Mailbag: Restealing

This week’s Mailbag is a follow-up question to an earlier Mailbag about stack sizes. I gave a short answer to the question in the comments section of that post, but now I want to elaborate a bit:

Q: Thank you for your response, I agree now that setting goals for something that is out of my control is unrealistic. I think one of the questions I was trying to ask is this: “When is it more EV+ to just shove as opposed to raising your regular 2.5BB raise?”

Is there a general rule, if your raise is x% of your stack, then you might as well shove?

Also, what stack size do you find ideal for restealing?

A: The short answer to the question about open-shoving vs. making a small raise is that if your normal raise size would pot commit you such that you could rarely or never fold pre-flop after raising, then you might as well shove. That may depend on factors such as who is behind you and the size of the antes. This is actually an example of my No Such Thing as a Free Hunch principle: if you’re giving away the information that your hand is worth your stack, then you might as well put your whole stack in the pot. Often you’ll be glad to maximize your fold equity, and the few times your hand is so big that you want action, it’s generally not a good idea to tip your hand by doing something differently from how you’d play weaker hands.

As for restealing, we should actually take a moment to define our terms. I think what you’re asking about is a 3-bet-shove, where you go all-in over someone else’s raise. Arguably, any light 3-bet against an opener with a wide range might be considered a resteal. Depending on the size of the original raise, you may have room to 3-bet and fold to a 4-be with as few as 20 BBs.

Just as with open-raising, when any 3-bet would commit you to the pot, it’s generally best just to go all-in then to try to get cute with a tiny 3-bet for 40% of your stack or something. The power of this play, relative to 3-betting with room to fold, is that your opponents can’t make you fold pre-flop with a 4-bet, so re-bluffing is not an option for them. Even if they think that you are light, there’s nothing they can do about it if they themselves are light; they have to fold. Thus, learning to resteal well is critical to nursing a 15-20 BB stack successfully. When you get shorter than that, you won’t have much fold equity, and it becomes more and more important to shove hands that have good equity when called.

The EV of a resteal is a combination of showdown equity and fold equity. The more equity you believe your hand will have against your opponent’s calling range, the less fold equity you need. Generally the larger your shove, the more fold equity you have.