What’s Your Play? A LAG Picks Up a Hand Results

Not too much controversy surrounding this week’s “What’s Your Play?”, but interestingly I think it nevertheless generated some of the best comments. Nearly everyone advocated folding, so let’s start by considering the alternatives:

Shoving

Hero risks, roughly, 800 to win 1750, so we’d need 46% equity against his calling range less whatever fold equity we may have in a $250 pot. Pokerodox suggests a calling range of {AQ+,JJ+} which in my opinion is overly optimistic concerning how often Hero will be flipping and still gives us only 40% equity.

A lot of you rightly pointed out that this sort of passive, recreational player is not liable to 3-bet light, neither as a bluff nor for thin value. As Nate puts it, such players “tend to fight back against aggression by calling, not raising”. So despite Hero’s wild image, I think it’s correct to put Villain on a narrow, strong range. Prabhat makes a good point that Hero’s image might even be an argument in favor of Villain having a tight range, since with a hand like 99 or AQ he would fear a 4-bet and so be unwilling to 3-bet.

This all adds up to Hero having very little fold equity and even in a best case scenario insufficient showdown equity to shove.

Small 4-Bet

A few commenters suggested raising to something like 250 and folding to a shove. Cited advantages of this line included getting the information of whether Villain is willing to shove and taking the initiative to enable better post-flop decisions.

Honestly, I think we have the information we need to know we’re beat already. Villain may not even have AK in his range, and if he does, we don’t know for sure that he won’t shove it. I’ll come back to Prabhat’s comment again that Villain may not have a raise-folding range at all.

I also don’t see how initiative is going to lead to outplaying Villain later. It’s helpful only for bluffing, and given what a strong range we put Villain on and how bad Hero’s image is, bluffing should not be a big part of our strategy.

So while it’s good to consider all of your options, I don’t think this one holds water.

Calling

This is my favorite option so far, because, as answer20 says, “we can … put the same amount of money into the pot (or not) after the Flop” that we would have put in with a 3-bet, but with the added information of what the flop looks like. Given that we have position and a decent idea of Villain’s range, we ought to be able to outplay him postflop. Thus, there’s not a lot of reason to force further action preflop with little or no fold equity.

Most of the value in calling, of course, will come from flopping sets. Joe Bono lays out the applicable math, determining that if we were to stack Villain every time, we’d be getting 9.3-to-1 on a call and would be 7.5-to-1 to flop a set.

Sound good? Joe adds, “There’s definitely some discounting that needs to be done here for the times that there’s a set over set situation and for when our opponent doesn’t pay us off with the AK part of his range.” The other important consideration is that a set does not have 100% equity against an overpair. Even in that best case scenario where we get it in against AA on a T-high rainbow flop, Villain will still suck out 8 – 10% of the time.

My own rule of thumb to account for these risks is that I need to expect an average return of ten times my investment in order to set-mine (note that this is NOT the same as merely having ten times my investment in the effective stacks). We’re a little shy of that number, at 9.3-to-1, but perhaps we can recoup a bit of equity with the occasional +EV call or bluff post-flop?

Honestly, I don’t see how. Even with the advantages of position and a clear idea of Villain’s pre-flop range, I can’t see anything but folding to a bet on any flop that doesn’t contain a T. I’m also not confident we can move him off of KK or QQ on an A-high board.

It’s close – to be honest I wish I’d put a little less in his stack for the sake of this post just to make it less ambiguous – but I don’t think we can turn a profit by calling. BRaven spells it out really well, so I’ll let him sum it up:

“The problem I see with playing post flop against such a tight range is that we don’t know precisely how tight it is. if it was QQ+, then we can play profitably by set mining and bluffing at A high boards, the rest of the time giving up.

However if his range is JJ+, AK maybe some AQ. Then we know not to try and bluff A high boards and instead call when our TT is an overpair ie. (a), raise with a set and fold the rest of the time.

Either of those strategies are profitable enough to make a call’s EV>0 when we know precisely the range we face. But we don’t know that and therefore can’t profitably bluff at A high boards or call when we have an overpair.”

Results

I folded.