Awkward 10-15BB stacks, NLTRN

[TheSalche]

Wondering how you guys play this ... situation is hypothetical now since I'm at work, but I've been encountering this a lot. You're on the button with a good strength hand, something like A7o, KTs, 44. You're winning the match, but not by a lot. Enough so that doubling up will cripple you and likely cause you to lose. How do you play these preflop and postflop? Assume hero is an aggressive player, raising button about 1/3 of the time, calling most of the rest, folding say 15 - 20%.

Example:
Hero: 1800
Villain: 1200
Blinds 50/100

Hero has Ac 8s in SB and raises to 300. Villain calls.
Flop: 5d Th Qh
Villain checks, Hero ????

Three sets of reads:
1. Villain is a loose passive player, tends to play poorly post flop and doesn't raise/re-raise often preflop
2. Villain is a bad LAG and can raise with middle pair.
3. Villain is weak/tight but when he shows strength he generally has it.

[PrimordialAA]

First of all, never raise 3x there, thats horrible and why your getting yourself in tough situations, your risking way too much of your stack, and want to stay active, at 10-15bbs make your raises a min raise

[waxhax0rs]

Don't raise to 300. I think minraising when you're this short is fine. And I hate these situations too, the 12BB area sucks bad because I'm just above the point where I like to go to push-shove mode (10 BB). Limping is ok I think too at this blind level but maybe not I dunno.

[PrimordialAA]

you definently want to have brought in the limp at this stage, and if he will let you use it, but not w/ A8 w/effective stacks of 12bb, I am prolly min-raising and calling a shove from most semi-loose opps (as people tend to get very loose as stacks get shallow, especially if your image is aggro at all)

[TheSalche]

The problem with my aggressive style here is that if I min-raise and villain pushes into me, I'm getting a bit less than 2-1 to call and most of the time I'm a 65/35 or 70/30 dog or worse. If I push preflop then I'm ONLY getting called by a better hand, some coinflips.

Obv. I try to get my opponent down further into the 7 - 10 BB range so I can push with hands like KTo, but that's not going to happen all the time.

I see what you guys are saying about the 3BB raise though, does make postflop awkward. And it doesn't help when I don't have the stones every so often to shove a wiffed flop like that.

[ChicagoRy]

It shouldn't have anything to do with "stones."

Analyze your hands and spots a lot more often (like you are doing with this post) and you will see things in terms of +EV and -EV. Then you will see things in terms of "shoving has more EV than minraise" for example. It shouldn't require any "guts" or whatever to do anything in these games, your decisions should be made based on how you profitable you feel a play to be.

At times when you are uncertain and aren't sure if bluffing a river or check and giving up is ok, it may seem like manhood or guts comes into play, but you should really be thinking about which decision has the liklihood of being more profitable and go with that.

[PrimordialAA]

I mean it's a basic math problem if you have Pokerstove, S&GPT and a calculator, just go based on the ranges you think he will shove over your min bet, therefore you know how many times you will collect the 150 chips already out there, and how many times you will have to call his raise (if it's good to call), and what your hand will be against his range, then just find the most +EV plays against that type of opp until it becomes natural for you to have a feel for ranges and plays like this

[TheSalche]

I don't like thinking of HU hands purely in terms of hand ranges, etc because of how HUGE the ranges can be in heads up and you don't see many showdowns compared to how many hands you are playing so you don't have a ton of info.

Maybe this is because I am new at heads up play, and maybe its because I'm not a super number cruncher. I rely on pot odds and implied odds but I tend to not use pokerstove inputting hand ranges, etc because that stuff is hard to apply in real-time games. I probably should get into that type of thinking though.

I suppose I shouldn't have said "stones", I meant more of my lack of confidence about the move and how +/- EV it is.

[creedofhubris]

[ QUOTE ]
Assume hero is an aggressive player, raising button about 1/3 of the time, calling most of the rest, folding say 15 - 20%.


[/ QUOTE ]

Huh. Q from a non-SNG player:

Does that really work? Why wouldn't villain just push most every time you limped? Seems like, once you raise your top 1/3 of hands, your limping range is so weak that you can't call him very often (even if you make a stand with Q-high you still have to muck 2/3 of the time, by my calculations), and there's enough dead money that he can blast away at you.

[ChicagoRy]

The hand ranges in certain spots that are very hard to calculate on the fly for most people become a lot easier if you study them in your down time.

If you come up with a few hand ranges at different stack sizes for 2-4x raises from villain's sb you can get a very accurate estimate no matter where you are in the game.