Thanks guys for the comments in the last post. Brian had the best advice of all, which is to move tables against a good aggressive player who has position on you. The hand I posted was an actual hand, and while the guy to my left was a PITA, the two guys to my right were worth it. Anyway, I think as we all move up, we are going to face increasing aggression from the whole table, including the guys on our left of course. And if we have some good targets to our right, we'll start raising lighter and the guys to our left will start 3-betting lighter...and we'll want to stay, and to play as well as we can against them. Plus some of them won't be good at playing reraised pots, even if they're the ones reraising.
If I'm in the CO and the BTN is 3-betting 7%+ of his hands, that means he's likely 3-betting quite wide on the button, and I think AQ is too much hand to just give up against those guys, assuming 100bb stacks (and for sake of argument, yeah 3.5bb raise, and the guy 3-bets to 12bb). If he's position-aware and 3-betting 7% of all his hands, let's just say he's 3-betting 10% of his hands on the button. So, if he's doing this with like 99+, ATo+, A9s+, KJ+, we actually have more than 50% pot equity with AQ.
The question is how much to play back against them. You guys my disagree that we should play back at them, and that's fine, but from a hypothetical standpoint, let's say that we are compelled to at least call the 3-bet. Between calling and raising, I like calling. Raising does force him to fold some hands at the bottom end of his pocket pair range that we would prefer he actually fold, given we're flipping and there will be decent dead money in the pot, but it counts on him folding out 99-JJ, which might be too hopeful. But more than that, we're screwed against his non-folding range (whether we shove or not for our 4-bet).
If we call, what we have going for us is our equity against his range. What we have going against us is that we are only going to hit our hand 33% of the time, and of that, a decent chunk of the time we will make a 2nd best hand, although not always. The times we don't, if we c/f, then we will definitely be losing money on the deal and you guys are right we should just toss the hand after he 3-bets us.
So, that leaves us having to do something besides fit-or-fold (again, supposing we *must* at least call his 3-bet). In other words, we need to bluff some of the time (but not all the time), in order to make up some ground. One of the key advantages we get by 3-betting (in position or out) is fold equity, so we can fire when we miss. Well, if you know that your opponent is 3-betting light, then you have some fold equity as well. You still don't have position, but if you come out firing after calling a 3-bet -- presuming you don't normally call 3-bets, especially OOP -- you are going to make your opponent uncomfortable to say the least.
On to the specific hand. To recap, I raised 3.5, he 3-bet to 12, I called. Let's say the blinds pay the rake. There's 24 in the pot and 89 behind in each stack (he had 101bb and I covered). I have AsQx and the flop is JsTs3x. First of all, I think since we didn't hit a pair, there is nothing really wrong with check/folding, in a vacuum. However, if we have to bluff sometimes, then this board is a good candidate for it, but we need to bluff big if we're going to do it. I checked for a couple reasons. First, he could possibly check behind and let me draw to one of my 3 outs to the nuts. Second, if he bets, I can CRAI, and as long as my image isn't that of a total LAGtard (yet!!!), I think a lot of hands ahead of me will fold, and if they don't I do have at least a few outs.
The fact that the ten, jack, and ace of spades are all accounted for makes it a lot less likely that he's got a flush draw. If he's any good, he's going to see my play and figure slowplayed AA, 2-pair+, good to great draw, or B.S. Now he may have a really strong hand himself, or maybe just feel pot-committed and look me up. In the hand, he bet 19bb and folded to my shove, so maybe I had the best hand all along and turned it into a bluff. I'm far from convinced I made the clearly correct play, and it might not even be close (i.e., folding preflop might be the right thing to do). But I don't think that approaching it a more aggressive way like I outlined is so -EV that we should always avoid it, either, from both a learning and a table image standpoint.
FWIW, I usually just take Brian's advice and change tables when a good aggro player is behind me. This time, though, the aggressive player -- who seemed pretty solid actually, if not outstanding -- didn't 3-bet me again, even though I raised a lot of hands against the looser players to my right. After a few orbits, he left.
No comments:
Post a Comment