I would never play the 4-3s 5 handed but, if I had, I'd call the flop bet as a matter of course. You'll notice that your friend didn't 3-bet the river bec he knew the danger but he also wasn't going to fold a flush that he'd played to make. I expressed it above: he does this on purpose and since he likely doesn't do this very often he doesn't have to calculate his equity to anything like precision and proceed accordingly. He took a flyer and got there, that simple.

Yes, those hands are in the ranges. But the percent of the ranges that they comprise is small. Literally: KK, KJ, JJ.

There is no straight possibility. And if you make trips/two pair, there will still be no straight possibility.

This is true. But I never claimed anything about certainty.

You are talking about immediate odds. There will be opportunities to make money when you hit your hand. But I'm not saying here that you should add a huge buffer because you're right that you're going to lose sometimes when you hit. There's no really good explicit calculation that can be done here short of having a full decision tree.

This is unduly pessimistic. The chances of you hitting your hand AND losing are quite small due to the specific nature of the things you're drawing to. For example, the odds of you hitting a flush go down quite significantly if someone else is drawing to the same backdoor flush.

If your draw is fully live, your BDFD comes in 8/45 * 7/44 = 56/1980 = 2.8% of the time. If there's another BDFD out there, you're looking at 6/43 * 5/42 = 30/1806 = 1.7% of the time. That's 60% as often. This is a really big difference and dramatically reduces the chances that you'll actually end up in your nightmare scenario.

You're not wrong to contemplate the possibility of bad things happening, but your outlook seems to be more pessimistic than what the reality seems to indicate.

I might have 3-bet the river with the nut low flush here. I'm not saying I would have, but I might have. T9 (16 combos) just got there, and that's not an unreasonable hand to see show up here. And two pair K7 (9 combos) or J7 (9 combos) can't really be ruled out. It might be a little thin (there are 36 better flush combos), but it's at least close enough to consider raising.

I'd need 3 Wild Turkey's to go w/ my flush to 3-bet.

3-betting the river is clearly terrible.

I’m obviously never arriving in this spot like he did, but I can have hands like JTs, T9s, 98s, 76s where it could be similar.

Yes there is, if someone else peels with A5 or 65.

Not that similar.

JTs gets flush-over-flushed one zillionth as much as 43s. JT straight-over-straights 65 on a 987 board. JJTT is more likely to be good than 4433 and if you flop jacks up, way fewer hands have way fewer outs against you.

Change the hand to a hand where any better and you'd be tempted to 3bet, like 98s or T9s. HJ raises CO coldcalls BTN calls SB 3b all call Flop KJ7 oh wait now 98 has a GS and T9 has an OE because that's exactly why T9s is better than 43s, you're more competitive against premium hands and have overs against the low cards. Good hands are good precisely because you end up with integer outs and more scenarios in which you can legitimately peel one on the flop.

The whole idea of playing bad intentionally to make people think you're bad is lol. Good strategy is not obvious, and even if you just played well all the time, a lot of the people you want to think you play bad will think you play bad anyway.

I only meant similar in the sense of having a BDFD and BDSD - and basically no live overcards - getting 18-1+ on the flop... with hands that could actually be in my range. I understand that the hands we end up making are much stronger.

I think we can all agree that JTs is substantially stronger than 43s. That doesn’t need to be discussed.

Of course he’s cold calling 43s on purpose - it’s not an accident. But he’s not doing it to put people on tilt or build an image (trust me, his image doesn’t need much help - actual quote from this game, when Joker and I were heads up: “Okay, let’s see who can outbluff who.”); he’s doing it because The Joker simply can’t help himself. His preflop game is sloppy. It’s obviously better to just 3-bet the 43s in a 5-handed game... not that I would when the big blind is defending 3-bets 90% of the time and super sticky postflop. There is literally no defense for his preflop action here. His cold-calling range in a 5-max game should be 0%.

'Can't help himself' doesn't go very well w/ 'very good player.' 'Pf game is sloppy' may or may not be so bec it's your estimation and I read you as being on the tight, cautious, and esp math based side. I've done the same thing as your friend but it's always for a reason and it's always rare. I'd like to read more hands that your friend has played that are also things that you'd never do.

I'm going to add an example that I posted a while ago that you may have missed: I was OTB w/ 5-3o and called after everyone had limped in bec, for one small bet, I was hoping to be able to show that I did it. I won the hand and at least some players had been talking about it which I learned the next time I showed up. I got what I paid for and it is well worth it.

I think limping with 53o there is meh but at least somewhat reasonable. I do not think cold calling raises with 43 suited in 5-handed games is reasonable.

He’s proven to win with a preflop style that borders on maniacal imo. When I was using the tracking app he ran at 41% VPIP and 23.5% PFR in mostly full ring games (900+ hands).

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I can tell who the better players are and, to a lesser extent, who wins and who doesn’t. When The Joker first started crossing paths with me I wasn’t giving him any credit. He just came across as a super loose fish (and I think that’s his image to a lot of ppl still), but then I started noticing he continually did things that annoyed me and put me in tougher spots than anyone else did. Then I started noticing that he was heads and shoulders better than any other player in the area besides myself.

He’s proven that he can play a hyperLAG style extremely profitably. He wins regularly and wins big. He also loses big. I’ve seen his records on Poker Income though. He was showing me some number or other and I just grabbed his phone and started looking. He’s having a better 2018 than I am and he has a day job. He’s not just beating up on weak players at Palace either - he’s been doing well at 20/40 at Fortune and 40/80 at places like Commerce and Bellagio.

He plays way looser than I do and takes some crazy lines, but you can’t really argue with results. The sample size is large enough that I’m a believer.

I guess you don’t read my blog. I have posted many, many hands vs Joker and some of them are real mind-blowers.

1. You don't need to do stupid stuff to have people think you do. Period. If you know ILR IRL (hehe) I think she can +1 this.

2. If you insist on doing stupid stuff, do it with things that are closer to correct, like 98s rather than 43s. Same frequency, way less cost.

3. If you insist on doing stupid stuff, do it with aggression, which is more memorable. Nobody will notice if you fold 80% or 75% of the time. They sure will notice if you raise 10% or 15% of the time.

I see no profit in the preflop play. I also see no reason to cultivate a loose passive image.

Sorry. I was focused on the running trips example. You're right about running 34.

DeathDonkey wrote a post at some point called "LAGs get paid" (that I can't find) that might be insightful here. His point in that post was that when you play against very aggressive people, you are going to have to pay off a lot and you're going to pay off better hands a lot.

What could be the case is that this player is running over players that aren't willing to call down enough. If you consistently build big pots and your opponents fold too often, you're almost printing money. They don't have to be super-tight for this to work, either.

Just making up numbers here, but let's say that you build an average 10 BB pot. If you get your opponents to fold 5% too often, you have a 5% * 10 BB = 0.5 BB/situation edge. If this comes up once every 100 hands (maybe ~4 hours of live play), that's a significant 0.5 BB/100.

Of course, this isn't the whole story, but it gives you a sense of how it's possible for this strategy to be profitable. (Also imagine if you're paying enough attention to pick your spots and only do this against opponents that are more likely to fold...)

It starts to fall apart when you have players that push back effectively or are good enough to make you show a winner instead of getting out of your way.

Is the villain a very good/math-based NL player?

He plays primarily LHE. He probably dabbles in NL cash more than I do but I’ve never heard him talk about math in a HH, so I’ll say... no.

Everyone has said everything that needs to be said. It's very bad to cold call raises with 43 suited. He's at a significant equity disadvantage, and in limit hold 'em significant equity disadvantages are hard to make up.

Which is why DougL's question is so pertinent. In NL, good players in deep stack games will take a flyer with hands like this in a raised pot because the implied odds are enormous-- you can get someone's stack on occasion. But the implied odds in limit hold 'em are not good enough for "trading mistakes", i.e., making a bad pre-flop call hoping that your skill later will make up for it, to be a good strategy.

Once he is in the hand, though, it is correct to call one bet on the flop. And this strategy IS relevant even to tighter players like OP.

Here's an example. Player raises, call, someone three bets, 2 or 3 callers, and it comes around to me in the BB. Guess what? In that situation I am calling with the 43 suited. I'm getting well more than the equity needed to call.

Or lets say it limps around to me on the button with a bunch of players and I limp in with 43 suited, and then SB raises and BB 3 bets. Again, I am calling the 3-bets with the 43 suited.

So now I am in a huge multi-way pot with 43 suited. And if I flop a BDFD and a BDSD, I am calling one bet on the flop.

Bear in mind, as well, the following. The possibility of overflushes is one reason you shouldn't play 43 suited in a raised pot most of the time. It cuts into the EV of the hand. But it isn't as though overflushes are COMMON. Most of the time, there's only one player with a 3-card and 2-card flush, and a 4 high flush is good. And one of the dangers of overflushes is that you flop or turn a flush and then someone hits a higher flush when the fourth card comes out, but that's impossible with a BDFD. So you don't need to devalue your backdoor flush draw once you flop it. Indeed, some of the time, a player with a stronger BDFD will fold the flop if they don't have anything else!

Don't forget that when you cold call first in, you give players better prices behind you, and the BB can now profitably play a ton of hands for 5.25:1 that may be folds at 3.25:1 HU. So equity disadvantage + not generating any dead $ in the pot (which is why it's generally bad to cold call anyway).

If I were in insane games, I might start cc like 66-/T9s/etc type hands, but this is a FR game type, not 5 handed.

Similar to your last comment, there is one situation where I cold call sometimes, and it's when there's some absolute maniac under the gun who is raising 70 percent or something. In that situation, that raise is basically similar to an open limp, and if I cold call first in I can often get a bunch of callers behind me, which is exactly what certain hands too weak to 3-bet (T9s, which you mention, is an absolute perfect example) would prefer.

I don't understand this when you say you fold Q5o in the SB getting 13:1 7-ways for half a bet.

It's s000ted.

Also he's going to argue position.