Professional No-Limit Hold 'em Volume 1 Review Thread

[1p0kerboy]

Thanks for responding Sunny.

Based on your response, your strategy is much worse than I originally thought.

If you are limp-reraising with jacks and KQ in early position pretty routinely and then stacking off with top pair, then you are definitely offering many other areas of exploitation and the fact that now you are not giving information away is not nearly as important as the fact that you are just playing bad poker.

When you say

[ QUOTE ]
They are being offered 17.5-to-1 to flop a set ONLY if:

1) they call with pocket pairs and fold everything else,
2) we have big pairs and nothing else in our range, AND
3) we pay them off for our full stack everytime.


[/ QUOTE ]

There is some truth to what you say. But:

1) They are getting the proper pot/implied odds to call with a lot more hands than pairs, but they certainly want to drop any weak top-pair hands at this point.
2) Like I previously said, if we have a lot of hands in our range here there are even more ways to exploit our play.
3) According to the book, the whole reason we are making this play is to achieve the proper SPR to give us an easy committment decision. There's almost no spots where we are going to fold an overpair (which is extremely likely).

So while we may not be offering 17.5-1, we certainly are offering much greater than 10-1 which is +EV for our opponent.

[fraac]

I want more of this discussion, it's top class. Some really knowledgeable no-limit players here and I honestly don't know which of you to believe. Theory fight!

[Sunny Mehta]

[ QUOTE ]
Thanks for responding Sunny.

Based on your response, your strategy is much worse than I originally thought.

If you are limp-reraising with jacks and KQ in early position pretty routinely and then stacking off with top pair, then you are definitely offering many other areas of exploitation and the fact that now you are not giving information away is not nearly as important as the fact that you are just playing bad poker.

[/ QUOTE ]

What hands we choose to lrr with has solely to do with what range we feel the button is opening with, and how he'll respond to both our reraise and our postflop actions.


[ QUOTE ]
When you say

[ QUOTE ]
They are being offered 17.5-to-1 to flop a set ONLY if:

1) they call with pocket pairs and fold everything else,
2) we have big pairs and nothing else in our range, AND
3) we pay them off for our full stack everytime.


[/ QUOTE ]

There is some truth to what you say. But:

1) They are getting the proper pot/implied odds to call with a lot more hands than pairs, but they certainly want to drop any weak top-pair hands at this point.


[/ QUOTE ]

Oh really? What are these hands that they have proper pot/implied odds with, and how (mathematically) do they have equity against our range on the full scope of possible flop textures and flop actions?

Further, how do they "know" to drop "weak top pair" hands, and where exactly do they draw the line between "weak" and "strong"?


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2) Like I previously said, if we have a lot of hands in our range here there are even more ways to exploit our play.

[/ QUOTE ]

Such as?


[ QUOTE ]

3) According to the book, the whole reason we are making this play is to achieve the proper SPR to give us an easy committment decision. There's almost no spots where we are going to fold an overpair (which is extremely likely).

So while we may not be offering 17.5-1, we certainly are offering much greater than 10-1 which is +EV for our opponent.

[/ QUOTE ]

The reason in THAT PARTICULAR hand is SPR, mostly because that is the concept we are teaching at that point in the book. We haven't gotten into global reasoning yet, which is the issue you're taking exception to. My last post touches on those types of concepts, and we'll have a lot to say about that in Volume Two.

Thanks,

Sunny

[Sunny Mehta]

[ QUOTE ]
I want more of this discussion, it's top class. Some really knowledgeable no-limit players here and I honestly don't know which of you to believe. Theory fight!

[/ QUOTE ]

fraac, there's no "fight", and in this game of imperfect information most of the time there's not one definitive right answer. debate is great because we all learn something.

[fraac]

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My last post touches on those types of concepts, and we'll have a lot to say about that in Volume Two.

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I'm sorry, that won't do. If your book is bunk, I want to know now, not after Volume 2.

[1p0kerboy]

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Further, how do they "know" to drop "weak top pair" hands

[/ QUOTE ]

Limp-reraises from EP give away a lot of information. It doesn't even take good players to realize that.

If you do it often with weaker hands to "mix-up your play" then suddenly you are creating big pots out-of-position with weak hands. That's not a recipe to win at No Limit Hold 'Em.

[1p0kerboy]

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If your book is bunk

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Let me add (before continuing the debate on this one particular hand) that there are a lot of good things in this book and it will certainly help anybody with their game.

[1p0kerboy]

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Such as?

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Our opponents are going to pick up hands. Imagine their delight when they have AK or QQ+ and we're limp-reraising in EP with junk. Suddenly we are the ones stacking off with weak top pair hands and they're making money on us.

[1p0kerboy]

This hand is being discussed in the full ring forum.

[fraac]

Fascinating. I limp-reraise KK utg in tournaments all the time, but it doesn't really matter there.

It does seem, to my untrained eyes, like a possibly insurmountable problem. If you're aiming for SPRs with particular hands, you're also aiming for that SPR with hands you want confused with those hands (balancing, they call it), which surely won't be the correct SPR in the latter case. At expert level, when your opponents aren't aiming for SPRs (see earlier in this thread for use of PNL1 at expert level), you learn by checking the SPR that they have a particular kind of hand – or that they don't!

Please correct my oversights.