Preflop ranges with kills involved are a topic that doesn't get talked about enough IMO. Here's a situation I played recently but I'd rather discuss it in ranges.

Bellagio $20/40 half kill LO8, 9-handed
Tough game. No one has looked gallingly incompetent in the 2 hours I've been here. Villain seems about the median of that--solid hand selection, selectively aggressive but maybe not as aggressive as I think is correct, etc. This read is highly speculative since I can't remember too much that he's shown down.

BB is slightly on the loose side and SB is slightly more on the loose side.

SB $10, BB $20, I post $30 on the button. 2 folds to Villain who raises, all fold to me. Blinds are still yet to act.

What should be my calling and raising ranges here? Let's try to get some consensus and then I'll start tweaking parameters.

think my standard here is

calling with junky A2xx, including A2ss with bad sidecards
calling with A3/A4 bad sidecards ss
calling with strong A2WW and prob capping if ends up reraising to me
raising with suited A3Wx
raising with A45B double suited
raising with A2BB suited
raising all playable AAxx
calling all good 23xx i.e. ds, 23BBss, 23Wx.

strong QQ/KK i'm calling, as well as BBBB.

maybe put more categorically
my raising hands tend to be more of my push hands and calling hands tend to be more of my pull hands. but my calling hands also include the weaker parts of my range as well.

comparatively my raising hands leave out the junkier things, i think.

I also don't have a very good sense of what I should be reraising, but I certainly don't think you should be folding much at all. I think the only way I would be folding more than like the bottom 10% of hands is if I knew the blinds to be particularly aggressive preflop.

my call/raises are similar + calling almost anything here as well.

oh yeah

i'd call a ton of hands here given my post. basically anything that wasn't gutter trash. but if i knew blinds were aggressive i'd fold.

FWIW I misinterpreted your post too. Really really appreciate the level of detail and thought in your ranges though, thanks so much.

Slightly pedantic point: In Las Vegas a cap is usually 5 bets. Occasionally there's a spot where you have a hand that wants to put in a 4th but not reopen to a 5th I suppose.


Regarding our reraising range:

Intuitively I think there's a case for reraising most of what we play under certain circumstances. As with other threads where I advocate 3!, this is a LHE concept that I think still applies quite well to LO8--get heads up in position with a hand that's not that far behind and compensated with the dead money if you knock out both blinds. Since you have to put in one bet anyway and want to put in a second bet with any plausible hand, I don't think you mind the slight "badness" of the third bet (and fourth one if reraised) in return for the immense goodness of getting to play a marginal hand HUIP.

I mean, knocking out hands with good equity really is essential to midstakes (and even small stakes) limit poker. Bets are small, pots are big.

I suspect I probably do take this concept a bit too far. Implied odds matter a lot, of course, and putting myself in position to call down a lot of postflop bets against nut hands may be a problem. But I see the following counterarguments:

• What I would call shorter "effective stacks" (yes, a NL/PL concept but I mean higher ratio of pot to number of bets I have to pay off to showdown) makes IO less important. Extreme case: If a pot's 50 big bets you don't care that you're calling down with losers a lot. I'm not sure of this point and need to think through the theory some more.
• Position mitigates RIO a *lot*
• Knocking out players also mitigates RIO problems. Something like a 2nd or 3rd nut low draw after A2 counterfeits is pretty valuable HUIP since I can't assume I'm facing A23. Ditto any flush draw--pretty valuable HU. Multiway in both cases that value attenuates rapidly and it's easy to get value towned.

In this spot there's another factor though which is that the blinds, though loose for this game, are not calling 10 or 8 more chips just with 2 or 4 in the pot. So 3-betting is unnecessary to coax them into not playing.

Not that it matters but in the actual hand I called with some crappy semiconnected A6. But the key point is, I'm really not that far behind a tight raising range:

ProPokerTools Omaha Hi/Lo Simulation

600,000 trials (Randomized)

Hand	Pot equity	Scoops	Wins Hi	Ties Hi	Wins Lo	Ties Lo
Ac6s9d8d	40.27%	138,937	265,415	5,987	92,238	25,013
8%	59.73%	255,304	328,598	5,987	204,433	25,013

40% means if i 3! this steaming pile of garbage and get 4!, I've put in 12 chips to get 9.6 chips back in hot and cold equity, meaning I lost $12 (1/5 big bet) by getting out of line. If they just handed me 40% of the blinds, including my kill that I have no control over, that would be $24. It's a bit apples to oranges because, for example, getting blinds to fold when they were going to fold anyway is worth zero in compensation. Other times the blinds have a good hand.

But my point is, reraising wide substantially increases my equity in the $60 blind money. If it increases it by 20% (which seems plausible if we often go from 3-handed to HU) and I don't make major postflop errors in a bigger pot then that's fine.

I didn't reraise my garbage A6xx here because I didn't think I needed to (and it's like, a really bad hand) but I think we should be 3! here a lot more than most people think.

Any consideration here to re-raise a ton of hands? And very little if any calling?

I'm definitely re-raising hands like 23BB, BBBB, KK etc

Premise is same as that tourney situation hand where we can gain a lot from putting an one extra small bet to make it HU vs 3 handed.

agreed, good post imo

and getting re-raised is not a complete loss as it can give you info regarding your opponent's hand where you can make snugger folds and eliminate some RIO with dominated hands

I agree the principle is the same, but the specifics of the bet sizes involved make the situation somewhat different.

First, in order to put a third bet in here, you need to invest more money in the hopes of creating the same amount of dead money from the blinds. The third bet costs you an additionally $30 in a HK pot, versus $20 in a normal pot, and the blinds will still be $10 and $20 regardless.

Second, what you are hoping to accomplish in terms of getting the blinds to fold might already by accomplished by just flat-calling in the kill pot, but not in the situation facing a single raise in a normal pot. In the kill pot, the $20 BB has to call an additionally $40 against a single raise in the kill pot, versus only $20 against a single raise in a normal pot. The pot odds are basically the same for the BB in a single-raised kill pot as in a 3-bet regular pot (though not quite because there will be more implied odds in the kill pot). A lot of players will call most hands for a single normal raise, but fold most hands for both a normal 3-bet and a single kill raise. So the additional marginal benefit of 3-betting the kill in terms of inducing more blind folds is smaller.

Third, your overall playing range here is going to be a lot weaker than your playing range when deciding between flatting a raise and cold 3-betting in a normal pot. In the normal pot, all of the hands you are going to consider playing will be pretty good hands. In the kill, you need to be willing to play a lot of junk. And I don't think you can just raise everything. This will quickly become obvious and the blinds will play back at you, defeating the purpose of the raise. And even when they fold you will be at a biggest equity disadvantage against the original raise.

In a normal pot, I think you should probably 3-bet most hands you are going to play in position facing a single opener. My inclination is that you should basically 3-bet the same range if you're in the same situation but posting a kill. But that still leaves most of your range to flat-call. Maybe you should add in some hands to the 3-bet range that have good heads-up equity, like some junky KK hands that would be folds if you didn't have the kill invested. But I wouldn't include BBBB hands that don't contain a big pair.

But I'll repeat my initial statement in this thread, and admit I don't have a lot of confidence of the right 3-bet range here.

gotcha, yeah I think the smaller blinds is the main point I was missing, so some good points regarding all of that