If 3bets are likely then I don't like this play without 6+ people to the flop. If 3 bets are unlikely then I like it after a few limpers. It reminds me of a hand where I checked back the flop and turn 4 ways with J9s, then made a straight on the river and got called by ace high. Playing draws is easy in a loose passive game when you raise preflop, even if you only have 2 outs.

But I don't like it from the blinds.

With 22-55 you have to dodge a lot of cards to stay alive at showdown or be able to push your opponents out ... And in this situation you're basically just bluffing into a multiway calling station orgy. Pretty yuk IMO unless you're running well and have an excellent image. @beakwetter: If you wanna burn money so people can laugh at you at showdown then go right ahead. I agree with you often but not here.

The only way I'm taking this hand to showdown unimproved in a loose passive game is if everyone checks every street. Who said you have to bluff? This is very different than an isolation raise. The -ev zone(lol stating theory as fact) is when there are 3 or 4 players to the flop, or in games with very little action postflop, or against a tight passive player who shows down a lot.

It's actually bad, not good, to price yourself in to call additional bets with a weak draw. Obviously sometimes it happens, but it's a similar concept to bloating the pot in no limit. You are chasing your own money, in part, when you call the flop.

I performed a simulation where I had a 9-player table and wanted to see what equity for starting hands was against 8 other players who come in w/ 50% of hands, where 50% is the following:

22+,A2s+,A2o+,K2s+,K9o+,Q2s+,Q9o+,J2s+,J7o+,T2s+,T 8o+,96s+,98o+,85s+,87o,75s+,76o+,64s+,54s,43s

If everyone puts in $1 preflop and checks to the river here is profit you get back long term:

AA $1.61
KK $1.11
QQ $0.94
JJ $0.69
TT $0.48
99 $0.36
88 $0.23
77 $0.14
66 $0.10
55 $0.04
44 -$0.04
33 -$0.05
22 -$0.06

Aaron W. from the micros published a 2+2 magazine article on this subject. I'm not sure if he re-posted it (the mag expires and returns rights to the author). I remember that Mason disagreed with some of Aaron's conclusions and posted a rebuttal -- in some games, you tie people on to the pot by building it larger preflop. Since the only time you're really putting money in post flop is with a set, you tend to want the villains to pay you off more often than normal. Also, if anyone gets frisky "cleaning up TP outs" our the like, your set loves that. Thus, in a game where people fight for large pots you may want to build a bigger one. Also, chippy post flop betting tends to save you from those close 18:1, let's peel a card calls.

In this spot, I don't think hot/cold tiny EV + or - matters. If you can shape the post flop play of a large field, your equity with a set is huge and with an underpair is tiny. The question is more about if you are in a game like that and how much you lay preflop to make it happen. OTOH, getting 3 (or 5 bet) 8 ways with a small/mid PP isn't much of a disaster -- you have a bunch of interested customers to pay off later.

agree w doug : implied odds weighs in big here

I think this is a sensible post.

One thing I would consider as a counter to this is that when you raise pre-flop, it's true they won't put you on a set with a small PP, but they MAY put you on an overpair with the same result (betting slows down). In contrast, my perception is that since I raise the flop on the button with all sorts of things (draws, pairs, monsters), players DON'T necessarily put me on a big hand when I limp behind and then raise the flop. But YMMV and Doug is definitely asking the right questions.

One other observation: I will say that IN MY EXPERIENCE, many of the players that I see raising stuff like SC's and small PP's on the button tend to make pretty glaring post-flop mistakes (c-betting way too often, etc.), and that probably contributes somewhat to my skepticism about the maneuver, but Doug's advocating doing it right, not wrong.

As I remember, Aaron showed with a lot of work that math-wise it didn't make a lot of sense to pump the pot and Mason came in and made the point I relayed. I'll PM Aaron and see if he has the article up anywhere or if he'll weigh in.

I'd love to see his math. A lot of multi-way stuff is so hard to model.

I misread this paragraph when I posted above. My comment advocates the opposite.

When the pot is 25 bets to call on the flop, you get back 26/22 on your call. Putting an extra full bet pf to get back only 1/5 of a bet isn't good business. We need to call the flop bet, folding is worse, but if given the option we should prefer not to put the extra bet pf.

As Doug said, if the action is 8 ways then the situation can't be that bad because the number of players is close to the odds of hitting a set. But if it's 4 or 5 ways for 4+ bets then it gets hard to get most of our pf money back.

Isn't there a Sklansky hand floating out there about where he had 22 in position and capped it after like the entire table, cocktail waitress, chip runner were in as well? Might be a diff pair but i think i recall it being 22. Not sure what the action was tho

Doug asked me to weigh in on this thread. I know I have the article saved somewhere on my computer at home, and I used to have it on megaupload somewhere, but good luck getting it.

I did find the text on the wayback machine:

http://web.archive.org/web/200807041.../wong_0708.php

The images don't work, so you'll have to imagine some spreadsheets there with lots of numbers. They're basically just counts of different things that can happen on the flop with various types of holdings (flop an overpair, flop a set, flop a flush draw, flop an inside straight draw, flop middle pair, etc.). If you see random numbers showing up in the body of the article, they came from the image that doesn't exist anymore.

When I wrote the article, there weren't any flop texture analysis programs. There was only PokerStove. I know that there have been advances in the poker analysis software world, but since I don't play online (barely at all, actually) I'm not up to speed on what's out there. It's possible that there are programs now that will tell you how often T8s flops top pair or a flush draw, and that will reduce the amount of manual calculation you would need to do.

There are two parts that are relevant to the conversation. The first is the 99 example (which gets discussed in a couple places) and the second is the 22 example (at the bottom, just above "Conclusions and Caveats").

The reason you raise a hand like 99 (or 88) is because of its postflop value. A pair of 9s will win UI sometimes. How often depends on your opponents, the flop texture, and a bunch of other things. But the main fact is that 99 wins unimproved much much more often than 22 wins unimproved, and this is reflected by having more "good flops" for 99 than for 22. This extra value tips the scales towards raising the larger pairs preflop while not raising all pairs preflop.

Specifically, you can somewhat comfortably bet 99 for value on a flop of A75, but you can't do that with 22. With 99, you can bet here and hope to get a call from a hand like K7s or other weak one pair hands. If you're betting this flop with 22, you're betting with the hopes that everybody missed and you'll win the pot right away.

I should note that the article does *NOT* factor position into the analysis. It's very difficult to create a good mathematical model that effectively accounts for position. It's more of a tool for multiway pots where you expect to have to show the winning hand to win the pot.

Thank you, sir. A lot of depth thinking about when to jam and when not to do so.

That's a great article.