[Micturition Man]

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EZ call. A fold or raise, and then folding to a 3 bet is just bad poker. Calling, with position, is the play. Its one of the few times that a call can produce a "free card".

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I can live with this. :-)

Do you raise if your pair is larger, like TT or JJ or something?

[Poker CPA]

5JJ Vs 588. Not much difference. It could influence a 4th or 5th street raise depending on the A's board cards. Still call

[SGspecial]

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I think folding 3rd has to be wrong here. If I'm folding 3rd here the A should be completing 100% and showing a huge profit.


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Do we care what the A's profit is? All he is taking from us is our ante

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Problem is, it's not our ante anymore. It's part of the pot. But he is stealing from us (if it's a naked A), because if only 3 players have cards left then we each own a share of that pot. If we play too tightly, we lose our share too often.

BTW, did anyone ask what the total antes were in this hand?

[electrical]

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BTW 885 is a 60/40 favorite over a random A upcard. (Though of course the A should not necessarily be raising 100%).

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If you think he has a "random" quality hand and is on a pure steal 85+ percent of the time, then you're even money and it doesn't matter if you play or not. I don't think that's the case with most opponents. I know it isn't the case with me. I am doing something other than stealing 15+ percent of the time, that's for sure. And if it is true that we're sacrificing profit, it's a tiny marginal profit from the equity in the ante pool. Subtract the rake and there's even less reason to fight over small potatoes.

[edit: after typing this, I'm not sure it makes sense. 0.60 * 0.85 = 0.51 I'm going to leave it for the purposes of discussion, but I will probably post a more reasoned argument when I have time to think about it more.]

Folding Third also avoids the general bad taste marginal hands leave you with on later streets -- you can never be certain you're ahead, so you can never extract full value from them (who wants to play for a cap with eights-and-fives?), and it's ridiculously easy to get run down if you are momentarily ahead.

You have been dealt a crappy hand, and it's okay to fold a crappy hand for free, especially when so many better opportunities present themselves.

If you're playing three-handed, that's a different story.

[electrical]

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The point is not that we care what the A's profit is, but that if it is abnormally high in this situation it indicates that we are playing exploitably tight.

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After thinking about it, I can express my thoughts a little better. You are afraid folding is a FTOP error, so you don't want to fold. You raise. Given even a very high percentage of the Ace's hands being Axx, he is being offered acceptable odds to play, and when he does choose to play, he will often have you in very bad shape. So, your raise is unlikely to induce an error in his play, and when it does it is a small error, but the raise itself can be an error on your part, and when it is, it will be a large error compounded over many streets. Folding third can only ever be a small error (relinquishing your equity in the ante pool), and that will be the case only some of the time.

The raise creates a situation where you cannot offer him unfavorable odds almost regardless of his holding. I think this is exploitable moreso than folding.

[Poker CPA]

Electrical

"If you're playing three-handed, that's a different story."

But we are playing 3 handed, BUT with 8 antes. The "different story" statement I don't get, because its this type of marginal play that makes the difference in winning and losing over the long run. You have to play these hands well, at the best price. If you don't, then you get no action when you do play.

[Micturition Man]

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Electrical

"If you're playing three-handed, that's a different story."

But we are playing 3 handed, BUT with 8 antes. The "different story" statement I don't get, because its this type of marginal play that makes the difference in winning and losing over the long run. You have to play these hands well, at the best price. If you don't, then you get no action when you do play.

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Was going to say the exact same thing regarding antes.

I don't mean this to be disparaging at all, as I am (obviously) far from an expert at stud hi, but I think a lot of the 2+2 stud posters play good +EV games in a stud ring game while making significant mistakes in the shorthanded situations.

Another way of putting it, electrical, is that if you think folding 88 is proper here there is no question you should be stealing 100% with the A up.

You will be taking it down, versus proper-playing opponents far far more than the 1 in 3 or so you need for an immediate profit.

[Micturition Man]

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The point is not that we care what the A's profit is, but that if it is abnormally high in this situation it indicates that we are playing exploitably tight.

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After thinking about it, I can express my thoughts a little better. You are afraid folding is a FTOP error, so you don't want to fold. You raise. Given even a very high percentage of the Ace's hands being Axx, he is being offered acceptable odds to play, and when he does choose to play, he will often have you in very bad shape. So, your raise is unlikely to induce an error in his play, and when it does it is a small error, but the raise itself can be an error on your part, and when it is, it will be a large error compounded over many streets. Folding third can only ever be a small error (relinquishing your equity in the ante pool), and that will be the case only some of the time.

The raise creates a situation where you cannot offer him unfavorable odds almost regardless of his holding. I think this is exploitable moreso than folding.

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I understand what you're saying here but IMO he will be making an FTOP error in calling with a significant portion of his steal hands, and he will know this, so he will fold them.

Even though he is correct in so folding, this is better than the alternative of giving him a free card. (So I am arguing, Poker CPA thinks otherwise and he may be right.)

This is similar to a resteal in heads-up stud, where the % of the time our opponent will be folding is a function of how high our upcard is when we reraise.

For example if it's heads up stud and our opponent raises with a K versus our 2, and we reraise, he will fold very rarely, and thus I never reraise here as it never accomplishes anything unless we have a monster and we don't want to give our monsters away so easily.

In the same spot if we had a 9 up he will fold quite a lot to our reraise.

I think the A is in a favorable enough steal spot, and 8 is high enough, that we have a signficant amount of outright fold equity.

If I thought the A were only raising like 65% of his hands here I think I would like a flat call, given the above considerations.

But when everyone folds to a live A looking at an 8 and a 2 in a full ring game, I expect him to be raising a ton, probably at least 80%.