From the outset, Andy Bloch’s chapter on pre-flop play for the Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide: Tournament Edition suffers from a mistaken objective. Bloch proposes to study pre-flop strategy like chess openings, which I take to mean that he is going to develop a coherent set of balanced raising, re-raising, and calling ranges from various positions. As with chess openings, there certainly could be more than one balanced, effective, and profitable strategy.
Bloch assembles his strategy, however, with all the wrong considerations in mind. Although he acknowledges that “many things can change the value of the hands, including whether there will be further betting, stack sizes, and whether you are betting or calling,” he nonetheless advises giving each possible starting hand an exact ranking in a vacuum. His own ranking system consists of a few tweaks to how the various two-card combinations shake out in a game where the small blind is forced to move all in or fold. The relevance of a hand’s performance in such a contrived game to its playability in various tournament situations is never articulated.
When discussing how to use these rankings to make decisions, Bloch’s central concern is the game-theoretic aspect of stealing and re-stealing. His criterion for a successful open raising strategy is taking the blinds more than 50% of the time (assuming no antes a 3BB raise), and then he works backwards from there to determine calling and reraising frequencies “with the starting assumption that opponents are going to call or reraise with half the hands that you’re playing with [sic]. Basically, opponents are going to call when they think they can beat your average hand.”
This reasoning ignores the most critical consideration of NLHE: the money each player has behind. With sufficiently deep stacks, players need to consider what they stand to win or lose in various situations, how they might bluff or get bluffed, and generally whether they can expect to get the better of it on future streets. Even with more shallow stacks, the decision to call should be based on a hand’s equity relative to the opener’s range, not some pre-determined frequency. And there are reasons to raise pre-flop, such as improving your position, isolating a weak player, and building a pot when in position, that have nothing to do with stealing the blinds.
Bloch does make some concession by showing how each starting hand stacks up against several different ranges in his jam-or-fold game. But the absence of any consideration of implied odds is repeatedly and glaringly obvious. For instance, the author asks, “if you advertised that you were going to play A-A, K-K, and nothing else, how do you think your opponents would adjust? They would play against you only with the 50 percent best hands you are playing: A-A.”
In a deep-stacked situation, that’s one of the worst strategies one could adopt. Depending on how the advertising nit was responding to post-flop aggression, one would probably want to play any pocket pair and possibly suited connectors. Calling with any two cards could even be preferable to playing only and exactly Aces in a situation where an opponent’s range is so narrow. Yet Bloch advises against calling an UTG raiser with 66 when you are UTG+1 because this is in the bottom half of the hands that the opener is playing. Although it’s true that you wouldn’t want to play 66 for showdown value alone against a player raising his top 11% of hands, there are plenty of situations where you would want to play it for set value.
To the extent that Bloch permits post-flop considerations to affect pre-flop strategy, he does so only in a way that muddles the issue further. He seems to consider the standard flop continuation bet a liability to the pre-flop raiser, as when he says, “If you are in the big blind, you can call more rasies because… you benefit, at least for one betting round, by having quasi-position on the raiser. If you call the raise and check the flop, most players who raised before the flop will bet.” If the pre-flop raiser is particularly bad at employing continuation bets, this might be an advantage, but elsewhere the article tends to assume opponents who are playing reasonably well, especially from a game-theoretic perspective.
Calling pre-flop out of position against an opponent who will use flop bets well to apply pressure is generally going to be more, not less, costly in the long run. In fact, the discounted price of seeing the flop is rarely sufficient to compensate for positional disadvantage. Yet Bloch advises that, in order to prevent late position raisers from stealing your blinds indiscriminately, “You should play every hand that the raiser could have in that position and maybe a few more.”
Towards the end of the article, Bloch does admit that, “When there is the possibility of more betting, the percentages are just general guidelines.” This throw-away disclaimer hardly does justice to the importance of post-flop play when considering a pre-flop strategy. After all, the article is not presented as solely or even primarily a guide to very short-stacked situations where one or more players are getting all in preflop. Thus, there is almost always the possibility of more betting, and this should have been a central consideration for the preceding portion of the chapter.
When it comes to handling pre-flop all in situations, most of the chapter’s advice is quite good. In particular, the charts detailing how to push, fold, and call correctly out of the blinds is very helpful. Folding too much in late-game tournament situations is a very common and expensive mistake, and Bloch does an admirable job of explaining why and what to do about it. But his chapter purports to be about pre-flop play in general, and when there is money behind, the strategy he outlines is fundamentally flawed.
You’re an insightful fellow.