Villain is pretty laggy playing 32/26/8% 3-bet over 54 hands. Not a huge sample on him at all.

Button was playing 18/16/7%

My stats are 24/20/13%



SB: $400.00
BB: $832.10
UTG: $357
MP:$457
Hero (CO): $602.40
BTN: $402.00

Pre Flop: ($6.00) Hero is CO with J J
Hero raises to $12,Button calls $12.00, SB raises to $52.00, Hero goes all in

Do you guys flat or go all in or 4-bet or are they all pretty close. What is the lowest hands we are jamming here preflop for pairs given the limited amount of info.

4betting smaller gives him a chance to shove his bluffs, so I'm thinking 4b/call > shove in a vacuum. I mean, he's never folding a better hand either way. I do shove sometimes, but usually if I have some sort of read that villain might either see it as weakness or possibly avoid his 5b hands that flips with us (if that makes sense).

do u ever do this w aa?

You can definitely give more information that should sway play one way or the other a bit, maybe even enough to make this a call instead of a re-raise, but that's an extreme case in today's games, especially in a squeeze worthy spot such as this one. Is Villain squeezing often? Is Villain playing 20 tables? How long have you been at the table? Did he just win or lose a or some large hands? To whom? How does the button play? Has the button been re-raising you recently? Have you re-raised or folded to Villain's re-raises in the past? In this session? Etc.

The majority of the time, four betting small to allow hands like 33 or T8to shove has much more value. Also, it works another aggressive dynamic into your game where you'll have the advantage if you're the better player. Shoving, especially with this hand, only folds out bluffs and is extremely rarely called by a hand like 55 that is putting you on a smaller pair (he probably just flats 55 anyway with those stats). You are still called by the good hands and some of the slightly worse hands you have crushed, like TT. You won't fold out AQ enough of the time for that insignficant amount of value to change a solid default play of re-raising.

If Villain folds, then alright! You win the pot and it still looks like you're in there not afraid to mix it up, to protect what belongs to you, and that it's going to take a lot more than one man's squeeze to push you around! Simply shoving appears weak, is rarely being called by worse, and does not balance well. You also deny yourself a dynamic, which is a problem for players who play better than their competition within that dynamic. Even if your reply to that statement is that you can still four-bet some of the time and shove other times, you are still skewing the perception of your four-bet range in one direction by shoving. Maybe that's best against some players, but again, JJ has to be one of the worst hands to shove here (i.e. AQ and TT almost always shove if you four-bet or call if you shove, and 33 will almost always fold if you shove instead of potentially getting it in great by allowing Villain to five-bet shove with his semi-bluffing hands).

You say Villain is re-raising with 7% of hands, so it's likely he's significantly wider in this situation (probably around 10-12% of hands), the mother of all squeeze spots. Because of the positions, we should assume that a better player will have a wider range and that you should have a correspondingly wide value range with which you four-bet, assuming that he adjusts by five-betting slightly wider to compensate for a widened three-betting / squeezing range. If he only three-bets wide, but never five-bets wide, then we get into a grey area about flatting versus four-betting this hand.

Flatting with JJ is miserable because there are a decent amount of hands you have crushed that try to get it in pre-flop in this type of spot, especially in the case where Villain is decent and has a wider value range that includes hands like 99 that assume you'll be four-bet bluffing a bit more often to combat his squeeze and therefore give Villain enough folding equity pre-flop to make the value of squeeze/five-bet shoving 99 greater than the value of flatting 99. If you flat, there's also a large chance of cards over jack on the board (~60% or so? Anyone with a refresher on the exact figure there? 63%?) and you're still trying to see the turn and river against a "TAG range" that can represent scary cards quite well. I say "TAG" just as a generalization and realizing that players play differently from each other and don't necessarily warrant such classifications in all spots, especially somewhat nuanced spots like this one that rely much more on game flow, positions, and stack sizes.

really good analysis shoot.

feel like i just learned a lot about pocket jacks vs squeezes.

awesome info shootaa, exactly what I was looking for. I read somewhere about 4-bet shoving over squeezes there with like 88-JJ dunno where but I stuck to it kind of blindly because they said it was profitable and you don't get into dicey spots postflop. 4-betting makes a lot more sense in the fact you get the villain to build a dynamic with you and he can 5-bet shove over you with bluffs etc.

good advice lol, people just dont get that if you shove 99=22. a typical squeezing range for villain includes JJ+ at least, most of the time TT+. but basically never 99 (at least on pokerstars, on crazy eurosites it might be different) so 99-22 are the same in terms of their ability for shoving (maybe 1% difference in equity vs callingrange). either 99-22 are all profitable to shove with or none. just depends on how many hands villain squeezes. i did the math once and i think villain needed to squeeze 10-11% in this spot to make shoving with pps profitable. JJ is obviously another case, 4bet/calling is good vs almost everyone and better than calling (shoota explained already).

How do you do the math to figure out how much fold equity you need in order for shoving to be profitable with pocket pairs? I could never figure out the equation.

you win 52+12+12+4=80 if he folds to your shove and 804*equity-388 if he calls. so shoving becomes good if:

fe*80 + (1-fe)*(804*equity-388) > 0

just give villain a range for calling your shove (most likely TT+,AK and some AQ) and check your equity with 99 vs that range. then you can solve the equation and find out what foldequity you need. say you need 60%, then villains range for calling your shove must be 40% of his whole squeezing range.

Yeah this is a fairly standard 4b/call spot imo. Shoving is really bad imo here with JJ since you only get it in flipping, vs better hands, maybe TT and sometimes 99 although more rare.

I don't really like calling here since a lot of flops/turns/river are going to be bad for you and you're going to end up just bluffcatching and playing a guessing game a lot of the time, especially since you can get it in vs hands that you have crushed here PF (TT, maybe 99), that will probably fold early or not put much money in postflop, whereas you probably won't loose "less" to AA-QQ.

Either way I think shoota pretty much covered this very well.

It may have been Seabeast years ago in a LeggoPoker video talking (those were the days!) where he four-bet shoved a hand like 55 as an exploitable play, not something he intended on making part of his normal game versus people he normally played.

There are a few things about that play that are different than your situation.

• You'll be playing with these opponents again Like I touched on before, when you're facing the same opposition, you'll need a game plan. Don't get me wrong, you can always zig when the zag and make exploitable plays forever, but in MSNL with larger player pools you'll have SO much to remember that ultimately you'll be the one being exploited a lot of the time and when it counts, not just in spots like this where you might eek out a few big blinds. Someone will have a note on you that says what it says and you may not have taken one saying that they saw you do your standard exploitable play, maybe it's shoving 55 over a squeeze pre-flop, maybe it's something different. The point is that with many different players and if you don't have a super-memory or documenting skills, that making so many exploitable plays will likely mean you'll face some troubles down the line you aren't ready to face. People will be squeeze/calling 77 like it's the nuts and maybe you won't be ready for it and get OWNED.
• Hands like 55 want folds Unlike JJ, and in some cases hands like 99 or weaker, 55 almost always wants anything that the BB/Villain is squeezing to fold. A highlighting example that best works because it's on the inflection point of both ranges in the example is that if you shove 55, maybe he'll fold AJ, but of course he'll fold T8s. So if I'm being wordy and confusing, in the example, the BB/Villain squeezes AJ and you shove 55. He's worried about facing AQ and AK so often that he thinks calling it off would be a poor play a you fold out a hand that's racing with your 55. Booyah! More folding equity! So yeah, with JJ, we want AJ to shove, we want T8s to shove; but, with 55, if either of those hands got stacks in with us in a spot where we are unable to append folding equity to the value of our play, then we will be donating a great amount of range versus range dollars to the opposition, in this case the BB/squeezer.
• Typically, you can do better than make this play OK, there are times that this is the best way to go. Those times would require finding people who won't call it off with KJs and against whom we can properly form a four-betting range. You can do better because in order to be exploitable by a player shoving a hand like 55 in the spot in which we find ourselves in this hand (with JJ), the BB will have to be squeezing with a pretty high frequency 100 big blinds effective, somewhere around 15%, depending on squeeze sizes and number of callers behind, how often they slow-play premiums, etc. You'll probably have to get a fold around half the time, maybe a tad more, to show a profit and you are less happy if they're squeeze calling 99 and TT since those hands crush you. I say you can do better because when we face such a wide squeezing range, we stand to make a lot of money by four-bet calling with a wide range for value, including hands like AQ and 99. There should also be a lot of opportunities for you to put pressure on a weak range. If he's squeezing 15% of hands, probably at least half of that range is uncomfortable when facing a four-bet. Obviously, that will depend on how the BB constructs his squeezing range and how often he'll fold to a four-bet. The unknown factors I'm mentioning are why people elect to just shove with 55 some of the time.

I have to disagree here when you say that stars regs "basically never" squueze 99 here, I play those games day in day out and could name quite a lot of people that would auto squeeze and 5-bet 99 here and many times I also see ATs or 66 type stuff.

if you 4bet/call {QQ/AK}, 4b/fold some air, and 4bet jam {JJ-55,AQ} that's a fine strategy vs a top heavy squeeze range. you dont allow him to 5bet jam light (like KQ never flips if called), you dont allow him to call a 4bet jam with AJ/88.

Given the 4b sizing will be ~2times the sq size (cause sq is 13/100) to allow 4b/folds you would allow a top heavy sq range to flat the 4bet somewhat often so the strategy above may even be really good as opposed to just fine.

Your math is wrong here, if you 4-bet jam JJ-55,AQ then in his shoes 88 is a very clear call and 77 would also be a call here.
Not that it matters too much, just saying.

Since I don't think it was mentioned yet, at least one overcard will flop about 57% of the time (~56.96%ish) when you hold JJ. The rest of this is solid. JJ is too strong not to 4bet most of the time in response to your generic 400NL squeeze, given your overall opening range from CO. Keep in mind however that some people have a disproportionately value heavy 5betting range here after squeezing. While 4betting is the standard, you can mix it up by calling when appropriate (don't try to balance a shoving range in this spot imo).