Quote:
Originally Posted by Shai Hulud
His response was that he needed to "define his hand". If he doesn't 4-bet and flat calls then he doesn't know where he stands post flop. This made little sense to me (I think primarily because when he 4 bets there will be no post flop game) but I wasn't sure exactly how to explain why he doesn't need to "define his hand."
I think 4b/folding JJ
can be a fine play. It's not 'turning into into a bluff', because nothing better folds (unless you'd fold QQ to his 4-bet). Most of the EV with the 4-bet with jacks comes from
denying equity. (He made you fold AQ, which is flipping vs him, after all. Winning 100% of the pot when his hand only has about 57% equity is a good result). He might occasionally get some
value if you sometimes call with AQs/AKo or TT, however.
Nevertheless, he has to consider that if he always folds to your 5-bets, and you make them at a reasonably high frequency, his 4-bet might be a mistake.
To "solve" the problem, he'd have to estimate the EV of flatting the 3-bet, and then compare it to the EV of 4-betting and potentially folding to a 5-bet. Only if flatting the 3-bet had a higher EV would 4-betting be a mistake.
A concept that's been coming up fairly often in this forum in recent times is that the terms "value-bet" and "bluff" don't make a whole lot of sense pre-flop. Hands get their EV from a mixture of hand equity and fold equity. Indeed, the
bulk of the EV with mid-strength hands (let alone weak hands) comes from winning the dead money pre-flop without seeing a flop. If I 3-bet AK pre-flop for instance, I'm extremely happy if villain folds, and I don't care if he has AQ (a hand I'm crushing), T8s (a hand I have 60% equity against), or 44 (and hand that's actually beating me). I'm happy because I prevent those hands from realizing their equity... and I pick up about 4.5bb with no variance, which is more than AK makes on average. It doesn't really matter whether it was technically a value-raise, a bluff, or a raise for protection. I just want to maximize my EV.
Last edited by ArtyMcFly; 09-26-2018 at 10:16 AM.