Awesome. I love it. Glad you were able to get away from the hand.
That said, if you thought the guy was c-betting with worse, why did you want him out of the hand? On that dry of a board, wouldn’t you want to keep him in (as it’s really unlikely that he’ll hit a draw that can hurt you) and see if he’ll keep betting into you? OTOH, we bet to make worse hands call and better hands fold, and min-raising is one of the likeliest raises that will make a worse hand call.
Not a giant fan of folding face up—it induces bluffs, and one of the leaks of most LLSNL players is that they bluff too little—but at least it induced the cutoff to show his set.
Good question. In that position I’d rather just have the pot right there and value the informational advantage of forcing a decision with a raise, but perhaps that was an error. I’m not just facing him, I’m facing the guy who had a set - and giving THAT guy excellent odds to call might be an error. If I just call he’s being presented an opportunity to call $20 into a pot that already has $73 in it, which would give some players the cojones to call with a wide range of hands that could shock me later. People at 1/2 are funny. He could have been playing 87s and decided his implied odds merited trying to call $20 for a gutshot. (Of course, the circumstances were that he had a made hand, but I didn’t know that. The c-bet guy wasn’t my #1 concern.
Still, maybe I threw away twenty bucks there out of my lingering disgust at losing to donkey hands in LLHE. If I just call, Mr Cutoff raises and I’d have come to the same conclusion, since he then would have bet something like $40 or $50 and therefore been doing precisely what I did in the hand in the OP, so I still smell a set and fold and save a few dollars. But calling seems very weak to me there.
I’m not sure now.
I don’t play much poker, but I am fascinated by the game and the analysis of this particular hand has raised some questions for me.
Some of you figured what each person had by the bets they made from whatever position they were in, correct?
In order for your particular strategy to work, doesn’t everyone need to be playing by the same “playbook”?
For example, some one said that the $75 bet on the flop was “hinky”. I interpreted that as a strange bet, not one that was expected. Why? Is there a formula that everyone uses to determine the bet amount based on the hand you have, your location at the table and where the button is? If he made a $100 bet or bigger, or he checked, what would that have told you, and would you have stayed in the hand with the pocket “4”'s, or would you have folded?
The only thing that I am changing in the scenario is the bet from seat 3. What should the guy have put in the pot to cause pocket 4’s to fold?
For example, some one said that the $75 bet on the flop was “hinky”. I interpreted that as a strange bet, not one that was expected. Why? Is there a formula that everyone uses to determine the bet amount based on the hand you have, your location at the table and where the button is? If he made a $100 bet or bigger, or he checked, what would that have told you, and would you have stayed in the hand with the pocket “4”'s, or would you have folded?
The only thing that I am changing in the scenario is the bet from seat 3. What should the guy have put in the pot to cause pocket 4’s to fold?
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Well, let me see if I can explain, having played the hand but learned from this discussion.
Of course, there was no bet Seat 3 actually could have made that would have made me fold. I was not going to fold to any bet at that point. My hand was a full house, a huge hand that was extremely unlikely to lose. Seat 3 might not have known that but it’s the situation he was up against. Had he pushed all his money in I would have called without a moment’s hesitation. Had he called I would probably have bet a little more in the hopes of getting hm to put in some more money, maybe $100. I think… It depends how I felt he was reacting. I might also have checked, in the hopes he would see that as weakness and bet a lot on the river.
The bet was hinky because it does not serve a clear purpose and represents taking a great risk when his opponent has raised the previous bet.
There is no clear formula of course but there are some basic principles you can use to guide your actions:
Pre flop betting and calling tells you a lot about what a player has. I just called before the flop, which is consistent with speculative hands, rather than big time made hands.
Then after the flop I raised a bet. Raising a bet is typical of a strong hand. Since I just called preflop but then raised after the flop, that pattern is very consistent with having played with a speculative hand (like a small pair) but hit big time on the flop.
Position is massively important. Seat 3 is out of position; he does not know what I will do until after he acts. So his $75 raise comes when he does not know how I will react, but immediately after I have done something suspiciously consistent with having a hand he is a terrible underdog against. (After the fourth card was shown to be an ace he was about an 11-to-1 underdog at best.). So why did he raise? It serves no clear purpose. He does not know what I will do, so if I do have a monster hand that money is gone and he may be forced to make a difficult decision to put more money in. If I Have nothing he won’t get me to call anyway.
Let me ask you another question. Since you are toward the end of the players and get to see what everyone does in front of you before deciding to play, what would someone have to bet pre-flop to get ypu to fold?
A pair of 4’s isn’t exactly a steong hand, and. I would think that if someone would have made a large bet before the flop, you may have folded.
Is this accurate? Or were you staying in to see the flop no matter whst was bet?
When you saw the $20 pre-flop bet from seat #3 was $20 to start off with, wouldn’t that indicate that he had a decent hand? Let’s say he had pocket 7’s. Is a $20 raise pre-flop bad betting?
And as the flop came out, A, 7, 4, he bets again. I noticed that you didn’t even consider for his pocket cards a pair of 7’s. Why not? Is it very unlikely that someone with a pair of 7’s is going to open up the betting with a 20? Then when he sees the flop, what bet would he have to make that would convince you he had a set of 7’s, or maybe a set of A’s? I was suprised that ypu didn’t even consider he had 7’s, which tells me thst you took his position and first bet into account. (i’m guessng here).
If he pushed all in on the flop, I am guessing he would have scared you out of the hand. But maybe not. How did you focus on the few hands he probsbly had and not consider a pair of 7’s?
Impossible to tell, because we don’t know what the average open was at this table. It can vary from table to table and night to night. At $2/5 it’s only 4x the BB so not that big. The bigger tell is that Villain opened from UTG, which should mean a stronger opening hand (the entire table is still to act, so he’s much more likely to get 3-bet, but he’s opening anyway. This info definitely helps us narrow his range later in the hand - see below).
With pocket pairs, you have a 1/7 chance of flopping a set, or 15%. A general rule of thumb is you want to make at least 10x the raise size: if you set-mine for $20 100 times, that’s $2,000. 85 times you wiff, but if you win at $200 or so the 15 times you hit, that’s $3,000. Obviously that’s assuming you get 10x every time you hit - which you don’t. Sometimes you hit but nobody has anything and you win a small pot. Sometimes you hit a set and lose (somewhat offset by sometimes winning the hand even without hitting a set). But that’s why you aim for ‘at least’ 10x the raise size for a profitable call to set-mine.
Here, RickJay called $20 with effective stacks over $300, so it’s perfectly fine. If I was in the SB or BB against a -late- position raise, I might even throw in a 3-bet sometimes. Note that RickJay has to fold pre-flop if someone 3-bets. He’s not deep enough to call the extra money and set-mine.
I rule out 77 simply because he wouldn’t jam with 77 over a min-raise when there are far more Ax hands in RickJay’s range that just fold.
I should also note, it would take some very strange action for me to fold a set on the flop. Like, three-bet pre-flop, KQ9 all hearts, i have bottom set and there’s bet/call/raises in front of me? Sure I fold. Not on an A74 rainbow board; I don’t think I’m folding a set for any amount of money, not at 2/5.
Never, ever show your hand when folding; you don’t want people thinking you can make tough folds. It increases their bluffing frequency against you.
Uh, no. Rickjay never ever has A7 or A4 here. Like, literally never. See below.
I disagree. Let’s see what Seat 3 might have been thinkig.
When RickJay shoves the turn for 230, the pot is $620, and only $230 more to call. Seat 3 only needs to be good about 25% of the time to make this a correct call. So let’s do some range analysis and hand reading.
a) Could RickJay do this with any ace? Sure.
Could RickJayhave the two Ax hands we lose to, A7 or A4? Unlikely, because most players aren’t playing A7o or A4o. They might play A7s or A4s, but the Ac and Ah are on the board, so the only combos available would be A7/4s and A7/4d…but then we look at the board and see the 4 is a spade and the 7 is a diamond. So really there’s only A7s and A4d. Two hands…and we can dismiss one of those hands because Villain has either Ad or As in his hand! And if Hero does have that one specific combo, we -still- have three outs, so we’re not drawing totally dead.
However, people will play AT/AJ/AQ/AK unsuited. Maybe - maybe - A9, but we’ll ignore that for now. That’s 4 combos of AT, four AJ, four AQ and 3 combos of AK that we chop with (Villain has AK in his hand). That’s 15 combos of Ax that we beat or at worst chop with, vs the precisely one combo of A7s or A4s that beats us. Now…would AQ/AJ/AT play like this? At the lower stakes? Absolutely.
b) What other hands would play like this? 56 is open-ended…if I were at the table I’d probably dismiss it, since I assume a draw on an Ace-high board would either flat the flop (he doesn’t expect an Ace to fold)…OR raise much bigger on the flop. And there’s no way 56 shoves the turn when the Ace pairs.
(By the way - I love, love, love the min-raise on the flop. Doesn’t blow weak Aces off the hand and builds a pot up. If there was a flush draw on the board, I think you could make the case for raising bigger to make it look like you’re on a draw, but on this fairly dry, Ace-high board, I think a min-raise is perfect).
c) Could RickJay have two pair? Very unlikely - we already noted that we can probably dismiss A7 and A4, and I don’t think anywould would expect Hero to have 74.
d) Sets? Yes, sets definitely would play like this. AA is obviously impossible. If he does have a set, we’re behind specifically three combos of 44 and three combos of 77, six combos in all. More importantly, we’re behind, but not drawing dead. We have 1 Ace out, 3 outs of either the 7 or the 4 (boat us up without giving RickJay quads) and 3 King outs. 7 outs, or 14-15% equity.
7 combos we lose to (sets and one combo of A7 or A4), with 7 outs to suck out, plus 15 Ax combos we beat vs exactly 1 combo of Ax we lose to, plus I always add a few % just to factor in the ‘random completely spazzed out’ factor (it does happen - I’ve seen people shove boards like this with KK and QQ).
Now - with three Aces accounted for, it is unlikely that RickJay has an Ace, which means I would suspect that sets were more ‘likely’ than AQ/AJ…but there are still more Ax hands possible than pocket pairs. I think this is a profitable call, simply because there are more AQ/AJ that would do this vs sets, and we have enough equtiy to call if Hero does have 44 or 77
Overall, I like how Seat 3 played the hand. He didn’t bomb the flop, because he doesn’t want hands like A8 or A3 to fold. He wants pocket 3s, pocket 5s etc to keep calling. Betting $80 on the flop blows all those hands out.
He continued to bet the turn because he wants to extract money from weaker Ax hands. AQ, AJ, AT. When RickJay jams, he’s getting the pot odds where he pretty much has to call.
RickJay’s jam on the turn was correct, not because ‘I haz full house’ but because he correct read Villain for having AK, and this specifically goes back to the fact that Villain opened pre-flop from UTG, making AK much more likely (although AQ is also possible) - and realizing that he wasn’t going to be able to fold given the pot odds (although I don’t know if RickJay was even thinking about the pot odds he was giving the player).
The more interesting exercise is to think about what RickJay would have done with AQ/AJ. Or what Villain would have done with AQ. AQ was just as likely as AK and would have probably played the hand exactly the same way, but probably has to fold the turn ship now.
When RickJay shoves the turn for $230, the pot is $620, and only $155 more to call. Seat 3 only needs to be good about 19% of the time to make this profitable, making this even more of a correct call. It’s somewhat close even if we think RickJay has 44 or 77 most of the time!
Four BB is a standard raise with a solid hand. With a pair of sevens under the gun, though, it would be foolhardy. A small pair will almost certainly not hold up without improving to a set, so your $20 bet may be money burned if someone re-raises and you find yourself heads up with them. You’d have no logical choice but to fold then. With nine players still to act, it would be incredibly risky and unusual for a player at this skill level to make such a daring bet.
While it is not impossible for him to have 77 here, it is vastly LESS likely than the more conventional raising-under-the-gun hands. You can never know for sure. You can only make estimates based on what’s likely, which is why we call it “a range.”
Well, of course you have to CONSIDER anything. But you have to play the odds, and 77 is just not nearly as likely as AK, AQ suited, or other similar hands.
I mean, if he’s got 77 there, good for him. Great, deceptive play. He’d take all my money. It’s been done to me before and I’ve done it to other people, but you’ve gotta play the odds, and the odds were he didn’t have 77 - not a certainty, but pretty heavily against it. And to answer your other question, had he immediately pushed all in on the flop, I would have absolutely called him. If he has AA or 77 I’ll die on that hill, but I would have interpreted that (very weird) bet as being a guy trying to protect a pair of aces. He COULD be running a reverse psychology move there, but I am not folding what I think is more than 50% likely to be the best hand.
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With pocket pairs, you have a 1/7 chance of flopping a set, or 15%
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Your odds of hitting a set on the flop are a little worse than one in eight, actually - about 11.76% of the time. (Which can be expressed as one in eight, or seven-to-one. It’s confusing.) There is also a 0.25% chance of flopping quads.