6 thoughts on “All In With Alec – ep.09 | Live poker cash game strategy | Knowing When To Fold In Poker | #Live”

1. On this first hand, let's say villain does have AA or KK and intends to check-call or check-raise to protect his range, buy relative position, etc. But everyone checks and now the turn puts up a pile of draws. Playing villain's value hands (whatever they are) here as a check-raise is dangerous, because in a game where pots go five-ways, it's quite likely that someone who picked up such a draw would play it passively rather than stab. So villain loses value against those hands when it checks through (the turn is the only street he can get that value on, to boot.) He probably would have expected the marginal made hands to bet the flop, so if I had a value hand in villain's spot on the turn, I would have bet out. What inclines hero towards a turn and/or river call is that it is quite possible villain turned some kind of draw, sensed weakness in the field, and decided to take the line that applied maximum pressure.

   Now, reasons to fold: Bluffing off 200bb into any multiway pot, using any line, is dangerous. The same reasons he would pot control his made hands are also reasons for him not to stack off with air. Loose passive donkeys love to slow play. Villain does have to worry that someone checked back a flopped set or two pairs, that they peeled with bottom pair and then hit trips on the river, etc. So, yeah, there aren't a lot of thick value hands that make sense: the 4 combos of 99 and TT that are left, sure, but that's only four. What's more worrying/likely is that villain takes the check-raise turn line with an overpair and range-merges because he believes that his opponents' ranges consist of a bunch of turned draws and marginal made hands, and he thinks that someone with such a hand will very likely stab. If this is the case, then check-raising makes sense because you force the marginal made hands into the spot that the hero is in, and all of the draws you force to pay a high price to draw, and you might even induce those draws to 3-bet jam on the turn, thinking they could "maximize their fold equity." Risky, but anything the opponent is doing with hands other than TT and 99 here is pretty risky. Checking the turn also gives villain the opportunity to escape from his over-pair if it goes bet-raise-jam or something like that (because the flopped sets are no longer giving away free diamonds.)

   I think in hero's spot I would have checked this on the turn, which would have sidestepped this issue. We have second pair. There are still some monsters under the bed multiway, and checking also allows us to induce/call a bet on the river, or if the river happens to be a king, we can cooler someone like the initial raiser who pumped the brakes with AK and now goes for one street. Playing it as a check-call on the river guarantees we realize our equity.

   Once we decide to flat the turn raise, we know we're not improving to the effective nuts no matter what happens, and we know we're likely to face some kind of giant bet. If the opponent is actually a GTO bot, then of course it doesn't matter what we do on the river because he's balanced, so what we're really saying is that we're trying to exploit the best player at the table because we're assuming he's unbalanced specifically toward going for it. Maybe he's unbalanced in the opposite way, and this is just always top boat. Maybe he's exploiting YOU by showing you one bluff last week and then now that you know he's "capable of bluffing" he's just going to take you to value town three times in a row. This is a really, really, common technique of high-stakes LAGS– they play like maniacs, and then at unpredictable times, all their giant river bets become pure value for some amount of time. Are we sure he's not doing this?

   I agree with hero that the leveling war with the pro who plays bigger is not where the money is at in this game, I just think we avoid it in the first place by playing the turn as a check-call and the river as a check-fold. Bet-fold is also fine.

   We are allowed to be tight postflop because the justification for entering the pot at all with a hand this weak, in a passive way where we have such poor equity realization, is that we are getting a subsidy of $10 from the blind we posted. Call $25 to win 175, realize 15% equity five ways. If we lose track of this fact, suddenly we are in a leveling war with a strong player with a range advantage, out of position, playing for stacks. You can even check-fold the flop here without being exploitable by anyone. Your MDF is very, very, low here.

2. Second hand: We exploited him once by flatting preflop with a hand that should be a pure 4-bet. The plan was to call down because we expected him to barrel off . Now we flop top two pair, which is not the nuts, but it's damn near the top of our range. And lo and behold, he pries us off our hand when a scare card comes. If you're going to adopt this strategy preflop, you must call him down even if the scary card comes, because the scarier the card is, yes, the more likely he is to have hit it, but also, the better a candidate it is for him to bet.

   What would have happened if we miss the flop with AK? We fold, eventually. Four to a straight on board? We fold, eventually. Flush comes in? We fold. Every one of these barrels is profitable.

   You guys count these combos as if you know the bottom of his going-crazy range. You don't. How do you know he doesn't have pocket threes here? Total air?

   I know we can see his cards. So I'm cheating. We're getting a little better than two-to-one and it's the second worst card in the deck (it could be the ten of hearts!) We are supposed to shed some portion of our range on each street, so I get that the two pair now becomes a bluff catcher, but it is still not the bottom of our range on this runout. Are we really defending 55% of our range that takes this line?

   That's if we're playing Equilibrium. But see, we aren't. We are making a fairly extreme adjustment by not 4-betting pre. The less extreme adjustment, if we intended to play cards with this guy postflop, would be to 4-bet EVERYTHING. Start chopping down his implied odds and equity realization IMMEDIATELY by dropping the hammer on his wide-ass 3-bet range. Suppose he doesn't make 'calling mistakes?' who cares? If he wants to raise-fold everything from the BB and donate $75, that's an EV of $75 with no variance, no risk, no stress.

   But we passed over that chance to try to get his stack because we think he's going to get WAY out of line postflop. That's why I do think I would close my eyes and call, if I'd made this deal with the devil pre.

3. Derek in Spokane. Pocket 5s!!!!

4. Ballsy bluff from the villain with his cards faced up

5. ALEC. Maybe now is the time to push CONGRESS for ONLINE-POKER. A boatload good source of revenue for USA?

6. Massive inflation and deflation from Federal Reserve stimulus. The world is running on central banker counterfeit money? The world of poker/gambling exposed as a farce of abstract decision making unchained from reality?

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