I got a very good comment/question from Christoph on a recent post about a huge bluff that I averted when I rivered a pair:
“I’ve been thinking a bit about this hand and I’m wondering about how you’d play it if you were the player holding the aces. It sure depends a lot on reads, but let’s just say that you’re playing a good thinking player that is able to make big bluffs. I tried to come up with a way to defend against such a bluff, but I don’t really see any. I mean, you can start check/calling on the turn and river, but that way you might loose some value from 7x, 8x and overpairs. On the other hand if you bet and get raised, I don’t like any option. You can fold, but AA is still pretty strong considered your whole range you could be double barreling, so b/fing seems exploitable. However if you b/c, then I can’t see how you can not stack off on almost any river, if you think villain is capable of a big bluff. But that way you’ll loose 300BB with one pair pretty often as well.”
The key here, as with many of the trickiest situations in poker, is to realize that what you do with other hands in your range is at least as important as how you play this one. Many of the stickiest spots you can get yourself into in a poker game involve playing the middle of your range out of position when deep stacked.
I’ll start by saying that against a lot of opponents, I’m folding AA here on the turn. I’m guessing that many people’s first reaction to this will be, “But that’s such a strong hand! Isn’t it exploitable to fold something so close to the top of your range?”
But let’s unpack what a “strong hand” really is. Yes, if you listed all of my possible holdings in order from strongest poker hand to weakest poker hand, AA would be towards the top. But there’s no magical prize for having a hand at the top of a hand rankings chart. In this context, a strong hand is one with good equity against my opponent’s range. It would take a pretty aggressive dynamic for someone to be raise-calling worse than AA for value in this spot. Against a pot-sized raise on this turn, AA is a bluff-catcher, and not a good one. It has little chance of improving on the river, few outs against my opponent value range, no blockers, and a lot of vulnerability to semi-bluffs.
The bottom line is that there are a lot of hands I’d call or shove on this turn before I’d continue with AA. I’m thinking of stuff like T9 and Ahxh. If I thought a guy’s range was wide enough that I needed more hands to continue with on the turn after I exhausted legitimate value hands and draws, AA might make it into my range, but most people aren’t bluffing often enough to warrant that.
The stacks aren’t as deep, but here’s a hand I played today that illustrates this point. Think about how you’d play a marginal overpair with no draw, something like Jc Js here, especially if you were deeper. When I’m calling this flop and especially when I’m shoving this turn, I’d much rather have AQ with a flush draw than bare Jacks, even though the latter is the “better” hand.
Full Tilt No-Limit Hold’em, $10.00 BB (8 handed) – Full-Tilt Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com
Hero (MP2) ($2242)
CO ($1000)
Button ($1015)
SB ($1005)
BB ($2103)
UTG ($1137)
UTG+1 ($582)
MP1 ($1386.50)
Preflop: Hero is MP2 with A
, Q
3 folds, Hero bets $35, CO calls $35, 3 folds
Flop: ($85) 9
, 2, 9 (2 players)
Hero bets $66, CO raises to $150, Hero calls $84
Turn: ($385) 3 (2 players)
Hero checks, CO bets $240, Hero raises to $2057 (All-In), 1 fold
Total pot: $865 | Rake: $3
Results:
Hero didn’t show A, Q (nothing).
Outcome: Hero won $862
I think the point is that when you line hands up to rank them, as you suggest, you want to rank them according to their equity against your opponent’s range for continuing, rather than ranking them by their actual hand value? This would surely put Ah6h ahead of AA in your prior example, as well as AdQs ahead of JsJc in this example, I would think…same goes for a situation like AdKd being more favorable to 3b shove a 5s5d2s flop than 44.
Exactly right. Especially in the deep hand, I think the turn raiser’s range is polarized to air and monsters. If we jam turn, he folds the former and calls the latter. To avoid exploitability, we have to shove a large enough % of our range that Villain can’t bluff raise an unbalanced % of the time. When choosing which hands will make up that % of hands we 3-bet shove, we should evaluate hands based on their equity vs. Villain’s calling range, not based on their absolute strength. So Ah6h will perform far better than AA, etc.
I’ve only just seen this post (gotta serve a few days in the army atm, someone over here thought it was a good idea to make that mandatory…). Thanks a lot for elaborating, really appreciate it. So, when you’re 3-bet shoving you’re only gonna get called by 2 pair and better and a draw has better equity vs those than AA. So you make up for the theoretically exploitable play of folding a (in a absolute sense) strong hand here by 3bet-shoving with (in an absolute sense) weaker hands that do have better equity against villain’s calling range. Neat!
Sounds like you’ve got it just right! Just curious, into which army are you getting conscripted?
I live in Switzerland and over here it’s basically mandatory for every male to serve for (at least) 260 days total. There is a loophole though: Instead of going to the army you can do 1.5 times the days in social work, like helping in hospitals, homes where the old people live, working with a forester… in general stuff that helps the community as a whole. Nowadays you only have to send a request and they allow you to do that, but when I was getting recruited for the army you had to do an interview in front of some psychiatrists and guys from the army and explain to them that you couldn’t serve in the army cause that’s against your ideals and your conscience. The other loophole is when you have medical issues, but “unfortunately” I don’t.