Teach Me Restealing

[Rocco]

Holy crap! This is a top-of-the-line post, Ansky. I'm gonna jam my mouse-pad through the printer. Though, it might be easier to just stick it on the notice-board above my monitor. Will be practiced in my upcoming tournies...

[Lloyd]

So I think we've covered restealing with effective blinds in the 15 BB range pretty well. I know that this post (and the other in the Anthology) have greatly improved my game when I get into that range. I'm constantly looking for spots to push and this has been working brilliantly.

But while a 15 BB stack is an ideal spot to re-steal push, we clearly have to look at other opportunities to re-steal with larger stack sizes. So that's the question I'm posing: How do we most effectively re-steal with stacks of varying sizes above that magical 15 BB range. Clearly we're looking for the same spots as previously mentioned. Loose raiser, tight players left to act, etc.

At 20 BBs: If we re-steal by popping it to 9 BBs, that's almost half our stack. So we pretty much have to call a pre-flop push and push any flop. That doesn't sound too appealing to me. It seems like at 20 BBs we really have a horrible stack for re-stealing (again, this is all part of a question; I'm not stating what I believe to be a certainty).

At 30 BBs: If we re-steal by popping it to 9 BBs and get pushed on pre-flop, there's about 40 BBs in the pot and it's costing us 21 BBs to call. We're getting 2 to 1 and probably need to call pre-flop. Same problem as in the 20 BB range.

At 40 BBs: Re-stealing to 9 BBs and getting pushed on gives us 1.6 to 1 odds. We can safely fold pre-flop when we're restealing with air. Of course, IF (and that shouldn't happen often at all) we're called the pot will be 19 BBs with 31 BBs behind us. It would suck to put in a 10 BB continuation bet and have to fold losing half our stack. But that's shouldn't happen so often as to worry about it and if you've got a decent read on your opponent you should probably have a good sense of when to continuation bet or not.

Clearly having more than 40 BBs we can re-steal in the right situation and have enough chips so that options are available. And at 15 BBs we can safely push and the risk-reward justifies our action. The grey area, in my opinion and what I'm looking for guidance on, is how to re-steal (if at all) when in that 20-40 BB range (well, maybe it's 20-35 but close enough). Are re-steals still in our playbook and if so what's our plan if pushed into pre-flop or called and we see a flop?

[Lloyd]

As a follow-up to my previous post, one possible re-stealing line (as suggested by Woodguy among others I'm sure) is instead of re-raising pre-flop to just call the loose raise in position and then raise the flop. This might be the optimal re-stealing line when you've got that difficult stack of, say, 25-35 BBs. We eliminate the pre-flop commitment of our stack and can still probably win about 2 out of 3 times when the raiser misses.

[mornelth]

Ok, last bump of the morning... I promise [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[Ansky]

Someone just PMed me asking about this, thought I'd bump it.

[TightIsRight]

buuuuuuump. somebody plz reply to Lloyd. pretty pretty plz??????

[RichC.]

[ QUOTE ]
As a follow-up to my previous post, one possible re-stealing line (as suggested by Woodguy among others I'm sure) is instead of re-raising pre-flop to just call the loose raise in position and then raise the flop. This might be the optimal re-stealing line when you've got that difficult stack of, say, 25-35 BBs. We eliminate the pre-flop commitment of our stack and can still probably win about 2 out of 3 times when the raiser misses.

[/ QUOTE ]

I think this line might work best around the bubble vs the medium stacks.