When to lead flop against the preflop aggressor
Low connected flops are often the best type to take the initiative as the preflop defender, if your opponent is a thinking player.
As I have mentioned a few times I am working on a GTO book with Dara O'Kearney and posting some of the more digestible nuggets of information here along the way.
Today we have an example of when the preflop defender should lead out on the flop against a preflop aggressor. I have cherry picked a particularly effective example that you can pretty much replicate right away at the tables.
In this example, in a 100 big blind cash game, the UTG player opens with this range:
And the Big Blind defends with this range:
The flop is 6♣5♦4♥.
In terms of range advantage this is a straight 50/50 split in terms of equity. UTG has more strong hands in general including all the overpairs, but they have no nutted hands and miss this flop a lot with broadway high cards. The Big Blind, however, has lots of misses but crucially all the super strong hands.
The Big Blind is the only person with 87 and 32 for a flopped straight as well as all the combinations of sets, two pair and one pair. They also have every type of draw and combo draw that has a lot of equity and playability on this flop. For example, a hand like 7♦4♦ or 6♦3♦ both have over 69% equity against UTG's range with one pair, an open ended straight draw and a backdoor flush draw.
There is such a gulf in the number of nutted hands each player has that the correct strategy here is for the Big Blind to actually lead out 81.1% of the time for a small, 33% pot, sizing.
They lead out with all their hands and just have a small check back range. For practical purposes they can probably lead out small 100% of the time here.
When they do lead out, this is how UTG responds:
They have to call 80% of the time and fold the rest, they only raise 0.5% of the time so practically they never raise here. They cannot even raise with their best hands like a set of sixes, because they could still run into a better hand or a combo draw that has good equity against them. The lack of nutted hands in UTG’s range has forced them to play passively and protect their calling range with big hands like sets.
This is a great example of the power of nutted advantage. For all practical purposes UTG usually has the best hand here and the Big Blind usually misses, but the fact that the Big Blind could have a very strong hand and we know UTG almost never does is a very significant driver of the action. Against a weak calling station player UTG could still raise here but against a thinking player it would be a huge mistake.
Do you lead out here? Let us know in the comments:
