Excerpt Available for Professional No-Limit Hold’em

I like it. I would like to carry that thought out with the 6BB raise and see how it would play HU postflop.

That’s a well-written excerpt. I like the conversational style. I hope and expect that it is representative of the book as a whole.

I’m sure this must be another dumb noob question but here goes…

The example has 2 ways of playing the hand. When leading out with 6BB bet pre-flop, you end up with fewer chips behind on the turn so it’s profitable to go all in.

With 3BB pre-flop, you “probably have to fold if your opponent bets on the turn”.

But why? If you re-raise all in then you are all in on the turn, just like in the 6BB example. The cards are the same either way, you are all in either way, so why does it matter how you get there?

As I understand it, we’re raising to 6BB with 94BB behind with the intention of getting it all-in.

Won’t this leave us open to set farming behind us? Aren’t we essentially giving small pairs odss + ~52BB to make this call?

Ed,

I have a problem understanding why you say: “2. The remaining stack sizes aren’t LARGE enough for you to call a bet on the turn and then see what happens.”

Shouldn’t it be “… SMALL enough…”?

If my opponents goes all-in you expect him to have a better hand than KK, so it’s MY stack that I risk and not HIS stack that is most likely to be won by me. So my risk (my stack) is too big compared to the pot, putting me in a tough situation. If I only had one dollar left (= small stack) it would be an easy call.

That’s why I wonder why you write that stacks are n’t LARGE enough to justify a call.

Hello ED,now I know what REM means I think I will Cancel my order …….Joking honest.Since reading your articles my results have been transformed.

JJS,

you asked: “The cards are the same either way, you are all in either way, so why does it matter how you get there?”

I don’t think this is a “dumb noob question”. I am much too noob myself to give you a smart answer, but here’s my 2 cents:

Actually it DOES matter how you get there. Why? Because the risk/reward ratio is different, both for you and your opponent. In the 3BB example the pot is smaller and your last bet is bigger => bet/pot is bigger than in the 6BB example meaning you risk more
Once you are all in, the pot is almost as big in both examples (yet still bigger in the 6BB szenario), but the size of the call is bigger for your opponent in the 3BB alternative, leading to a higher risk/reward ratio for your opponent.

So what the heck???

Well, there’s something called “negative self-selection” (in a nutshell: in theory, only people who know that they have a risk higher than the insurance premium should buy an insurance which would make offering the insurance unprofitable in the first place).

Back to poker: when you lay bad odds, only premium hands will call and you will “certainly” lose. On the other hand you will win the pot in all the other cases when the opponent folds.

The trick is to find the “right” balance where
a) enough “bad hands” call your bet and lose or fold right away and
b) the cases where bad hands draw out or you run right into a better hand than yours.

You should concentrate on NOT laying the right odds for the bad hands to draw out on you. If your opponents call that, they make a mistake that costs them money and you gain.
Driving out the great hands with huge bets is very difficult (you need very weak opponents) and you will most likely lose money, because your opponents will still call you often enough with their great hands.

Now back to the hand: in the 3BB example you lay odds MUCH too bad for worse hands, so they’ll fold too often leaving only great hands that call you. You want to get more bad hands to call you so you should reduce the bet size.

But if you don’t go all-in then you are vulnerable to a reraise, that again is very likely ONLY to come from hands that beat you. Now you are the one getting odds too bad to call (2 outs for a set).

The only way out of this is NOT by lowering the bet, but by increasing the pot to get a lower bet/pot (=risk/reward) ratio. That’s what you do when you raise to 6BB preflop!

Hope I could help a little…

Grenzy,

Not to put words in his mouth but I think what Ed means is that you cannot call a bet with the intention of seeing what happens and making your move on the river. If you call a bet on the turn you won’t have enough money left over for that option. As you mentioned, if the stacks were smaller you could actually safely get it in on the turn.

Ed, if this is fuzzy in anyway feel free to correct me.

I really enjoyed this though. It already has opened up some new thinking for me. It has me thinking of considering more things when I size my preflop raise. I think this is an often misunderstood concept, imho.

Nothing is more frustrating then not getting better….

Ed,
you are a genius.

JJS,

…snip…
But why? If you re-raise all in then you are all in on the turn, just like in the 6BB example. The cards are the same either way, you are all in either way, so why does it matter how you get there?
…snip…

In the first line, the villain hasn’t put all that much at risk when shove in. You’ve taken all the risk in the hand. The villain will only call with a hand that beats you and doesn’t lose all that much otherwise.

In the second line, especially the check raise all-in variant, the villain is the one taking the risks, not you. By the time you’ve informed the villain that you actually do have a big hand and weren’t just c-betting, he has put a lot of chips in the middle. By manipulating the pot size, you’ve manipulated who is forced to take the bigger risks.

Thanks Todd and Greyzy I think I get it now. Poker is a pretty tough game to get your brain around, especially for perpetual beginners like me. I hope someday I will get some time to play more often but right now it’s not so easy…

If one page from the book causes this many comments, I wonder what will happen when the book comes out?

what happens in example 1 if you get raised on the flop? I know this is read dependent but, assume villian is a solid player. Fold?

Example 2, flop raise, you would be too committed and have to call?

I think betting so close to the pot leaves u pot commited, and you only get called/raised when you are beat most of the time.

would betting half the pot or 2/3 of the pot be better because it is good enough to let u know where u r in the hand.

btw, what happened to big pots with big hands, small pots with small hands.

Hi Brian,

I was talking about this hand with a friend of mine and he was bothered by the post flop play as well. To me, the key here is:

…snip…
The button plays loosely when he has position, so his range is wide. However, if he gets all-in, you expect him to have a better hand than kings.
…snip…

Give that assumption, there’s 18BB in the pot pre-flop, You bet another 18BB and the villain raises to something like 75BB total. Right now, you’re in the pot for 24BB and the villain is committed to being all-in. If you were to ship it in, you would be putting 76 into a ~205BB total pot. I don’t think you are married to this pot, but I think you need to refine your range estimate because the villain is committed. If you have more than 40ish % equity against the villains range, the it’s a call. From those 2 sentences above, it’s hard to know if he’s capable of making the play with 89, 86, JJ, AT, QT or other hands like that. If we can rely on the notion that if the villain gets all-in, he has KK beat, then we probably need to fold.

Just curious…

Did you, Matt, or Sunny choose the excerpt?
If not, what would you have chosen instead?
Also, did Mason pay any royalty for use of that excerpt in the magazine?

I understand how in this example we’re better off with the 6BB case because we’re charging more for the villains to hit the flop, and will discourage them from bluffing post flop if we’re pot committed. I think the hard part with this example is figuring out preflop how many villains are likely to cold call a particular raise, (we want at least one), and what that implies given their stack sizes, which will probably vary by a good bit.

I’m looking forward to the book which I’ve already pre-ordered.

What troubles me is the implications that raising KK for 6bb preflop has for your overall preflop strategy. After all, if you only ever do it with AA-KK, you’ll be quite easy to read. ;-P

To my mind (but I do play way too much short-stack ratholing nonsense), if you are not sure how to play KK in the above example - either because you are new to the table or outmatched - it would be a lot better to just buy-in for 50bb. That way you can make the same 3bb with KK as with all your other hands yet deny your tricky / set mining opponents proper implied odds.

Damn, could you make me any more curious? ;-P