Calling flop seems way too passive. You have 4 high with no initiative going into the turn. He easily barrels most turns and you fold. How can anything besides raising or folding the flop be any good? We like raising flop here because we should be raising aces and tens as well. He folds better hands and we have additional equity with our gutshot and back door diamond draw. Not to mention, we have pair outs in case he feels like calling us down with K high in a button raised pot which is completely possible. This hand is well played.

Well, there are about 18 cards that can come on turn that I will call or raise with. Not sure which better hands you mean that are folding. But if you are talking about his air hands that are better than ours. Those hands are gonna bet and fold to a turn raise also.

So, less than half the deck? You better be raising all of those ~18 cards. Calling turn again seems absurd.

Why are you c/r'ing a 3? to get value from hands he'll chase with for one more bet that he probably won't put money in with on the river?

This thread seriously reminds me of the old ZeeJustin/El Diablo NL joke thread about going all in with the nut low to induce lighter calldowns that most people didn't realize was a joke...

/thread

Your main adjustment against this player is to be value-centric and lower your bluff combos.

Preflop:
I think folding and calling are both defensible. My issue with calling is that 43 makes slightly fewer straights and has no high card value (ur gonna have a lot of bottom pair situations). Also, straight/flush goes down in value HU OOP; ur not going to make it often enough and have a hard time extracting additional bets. But theres always pot odds, so we're surely calling with, say, 87s. My guess is the BE point is somewhere around 64s.

Since our strategy should be to focus on extracting value with robust pairs, Id fold this as default (begrudgingly). In the extreme end of the spectrum where villain shows down 100%, i think this would be an easy fold; adjust based on where this villains tendencies lie.

Flop:
Having gotten to the flop, c/c and c/raise both have merits given your hand and board. its the lowest part of your range, and ur equity is fine against all his unpaired hands. deciding to do which should depend on ur strategy with the value portion of ur range. if u only craise semibluffs but delay to turn with pairs, ur opponent may catch on. if this villain always blindly double barrels, id c/c flop with all of my range.

Turn:
This is tough. You need to estimate which hands this villaim continues with. If its all pairs/qx/kx/54/53, i think check with plan to give up is ok. even a hand like 98 might continue or rebluff. ull need to invest 2BB to follow thru with bluffing, and u wont know which cards villain will fold to a river barrel.

I think flop and turn illustrate why folding pre has merit. putting in bets with 4high against showdown monkey OOP would only be +EV if u know what ur doing

Another note: this villain played Kx perfectly fine in this hand. So if its not villain playing incorrectly in wide range situation, then we need to play correctly by deciding if we should defend this loose.

Pokerstove has 34s as a 70% hand. To those saying fold - what % are you folding PF? Admittedly, pokerstove ranges are skewed for NL. But folding 30% vs a BTN steal is way to high, to the point where BTN should be raising any two.

I don't think folding Q2o, J5o 92s etc to a button steal is that bad and defending top 60% is reasonable. Vs lots of live players that number should actially be smaller.


Also I could be wrong but get impression that people overvalue what making a straight is worth. For example Id much rather have J3s than 43s here

my defaults for bb defense vs btn has been q4o, j6o and 94s, even online. too tight?

I feel like it's so villain dependent. Against someone who I think plays really well postflop and who probably has the right button opening frequency and is not adjusting it based on either their perception of me or the SB, my range is probably about the same as Steve's. But this situation is very uncommon and in pretty much every other situation, I feel there is a reason to adjust my range.

Rake can be a big factor that makes you defend tighter, but the general rule of thumb is that we can defend twice as wide as BTN's opening range. We're out of position, but have SB's dead money in the pot.

People here typically assign BTN range to be ~50%. Some go even a bit looser. A tight range is 30-40%. Defending <60% against these typical ranges is nutso.

But it's not just the value of making a straight. 43s beats J3s in every possible aspect of hand's playability. On average, it has better implied fold equity, because it can make more straight draws and flush draws, which allows you to bluff and rebluff more aggressively. Also you can fold out more better hands with 4-high draws than with J-high draws. Moreover, 43s has on average smaller reverse implied fold equity and folding unimproved 4-high is therefore much easier than folding J-high. And finally the ability to make more straight postflop makes the average implied pot odds of 43s higher than are the implied pot odds of J3s (though its pair outs have worse implied pot odds on average than pair outs of J3s).

I do think that as far as the BB defense ranges goes, 43s is somewhere in top 50% of hands. I'm never folding it against button or cuttoff open, unless the aggressor is incredibly tight and is opening less than 25% - 20% of hands.

FWIW, Q2o, J5o and 92s are the top of my folding range against button open (I'm defending ~ top 70% as a default).

Against a player that opens wide and doesn't fold much postflop, I would think the adjustment is to tighten up and play more hands with SDV. Don't have access to stove ATM, but I would think defending ATC 5 or bigger would be my ballpark.

You're going to be playing a lot of guessing games OOP with bottom pair, and/or barreling off with 4hi against a player that doesn't fold (this thread is a case in point). I would think giving up some marginal pf spots is more than made up by the times we make middle/top pair or better and villain pays off.

Rake is another consideration that you mentioned.

I don't even know where to start with this post. Must be a troll in disguise.
* Ok, 43s can hit straights more easily than J3s. We agree on something.
* "Allowing you to bluff/rebluff more aggressively" doesn't work against guys that don't fold. It's more reason for us to fold them preflop.
* " you can fold out more better hands with 4-high draws than with J-high draws". Well ****, then 23s must be the nuts with that logic, since it can fold out 4-hi hands as well.
* " smaller reverse implied fold equity". What...?
* Folding 43s is much easier than J3s. That's not more reason for us to defend with it...****, if that were the case, just give me one card, as folding with a non-eligible hand must be the easiest to get away from.
* "And finally the ability to make more straight postflop makes the average implied pot odds of 43s higher than are the implied pot odds of J3s" - Essentially, you're saying 43s has higher implied odds than J3s (in twice as many words).

Lets put it in perspective:
* You will flop a flush draw ~11% of the time, open ended straight draw ~8% of the time, gutshots another ~11% of the time. <3% of the time, you flop something ridiculous (flush/quads/trips/etc.).

* The above percentages aren't mutually exclusive. You can flop combo draws, etc. But nonetheless, you are no better than ~30% to flop a draw from which you can "play back" with.

* By contrast, you're looking at flopping at least a pair ~32.3% (aka, hands with showdown value.)

So the question is, are you making enough money the times you make a flush/straight + the money you get when villain folds to aggression?

All in all, you're only making a flush/straight by the river around ~8% of the time. It's limit poker, you're at best going to be able to extract 1-2 additional bets. Villain folds very seldomly. The math indicates you're going to bleed way more money than gained from completing draws.

I'm not raising the flop and this doesn't sound like a player I'm going to try bluffing all that often. c/c flop, c/f turn.

First is of all, for the explanation of what reverse implied fold equity is and how it relates to playability see for example this post: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...0&postcount=74

Second, folding 43s against someone described as loose BU opener and overall bad player is bad and it’s not even close. Assuming that loose BU opener is someone, who opens 60%+ on the BU, I’m calling with any two suited here and a lot players better than myself are doing exactly the same, as far as I can tell from my experience at PS games (also a lot of them is defending 43s as default against standard 25% HJ OR, so there's that).

Now, in the post above I argued that
--one cannot judge the hand's playability just by the implied pot odds
--on average, 43s has better playability than J3s in BB against BU scenario

It's important to point out though, that the fact that some hands has better playability than others does not necessarily imply, that it's better to play those hands. It's just mean that when making the playability profile for that situation, you assign different equity offsets or equity realization percentages for those two groups of hands.

Of course you can disagree and argue, that against this specific Villain, the playability of 43s is worse than the playability of J3s or that the playability of 43s is worse than the playability of J3s against all Villains. But the fact you disagree with my assertions doesn't mean that I was trolling.

Of course it’s true that loose players don’t fold very much, but that doesn’t mean that they always go to SD on all boards with random J, 9, 8-highs. Moreover, loose BU openers tend to have a lot of trash in their range. That said, even if the guy has 100% WTSD, I’m not folding this preflop.

And what about 32o, then? This is not an argument, it’s a misuse of reductio ad absurdum. When semibluffing, one always tries to get Villain to fold as much better hands as possible. And one can fold out more better hands with 43s than with J3s. The fact that this factor alone doesn’t justify defending with 32o here, or that it's less relevant against particular Villains doesn't mean that this factor is completely irrelevant.

Also, as I said earlier, against someone who opens too wide on the BU, I’m defending 32s.

Again, not an argument, just misuse of reductio ad absurdum. The equity of unimproved J3s > the equity of unimproved 43s on most flops. Therefore, when folding on the flop, you are giving up more equity with J3s than with 43s. That means that you realize more of preflop hot and cold equity with 43s than with J3s. And that means that J3s has bigger RIFE than 43s. To clarify, this is not something that would justify defending with 32o here, but that does not mean it’s irrelevant.

Turn bet is not good.

The fact that J-high is the best hand more often than 4-high can't be spun into being a bad thing, so I would just drop that line of thinking if I were you.

Yes but you need to take into account the equity.
Has the guy fold less, your equity needs to be higher.
If what you said is right, you would c/r 64s too because lot of better hands would fold ?
You only have a gutshot with 4 high.
Even if you hit a pair on turn, the chance you will get outdrawn is almost always 12 to 15% on the river because the guy never fold on the turn.

I mean , we make money vs calling station ( it was not specify if he was aggro or not postflop) by betting for value, not by trying to bluff them out.

And anyway, if he was loose aggro, more reason to fold pf with weak SD value card.
Vs those lag, flopping a pair on the flop means you always get outdrawn at least 24% ( with 43s/32s/etc.) of the time because they never fold and being aggro, they will make you pay much higher price when you get outdrawn too or even rebluff you when you bluff.



Seem to me you do not take into account the number of time you would get outdrawn more often with a pair of 3 or 4 compare to a J.
Your flush draw are stronger too with a J.
I think your overestimate the % of the time you have a straight draw and its value. First your fold equity is almost 0 (unless an A present itself on the flop) so it will often be an expensive bluff which need to work more often than not, which is not a guarantee vs very sticky players.
And on a fourth card straight on the board, you always have the bottom straight too.
Btw this might be a small point but 43s imo has much better playability in NL than in limit for different reasons like the IO are much better in NL than in limit.
Limit is more of a pair game than in NL.