Quote:
Originally Posted by peddy.jr.85
I get that there are hands you can either win a little or lose a lot on. Is it situational?
Yes. As with just about everything in poker, implied odds and RIO are situational. Fundamentally, the EV of a particular hand is going to vary according to stacksizes and
the ranges of your opponents. Position has a great impact on those ranges.
e.g. With 65s on the button in a heads up game, you're unlikely to make a flush, but it will nearly always be the best hand if you happen to hit it, and you're likely to get paid quite well by any top pair or better, because top pair is a good hand heads up, and any flush is a monster. In a 10-handed limp-fest, however, if 65s makes a flush it's much less likely to be the best hand, because there will be players with better flushes, or boats, so you run the risk of losing a huge pot.
Wherever possible, you want to have a dominating hand, not a dominated hand, and this applies to flush draws as well as pairs, especially multiway. (With regard to pocket pairs, bear in mind that AA has never been oversetted in the history of poker, because it's the best hand in holdem. 22 gets oversetted every day, because it dominates nothing).
Generally speaking, however, the hands that suffer most from reverse implied odds in ring games are (offsuit) hands that make top pair, medium kicker. (Or two pairs that aren't top two pairs). Hands like KJ, AJ, AT, QJ are the classic "trouble hands". Unless you make Broadway with them, you'll always be worried about your kicker or the strength of your two pairs. It can get very expensive when you have AT vs AQ on AQTxx, but you also have the fear of making two pairs and getting stacked by a straight.
Last edited by ArtyMcFly; 07-16-2017 at 05:01 PM.