0,25/0,5 K6

Hi Rantrave,

nice post. You may benifit from providing your thought process on each street. After all, in LHE we only have 3 options on any decision. This gives us a strong probability of being correct by chance alone. In otherwords, without knowing why one option is correct its difficult to justify being confident that we can make the correct decision in the future.

On to the hand,

Preflop you're decision to continue is good. K6o has low playability, but against a tight CO range you have 37% equity - enough to continue with a call.

You flop a pair and this gives you a marginal edge against his preflop range. I like your decision to check/raise.

Things do get interesting on the turn. One way to decide whether or not to call down is to consider your opponents cost to bluff. If he were drawing dead on the turn, a bluff raise and river barrel would need to induce folds from us about 34% of the time for him to profit. In other words, we certainly should not be folding 34% of the time against an unknown - it makes us exploitable.

Here are some questions for you to think about:

If we did fold our flopped 2nd pair, how often would we be folding? Would the amount that we fold change depending on the river card? Does our decision change depending on the river card?

The answers depend on how often and with which hands you are check raising the flop. In answering these questions consider your flop raising range.

Hi! Nice post, however I have som questions:

Originally posted by datsmahname
If he were drawing dead on the turn, a bluff raise and river barrel would need to induce folds from us about 34% of the time for him to profit. In other words, we certainly should not be folding 34% of the time against an unknown - it makes us exploitable.

If he bluffs then it's obviously more profitable for him if we fold a lot, but does this mean that we should fold around the bottom (for example) 30% of our range (as long as it's below 34%)? Furthermore, since any pair probably not is included in this bottom part of our range then we should call down all pairs?

Or how do we know in which part of our range a particular hand is on this precise board? I mean, if we start with our range preflop for defending BB vs CO pfr, then hit middle pair top kicker, how high in our range of the total hands we could have had in this position are we? For example between top 25% or? I'm only guessing here. And if this number could be made more exact then it might be helpful.

Originally posted by datsmahname
Here are some questions for you to think about:

If we did fold our flopped 2nd pair, how often would we be folding? Would the amount that we fold change depending on the river card? Does our decision change depending on the river card?

The answers depend on how often and with which hands you are check raising the flop. In answering these questions consider your flop raising range.

Is it correct to have a flop raising range consisting of all pocket pairs, 6x, Qx and some strong flush draws (like A and K high)? How does this lead to the answer of how often we would be folding if we fold our flopped 2nd pair? I guess that our decision does not change much depending on the river card because ranges in this situation are wide, except that flush-completing cards are the worst.

Hey fearcrow, I won't stop you in mid-stream because i think you'll be able to figure most or all of this out. I'll check this thread again tomorrow to see how things are going.

@datsmahname
Hello,

I play flatcall preflop beacuse I should have enough equity to defend this vs unknown 35% openraise from CO. Due to fact he is unknown but he dont look fishy I think giving him here 30-35% its quite enough good.

As played.

Flop for me its check/raise. I will check/raise here with Kx, 6x, 2x, :diamond: draws, and i think with bdstr8+bdfs like J :spade:T :spade:.

Im still betting his all big aces like AK, AJ, AT and stuff like that, also this board is heavy with fsdraws, so I can indunce some colddowns from weaker aces like A2s with bdfsdraws and stuff. Maybe even KJo, depending how much he is showdownbound.

The Turn is so much heavy in draws that I think folding directly here my 2ndPair ll be too weak in the beginning of our playing against each other.

And yes my folding on the River depending on the card. If he raises Qx im dead , but if he raise for free showdown with his draws I have to call on blank river, fold on & Ax card River, due to fact then i start to lose all majority of his Aces.

Hi Rant,

Sounds like you're check/raising this flop a lot against an unknown CO range. Do you ever play check/call on this flop here? What range of hands? To me it seems like your check/call range could be very weak and we will be folding many turn cards or making unprofitable calls. Something to think about.

Does an unknown tend to raise 30-35% of the time from the CO?

Ok I think I have some of the answers now with Equilab.

With the following ranges:
CO: 44+,A2s+,K6s+,Q7s+,J8s+,T9s,98s,A6o+,K8o+,Q9o+,J9o+ (30%, standard PS TAG)
BB: 66-22,A8s-A2s,K2s+,Q3s+,J6s+,T6s+,96s+,85s+,75s+,64s+,53s+,A9o-A2o,K8o+,Q9o+,J9o+,T9o,98o

We will have a pair 43.61% of the time on the turn and stronger hands 3.26%, so we are at top 46.87% of our range right? If we fold our flopped 2nd pair then we would fold 46.87%, correct?
This should mean that we would never fold a pair. Because if we certainly should not be folding 34% of the time against an unknown, then we need to continue with at least top 66% of our range.

The question here is exactly how light we should call down? We are getting the odds 7.2:1 vs a free showdown raise, so in that case we need to be good in 1/8.2=12.2% of the time right? But how do we know how often it's good to fold?

Furthermore if CO bets river we are getting the worse odds 9.2:1 right? In that case we need to be good 9.8% of the time.

Does it sound reasonable to play something like this:
c/r flop: all pocket pairs, 6x, Qx and some strong flush draws (like A and K high).
c/c flop: all other flush draws, Ax, backdoor draws.

Originally posted by datsmahname
Hi Rant,

Sounds like you're check/raising this flop a lot against an unknown CO range. Do you ever play check/call on this flop here? What range of hands? To me it seems like your check/call range could be very weak and we will be folding many turn cards or making unprofitable calls. Something to think about.

Does an unknown tend to raise 30-35% of the time from the CO?

I make assumption that, If unknown enemy is playing few tables, he knows more about poker then standard recreational player, thats why I give him a sign he's better then average weaker player.

If I do that I also make assumption he is good player, agresive one, and plays like me or better then me. beacuse of that I give them early 30-35% on CO, BU 55+%.

I would check/call this flop with Ace highs with kicker higher then 2 other cards like w/ A7o, A8o, etc. With weak and small pp. Also I will check call here hand like K :spade:J :spade:.

Hi fearcrow,

I noticed one thing very quickly... K6o isn't actually in your BB hand range. Definitely going to suggest another look there. It takes a while to check your post for consistency, but its worth it.

However, if we opened that range up just a tad then K6o is probably close to the top 25% of our preflop hand range. In our flop check/raise hand range its going to be maybe the top 50% of our hand range on the turn. Close to a mid-strength hand on this board texture.

We'll improve our decent draws maybe 20% of the time and we have these draws roughly 20% of the time (so villain has ~16% fold equity against our draws). 10% of the time our range will hit 2 pair'n'stuff (so he has 90% fold equity against our 2nd pair or worse, about 27% fold equity against our weak/marignal made hands).

Effectively, we are looking at folding the river over 40% of the time if we check/raise strong draws and 2nd pair or better then bet/call turn, fold river unimproved with busted draws or 2nd pair or worse.

If we include bottom pair which rantrave mentioned about earlier it'll be more hands.

Hi datsmahname,

Yes the ranges were a little bit on the tight side because I used the preselected ranges in Equilab which are based on the bronze chart for FR.

Btw I can't see how you calculated the fold equity and why we are looking at folding the river over 40% of the time if we check/raise strong draws and 2nd pair or better then bet/call turn, fold river unimproved with busted draws or 2nd pair or worse. If you could try to explain this it would be great.

sure, lets say 50% of our hand range is 2nd pair or worse AND draws on the turn.

20% of the total is draws that improve 20% of the time

30% is made hands (approximately 2nd pair) which improve roughly 10% of the time.

If we do not improve then we fold.

So, 80% of 20 is 16% of our total range. 90% of 30 is 27% of our total range. Add them up and we get 43% of our flop check/raise hands which play bet/call turn - fold river.

Its going to be a shade lower since some of our draws can improve to top pair, but we can see already that 40% allows our opponent to have a profitable bluff.

My guess is that there are other factors which kind of make the situation worse for us if our opponent knows our tendencies. For instance, consider the hands with which we bet/call the turn. Once we call his raise we're actually folding more than 43% of the time because the strongest of our flop check/raise range would actually 3-bet the turn.

The question becomes what should we do about it? If we want to have an inexploitable range then we can tighten up our flop riase range against an unknown or we can call down more often with marignal made hands. Another option is to research our database to see how often unknown opponents who open raise preflop are bluffing when they take this line on similar board textures. This can be difficult on its own if you have a small database of hands. Also, just knowing how to use the information you have is a challenge. A third option is to ask other players and combine peoples experience to figure out which is best, but in tougher spots peoples experience becomes less reliable.

In reality its not usually so complicated. We can just do all three to some extent and try to come up with the best option.

@Dathsmahname
So If I understand correctly, x/r here with K6o isn't a spew. But it's more adviced to have stronger x/r range vs unknowk, and make more colddowns. And my folding should only depend on how strong his Turn raising range is and I think it maybe is?

Hey rant, Yeah this is a pretty good summary sir!

Against unknowns we can have a lot of questions about how to proceed when different situations come up. Experience does help, but being prepared is more practical.

If we value raise wide and thin on dry board textures without a plan for how to proceed vs late street aggression then it is very likely that we can make mistakes. Folding too often is not uncommon.

As a key point, in this spot we should probably continue raising for value with SOME 6x hands (K6 is still a good candidate). Getting thin value is important. The concern is that if we have LOTS of these hands and then fold all of them, this can create problems for us.

So yeah, if we consider the pot size and can estimate our winning changes against our opponent this is one way to decide if folding is correct. Implied odds help too. Collecting an extra bet when we improve can turn a close call into a profitable one. However, making very accurate assumptions is important so that we aren't overvaluing or undervaluing our hand strength.