Above, I don’t mean to criticize any individual play or player, after all, every poker hand is a different situation.
But I believe that KK is entirely too strong a hand against most player’s range of “pushable” hands, that I think you are giving up a good bit of equity by folding pre-flop.
I used to work in a software company where we had a lot of people from foreign countries. One guy from India joined us for a poker evening. We had to write the order of the hands on the whiteboard for him.
He kicked ass. I’ve never seen anybody get cards like that. Do you know how sad it is to lose to someone who talks about having “a pair of Q’s?”
And yes, I’m sure we were not being hustled.
Oh my no, quite the opposite. If there are players at the table who are much, much worse than you and everyone else, you have to go out of your way to play pots against them, preferably heads-up. That means knowingly going in with inferior starting hands before the flop because you have such a big advantage postflop. This is particularly true if you have an idea of what *kinds *of mistakes your opponent will tend to make postflop, but even just knowing that he’s totally clueless is good enough to make a special effort to play against him.
So, for example, if you’re in late position and one of these god-awful players limps in to your right as the first to enter the pot, and **if **a raise from you at this point stands a fair chance of forcing everyone else to fold, then you should you raise with a very wide range of hands (anything that’s not *total *trash, really: 97o and K5s are raising hands here). The terrible player is going to lose all of his money, and soon. You have to do everything you can to improve the odds that he loses it to you. Doing so successfully makes a huge difference to your long-term profitability.
The one concession you should make in the opposite direction is to forgo what you perceive to be very small edges for very large amounts of money. Against a typical player, you should generally be happy to risk 100 BBs when you figure you have a 1% edge. Against a terrible player, however, you can pass up that high-variance proposition because you can be confident that you’ll get a better opportunity to put your money in against this player (though this wouldn’t be the case if you knew that he would rebuy if he lost, which is rarely the case with awful players). So, for example, if the clueless villain goes all-in on the flop and you’re just barely getting more than your price from the pot to justify calling with your straight draw, you should probably fold.
I’ve folded KK exactly once preflop (IIRC), and was right to do so, but generally speaking it’s hard to cost yourself much equity at all by treating it like the nuts, and most players (myself included) probably should. Most likely, for every time the guy who “obviously” has AA actually flips them over, there will be another time when you’ve misread the opponent or the table dynamics and will wind up feeling very foolish when he shows AK or QQ. Maybe one time in a thousand the hand will unfold in such a way that you *ought *to fold KK preflop. Probably less frequently than that.
Interesting comments, drillrod and VarlosZ, and I must admit that I barely considered the possibility of a semi-bluff (pushing with JJ, QQ, AK) by either of the other players. In fact, that was just what one of them was doing, as it was the player with QQ who pushed. However, it was really the other player who I was worried about, as he had re-re-raised the pot, which is a bit different from just pushing all-in as one is much easier to call than the other - in other words, pushing all-in is more likely to be a semi-bluff. I also had a slight read on the player with AA, having played with him for a couple of hours.
I was probably guilty of thinking about how I would play the hand if I were one of the other players, as well. Personally, if I were in a cash game and look down at (say) AK or JJ having seen the pot raised twice, I would be most likely to call or fold. Thinking about it now, call is probably not a good play with those hands here unless this will guarantee being heads-up after the flop (possibly not even then), which it wouldn’t in this case. On the other hand, I’m not sure I want to raise, either - if I do and someone pushes, I probably have to fold, or reluctantly call. With this in mind, I thought that at least one of them had to have AA, as that was about the only hand I would re-re-raise/push with in that situation.
The fact that I was up against 2 strong plays certainly helped me to my decision. Had the original raiser folded, I would probably have pushed or at least called, and lost a lot of money - the flop contained an ace and the turn brought a king! I guess it’s one of those plays that can only be judged by its results.
Does the fact that there were 2 players pushing/re-raising instead of one change your assessment?