Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr Papagiorgio
I just got my free (stars points) autographed copy of The Theory of Poker by Sklansky in the mail. I made it to chapter 10 and then became confused, so I took a break to think about it and thought I’d get some help here… This is 4th ed 9th printing so the page #s may be different.
In chapter 10 pg 82 he gives you JJ on a 10 10 3 (no fd) flop. He says a bet is in order to protect against a A K or Q hitting or being bluffed. Ok
Ch 10 pg 84 he gives you JJ on a A 8 3 rain flop, and again he says a bet is in order for the same reasons before; not giving a free card, A K or Q. Ok
Now in Ch 10 pg 88 he gives you 88 on a J 7 3 rain flop and is NOT in favor of a bet because only 2 cards in the deck can help you.
Is it just me or is there no difference between the 2nd and 3rd hand? The reasoning behind playing the 3rd hand should still be the same, correct ??? (would 99 or 10 10 change anything, if so, why?)
Maybe I’m just missing something, plase let me know.
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Hey Mr Papagiorgio,
For the first one, JJ on TT3r, this is definitely a value bet in most 6max settings as opposed to a protection bet. It may be different in FR though. You'll tend to find that most pros don't bet "to protect against a A K or Q hitting or being bluffed", for one thing the probability of one of those cards hitting is pretty low. Even if it does hit, it may not have hit your opponent's range. If one does hit you're also in a situation where you have a very powerful bluff catcher and are actually happy when somebody decides to bluff you. This board texture is very dry so you can expect calls from 44 - 99 and random floats when you do bet.
For JJ on a A 8 3 this is typically not a bet. Like I mentioned, we're not very concerned with betting "to protect against a A K or Q hitting or being bluffed". In this situation we want to check as we're not comfortable continuing against a check raise and, unless you're playing a fish, it's essentially turning a very strong bluff catcher into a bluff, which is something you want to avoid.
I made a post about a year and a half ago which should help you to understand what I'm talking about, substitute "call" for "check" and it applies to cbetting:
"Imagine your range as looking like this:
(_______________________)
Now within this range there's only a certain amount of strong hands.
(_________________
(_SH_))
These strong hands are hands which you're happy to (re)raise and get all-in with, you consider them the virtual nuts. In some situations this might be only sets, in others it might be TP decent kicker.
If you only have a certain amount of hands that you're willing to stack off with then you can also only have a limited amount of bluffing hands. If you had 5% nuts and 95% bluffs then you're extremely exploitable, people can just c/r you non stop and show a huge immediate profit.
So we need to have a bluffing range, but which hands should we use?
Well let's say there's a range of hands that we can call with profitably which are just below the strong hands range.
(________
(___C___)(_SH_))
And we'll say that we want to have an even amount of bluffs to nuts hands. (The actual ratio can be solved mathematically by looking at villain's risk/reward on a 3bet bluff or float, you typically should have more bluffs than nuts.)
If we use our strongest non nuts hands to bluff, like this:
(________
(_C_(_B_))(_SH_))
Then we have to fold all of the hands below the orange range. Another problem is that our calling range is also very weak, this is exploitable since people can just barrel us off our hand when we call. We need to have those strong non nut hands in our range that we can call down with to protect our weaker made hands we want to show down. Those weaker made hands also induce bluffs for our big non nut hands to call. They balance each other.
So we want to have our bluff range below the calling range:
(____
(_B_)(___C___)(_SH_))
The very weakest hands are the ones we want to fold:
(
(_F_)(_B_)(___C___)(_SH_))
It's basically polarizing your ranges and this applies to a load of different situations in poker.
It applies to 3betting preflop, we want to 3bet hands we're happy to stack off with, AK, KK, etc., coldcall with hands we can do so profitably with, KQ, T9s, 88, A9s etc. and 3bet light with hands which aren't good enough to call with but are still reasonably strong like 54s, 97s, 65o, A6s, etc. We can then fold our trash hands like 72o, Q5s, etc.
If we 3bet one of our callable hands and villain 4bets us then we'll have to fold since we're not happy getting it in. If villain has a balanced 4betting range of nut hands and air hands this sucks for us since we're folding the best hand a lot of the time.
It also applies to cbetting, we want to bet our best and worst hands and check behind with our middle strength hands. Stuff like weak top pairs, middle pairs, bottom pairs, ace highs.
If we bet all of our range then villain can c/r bluff us and make a lot of money. The weak top pairs provide protection for the bottom pairs and ace highs which we want to show down. The bottom pairs and ace highs induce bluffs for us to snap off with our top pair hands.
It also applies when we're facing a cbet. Let's say the CO, a TAG reg, opens and we call otb with AJs, this would be my standard play here 90+% of the time.
The flop comes down JT3r and villain cbets into us. Now raising is almost definitely +EV in isolation (it could even be more +EV then calling) but if he comes over the top we'd feel a little meh getting it in. If we raise fold then our bluffing range is too wide and our calling range gets a lot weaker. So by calling here we protect the times we have 88 and want to get to showdown or AQ with a backdoor FD that we want to float with.
So what hands would we bluff raise with? Well typically we want to do it when we have backdoor draws or weak draws which we don't mind folding if raised. So if we had 87 with a backdoor flush draw then that would be a good hand to bluff raise. The AQ mentioned earlier would also be a decent candidate but, because we have showdown value, it's also reasonable to float with it.
So that's, one of the reasons, why raising for information sucks. If you decide to raise a callable hand then you should be doing it all the time, but that means that your ranges are unbalanced and you're picking bad candidates to raise with.
On later streets it's o.k. to merge your ranges.
aejones can explain the concept better than I can, but the problem with merging your ranges on earlier streets, like preflop and on the flop, is that you're put in very awkward spots on future streets where you don't want to check fold since you're hand has a lot of strength but you don't want to continue betting because it's difficult to get value. On later streets this isn't as much of a problem since ranges are a lot better defined and you can be more confident in knowing if a marginal hand is ahead or not.
Now this is all assuming you're playing competent opponents. If you're playing micro stakes then you can pretty much just cbet ~100% of the time without it being a problem, your opponents are playing too fit or fold, they're not c/r bluffing you, they're not going to put you in awkward spots or punish you for being exploitable. You can just make the most +EV play in a vacuum and be happy with it."
So the reason JJ on A 8 3 is typically a check rather than a bet is that it falls near the top of our checking range, we may also have weak aces like A4, A7, etc. in there as well. If we bet we run the risk of getting check raised off of a lot of equity, this is something which most pros are far more concerned with then protecting against an A, K or Q falling. By betting we're also messing up our hand ranges, not only do we weaken our betting range (by having more bluffs in it), we also weaken our checking range because we have less bluff catchers in there.
With 88 on J73r I think he was comparing 88 to A7 and saying he'd prefer to bet A7 since it has more outs. Now in this situation we rarely want to be cbetting either of these hands against someone competent since they'll usually fall pretty much bang in the middle of our checking range. So the comparison is pretty stupid to begin with, I'd rather 3bet bluff 82o than 72o but since I'll almost never 3bet bluff either of them it's a pointless discussion. However, I still disagree with him anyway. Like I mentioned a few times, we're far more concerned with not getting bluffed off significant equity rather than outdrawing a pair of jacks. In this case the added outs of A7o give us more equity and make us want to check more rather than less.
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