I'm not arguing that it isn't easier to get in 200bb stacks in a raised pot, obviously it is. What I mean is that if someone is willing to get in 200bb postflop, you'd better hope they are either (a) ******ed or (b) coolered. 77 is the type of hand that ends up being on the bad end of the cooler quite a lot (it's probably on the cusp, not as much as 22 obviously, but still ends up on the bad side its fair share).

This hand is a pretty good example. We're only coolering 66, whereas straights and 88 are coolering us. If this was a limped pot 75bbs deep, there's a lot of opponents who would play their draws aggressively, and now we're crushing those. And at 75bbs, two pairs will stack off *a lot* more easily. But at 200bbs deep, a lot of those same opponents tighten their postflop aggression way up / play a lot more cautiously, and all of a sudden there aren't nearly as many hands we're ahead of when big stacks start going in.

GimoG

We weren't there, so I'll simply let OP answer this.

From the preflop results of the 3 cases we've seen, and given the table description, and the fact stacks are very deep facing a lol $15, my guess (and OP can correct me if I'm wrong) is that OP would fall out of his chair if his raise thinned the field to anything less than ~5 callers.

GIraze,5callers,standard,amirite?G

These were all at different tables FWIW. And I wrote a post abotu this somewhere in teh thread, and while this is a looser table (in hand 2), there were still some hands where someone raised and went 2-3 ways post flop. We have to draw the line somewhere for our EP opening range. 77? 99? TT?

it was certainly not to the point where if I raised and went heads up I would "fall out of my chair." I would have been shocked if it folded around maybe.


I will say that out of all the decisions in these hands, preflop for Hand 2 was one of the last things that I thought we would discuss indepthly. Limp/call I'm fine with, open folding is just way too nitty not because I expect to flop sets and stack everyone, but like niceguy22, in the aggregate, i would assume that it is +EV because it is overall ahead of their range and because people are really bad at poker postflop. It may be more marginal on looser tables, but I still believe it will be +EV. If literally every hand I raised got 7 callers, then it will maybe be much tougher to make it +EV, but that's not necessarily the case.

This is your description of the table.

I don't know what to say. I would literally fall out of my chair if a raise narrowed the field at this table.

When I saw the result (5 callers), I literally didn't blink an eye, thought to myself "um, of course, we expected something different?" and thus wondered why we raised. I guess (???) if you sometimes expect the raise to narrow things to HU / 3ways, ok, whatever. It doesn't sound like that's a very good estimation of what is going to happen here.

Glike,literallyfalloutofmychairG

Dude you've lost the plot. 77 is a killer hand in these games. You appear to just be petrified of losing 200BB on a hand. While it's true that when all the money goes in, the opponent sometimes has a better hand (as we saw here), where you really make money with 77 is getting 1-2 value bets off people on like Q74 when they are drawing more or less stone cold dead. You want the pot bigger in these spots so that the value bets are bigger. Raising preflop doesn't really make money in itself (although 77 wins more than its fair share against 5 top 50% hands) but you want the pot larger on later streets in order to take full advantage of a set.

I mean are you hearing yourself? Better not raise preflop because OHNOEZ stacks might be in play when I have a set? What the **** are you talking about? Big bets going in when you have a set is precisely what you want. It's not either everyone check folding the flop or stacks going in, there is a creamy middle ground where people call value bets with no chance to win.