Hey guys,

New to the O8 forum and wanted to get some thoughts.

-CO was a bit spazy (generally raising anytime he got 4 cards).
-Is the flat PF fine with A3 since A is suited and has some high help?
-C/R best line on flop?
-Bet the turn, c/c, or c/f?

Thanks in advance,
RA

Merge, $1/$2 Limit Omaha H/L Cash, 6 Players
Poker Tools Powered By Holdem Manager - The Ultimate Poker Software Suite. View Hand #13030601

Preflop: Hero is SB with A T 3 K
UTG folds, MP calls, CO raises, BTN calls, Hero calls, BB folds, MP calls

Flop: (9 SB) 9 4 Q (4 players)
Hero checks, MP checks, CO checks, BTN bets, Hero raises, MP calls, CO folds, BTN calls

Turn: (7.5 BB) Q (3 players)
Hero ???

Leading the flop can't ever be a bad play here.

As played, I'd lead the turn. Should be a scary card for your opponents given your flop play.

+1

can't decide between bet/calling (turn) and bet/folding, so I guess it doesn't really matter...

just continue to sell a full house and hope they fold. pot size makes it worthwhile. haha! but you made the pot so big! so keep betting, be consistent with your play. you can also lead flop and play the turn in a straightforward fashion, that is: check/decide...

as you can see, every street brings a new decision, but each street can't be isolated. on the flop you know you are going to face a decision on the turn and need to be prepared for that. no alarms and no surprises.

it's this important equation that makes a turn bet (as played!) a profitable play: pot equity+fold equity=a bet!

but where does the fold equity come from? your flop play! see how it all connects?

also, your flop play will make villians less likely to raise you with less than queens full (unless they're nuts).

flop line gave you extra options for the turn, not just the good old: ABC poker, bet if you improved type of game.

bet the turn, not because checking is bad as an isolated decision, rather that checking turn makes check/raising the flop quite a bit worse than leading the flop.

think one step ahead. play chess.

lead flop, pfr'r is in late position. more bets go in if you lead.

bet/fold turn and pray

I'm new to this game, but I can't see how bet/calling the turn can be correct. With the board pairing like that, it doesn't seem to me that we have enough of a hand to put in two bets on the turn.

What sort of hands are we hoping to fold when we bet the turn?

bet/folding might very well be better than bet/calling.

we probably don't, but we don't expect to be raised very often. actually, we hope villians fold.

many disappointed drawing hands. flush/straight draws around the Q9 hate this turn card, and backdoor low isn't coming. AA/KK might also make a tight fold.

Perhaps I can explain it to you. Understanding it and being able to apply it profitably is really the essence of poker.

You don't win at poker by getting your fair share of pots.

Over the long haul, if you just get your fair share, you cannot beat the house rake. (Well... of course you can be lucky and happen to have a winning hand often enough to be a winner... but if you play long enough, the law of averages tends to catch up to you).

You win at poker by getting more than your fair share. And you do that with both offense and defense. You do it with offense by betting so as to scare your opponent out of the pot. It takes a deft touch, actually involving considerable skill which is not usually immediately obvious to someone unfamiliar with the game or the players in the game.

In other words, to win at poker when you're playing decent opponents, you have to bet without the nuts often enough but not too often. You have to win more money by betting when you don't have the nuts than you lose by betting when you don't have the nuts.

(For the sake of simplicity, think of betting in Omaha-8 without the nuts as bluffing or semi-bluffing).

And you do it with defense by picking off bluffs and semi-bluffs by your opponent often enough that your opponent loses more money by bluffing or semi-bluffing than he wins.

As you play Omaha-8 against someone, you continually adjust your offensive frequency of betting without the nuts. And you continually adjust your frequency of how you act defensively.

In this particular situation, the board pairs with queens on the turn. Hero can see eight cards, including two queens. Thus there are 44 missing cards including two queens. There are enough missing cards to make eleven four card hands, only two of which could have queens. Thus it's about 9 to 2 that neither of two opponents would be dealt one of the missing queens. And sensibly, anyone without one of the missing queens should be concerned about someone else having one of the missing queens.

So when Hero bets this turn without a queen, opponents who don't have a queen should be concerned that Hero does have a queen. But these opponents also know that Hero might be betting without a queen, that Hero might be gambling that neither opponent has a queen. Thus they might call or even raise without a queen.

And since someone might raise, with or without a queen, so as to pick off Hero without a queen if Hero would fold to a raise without a queen - since that's a possibility, Hero calls the raise, partly so as to discourage bluff raises, and partly because Hero still might win this pot even if Villain raising does have a queen. There's actually quite a lot involved.

Anyhow, that's a quickie explanation of how I think "bet/calling the turn can be correct." Actually (for me) what to do is very opponent dependent.

Buzz

I was a bit unclear there. I meant I'm new to o8, I have played hundreds of thousands of hands of small and mid stakes limit holdem.

When the second queen comes, a full house becomes possible as well as quads. This reduces the value of our flush draw.

I see what you are saying, about betting the turn as a bluff. We do have some sort of a draw, which makes me reluctant to turn my hand into a bluff at this stage. I guess I can throw my hand away if its two back to me after I lead out but I'd rather not have to! My experience of o8 so far is that bluffs rarely seem to work I'm assuming the plays that are carrying on to the turn have high hands/draws making it less likely they will be bluffed out.

Thanks for at least giving a reason to bet the turn...

Don't think of it strictly as a bluff. Think of it as playing in a way that causes your opponents to play poorly against you, vs. playing in a way that causes your opponents to play perfectly. Think of what happens when we check. Villain correctly value bets trip Qs, a full house, perhaps hands like AA/KK, prob checks back a lot of draws or barrels turn and river at which point we'll be forced to fold UI anyway. What happens if we check/call turn with our draw and we hit the river? If we donk out now, our opponents will again play perfectly. They will raise a full house, fold worse hands, and maybe pay off with trip Qs and that's it. If we check, they again play perfectly. They bet full houses and that's it.

Now think of what happens when we bet the turn. We've shown a lot of strength, even if our opponents have trip Qs here they can't really raise our bet. So our opponents basically tell us from how they react whether we are drawing live or not. If they raise, we should probably just fold. They may fold 2 pair or a draw fearing a Q, which is a big win for us. Just too many good things can happen when we bet the turn to pass it up.

I get that if we want to put in exactly one bet on the turn, bet/fold is preferable to check/call (unless we are trying to balance our turn checking range but that is something else). I'm interested that you guys are focusing so much on another queen being out there, rather than the full house. Do you think 44xx and 99xx combos are relatively unlikely preflop hands to have been played?

The argument that you are making that is so different to (normal) limit holdem is that they will only raise the turn with the mortal nuts. In the FL holdem games I am used to these value raises would be balanced with semi-bluffs. I would be reluctant to fold in case the raiser had a worse flush draw, for example (for different reasons I would bet this turn in holdem, though).

So, with this hand my inclination is to get to see the river, which is why I am reluctant to bet/fold. If they literally only raise when the hand we are drawing to is beat, then I agree bet/fold is good. IF that is the case, I am going to have to change the way I look at these situations completely.

Well I def. consider low and mid pairs to be negative factors in starting hand selection, and tight players should be folding 99xx pretty much always, but that doesn't mean I'm never expecting those hands to show up. Your opponents did not jam the flop, which for some players could mean they don't have a set and for others it could mean they were waiting for a safe turn card or are just scared to put any action in with bottom set.

Put yourself in your opponents shoes. You have a NFD and you are reluctant to even follow up your check-raise on the turn because of the paired board, but you think your opponents will semi-bluff raise with a low flush draw? Raising with hand like that is bordering on pure bluff, and habitual bluffers tend to go broke quickly in this game. It's just not that common of a play, people don't want to get 3-bet, puke and call the river when they were drawing dead the whole time. In fact you'll find that a lot of your opponents never bluff at all on principle. Not to say that good players don't bluff raise, but we've repped this hand so effectively up to this point that it just isn't an easy move for someone to make.

It's definitely not the case that we are 100% drawing dead when we get raised, but believe that your hand is not very good at all when action goes in on this turn after we played the flop fast. For example, if MP raises us after taking 2 cold on the flop, he doesn't have just AQxx or something because he would have folded that on the flop. He either has a boat, or your best case scenario is something like QJTx where he's taking a handful of your outs. And this of course puts us into a ROI situation where we can't put much action in at all even if we hit our hand, barring the J

DQ, great job explaining the logic behind betting again after the turn.

I'll adress one thing, to make it perfectly clear: when we consider betting as a bluff and our fold equity is high* (I believe that's the case here after the top card pairs), it's time to throw caution to the wind.

* if you want to know what's high, consider risk/reward. 1 big bet risked for a 7.5 big bet pot as a reward. we can see that villians don't have to both fold very often for us to have a profitable bet, based solely on fold equity.

Those odds are enticing. Is the point that this is a one way hand that has gone high? I'm thinking that after the multiway raised action earlier that this sort of move won't work on a low board, because:

(1) There are two reasons for an opponent to continue, high and low.
(2) Most players are entering the pot with (or after) a raise with hands that make good lows rather than good highs.

I just think on a low board they aren't all folding one in every nine times.

Yes, the entire dynamic of the hand changes completely with 2 or 3 to a low out. You should generally play much more honestly when a split is possible/probable.

I also would not do a lot of bet/folding in those spots because it's easy for someone to be raising going a different way. Although it's certainly possible for check/fold to be correct in a spot like that when you are drawing for either none or half the pot, cutting down your odds.

I agree that DQ has done an excellent job explaining why a bet on the turn is proper and necessary.

I'll try again too. Maybe I can add a slightly different slant to the logic.

1. Hero's check/raise on the flop sort of represents a set of queens. (Because a set of queens is the best hand anyone could have after this flop). Thus Hero's check/raise on the flop should scare any opponent without a queen.

2. It's unlikely either opponent has a queen. (Explained in earlier post).

3. Thus a bigger danger to Hero than an opponent winning with queens full or trip queens is an opponent backing into two pairs or something else.

4. Normally Hero would consider slow playing quad queens (and everyone at the table probably knows that), but since Hero check/raised on the flop, slow playing quad queens would now awkward because nobody is going to bite if Hero checks (and everyone at the table probably knows that too).

5. Thus it's logical for Hero to bet quad queens. And if Hero bets the turn, it's damned hard for anyone without a queen to continue. Thus Hero has a good chance of stealing the pot with a bet.
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Omaha-8 is not the same as Texas hold 'em, partly because four hand held cards make good board fits more likely, but mostly because of the possibility of a high/low split pot. Rightly or wrongly, people often give more consideration than is due to back door low draws. (It's a common mistake).

In this particular situation, either or both Villains without a queen may continue after Hero check/raises the flop. Part of the reason for them continuing is the implied size of the final pot compared to the cost of calling the check/raise. And they often don't give enough or proper consideration to the fact that if they win low and the pot is split, their low draws are only for half of the pot. (It's another common mistake).

But after the turn, there's no chance for low whatsoever. Thus neither opponent can add value for a low draw. And without a queen (or a full house below queens full) it will be damned hard for an opponent to continue.

Even with trip queens, an overly timid opponent looking at a turn bet from Hero might seriously consider folding.

Moreover, even if an opponent continues, with or without a queen, Hero may still win the hand by making a spade flush on the river, with neither opponent ending up with a full house. (Because of that spade draw possibility, Hero's turn bet is not exactly what I'd call a bluff. I don't know what exactly to call Hero's bet after the turn. It's not exactly what I'd call a semi-bluff either, although that's closer for me).

Whatever we call such a bet, I think it behooves Hero to bet this turn card.

If Hero checks and then his opponents check behind him, and then a spade comes on the river, and neither opponent has a queen (and maybe even if someone does), then Hero doesn't get paid any more than he wins by taking down the pot with a turn bet.

If Hero checks and there is no spade on the river, then Hero's opponents may find it harder to believe Hero has quad queens because Hero checked the turn.

By checking the turn, Hero may allow an opponent with a low pair a free draw to make a full house on the river. Then if the river is a spade (and an opponent makes a low full house on the river), Hero will be destined to lose an additional bet.

Most likely scenario is neither opponent has a queen (or a lower full house) and both will fold to Hero's turn bet. If not, then Hero has to reassess.

Buzz